Hey Guys,
I stopped listening to any BWE about a week ago. It was literally becoming impossible to sleep and if I did get to sleep out of some sort of heavy drug-induction, I would always wake up within a couple of hours with a very awake and energized mind. It felt like my mind was being forced into high gear. I needed my sleep. Like, it was BAD. I began to get very depressed and I wasn't able to work out because my body wasn't healing during sleep. Sometime during this period, I could still feel the Gamma effects, such as heightened cognition, increased apathy towards things, yet this carried over into depression. I honestly considered blowing my brains out a few times.... though this is primarily due to inability to sleep. When I can't sleep I start feeling like shit. These side effects cleared up when I stopped listening to Gamma and was able to get back to sleep.
I started listening to both pink&white noise a week ago, with no BWE, and as far as I can tell, there's nothing noticable. The Gamma BWE had extremely noticable effects on my cognition... all the pink/white noise does is allow my mind to relax just a little... though nothing more than a very light meditation session. The Gamma-effects are slowly lessening and I have been able to get back to my sleep cycle with the help of a little melatonin.
As great as the Gamma BWE effects are... it doesn't seen viable right now to do them because it just impacts my sleep far too much. With this being said, perhaps people can experiment with long-term usage of other frequencies that wont impact sleep.
Wow, I had a very similar reaction but I wasn't sure if it was just me but this is what happened. So at first (maybe a day or two after the start of this thread) when I was doing 30minutes of 40hz a day it seemed to make me less depressed, like at the end of the day I'd actually look forward to getting to "tomorrow" instead of being depressed about the day ending. The increased focus was great, I had much fewer brainfog moments like say temporarily spacing out when listening to something on TV, and it was much easier to focus on work-related things I was doing. Plus I seemed to more easily come up with things in conversations quicker. Also noticed the decreased emotions but it didn't bother me that much as I could still feel emotions during some things but overall it was like my emotions were stuck at an energized and content state without being able to vary.
After about a week into it I listening to 30minutes of the 40hz again but I noticed it wasn't giving me as much of a change (though I remember still being focused, maybe I was already in the focused state and that's why it wasn't giving me anything "additional"). So I thought I'd try running the entrainment throughout the day to make me even more energized (probably a few hours total). This is when the problems started.
That day I had a lot of focus, got a lot of work done, so I didn't think there was anything wrong with listening to it this much, and I kept going on with it. About two days later I noticed this bizarre different type of depression. It felt like I couldn't connect with anything emotionally, and because of that, part of me started getting depressed over lacking that connection. Way different than a "normal" depression type of feeling. It was so strange but I didn't connect it with the gamma entrainment so I continued it. It went on for about 3 days. I noticed I became extremely stressed trying to do any work at all. And one night I had a friend over and we were drinking watching one of our favorite tv shows and I could barely enjoy watching it. The alcohol also barely phased me (kind of interesting actually, it's like my mind was resistant to it), I stayed aware of what was going on the whole time and stayed in that stressed out state.
So anyways a few days ago I started to wonder if it was the gamma sessions so I tried out some other frequencies. First I tried 30 minutes of 20hz(beta). Focus increased but made me really anxious(I already have anxiety problems) so that wasn't really pleasant. Then I tried 15hz which felt pretty good, I was still stressed though. Then I tried some alpha entrainment (8.5hz) and that made me feel way better and gave me back some of that emotional connection ability and I could actually get some work done again. I haven't used any gamma in about 3 days now. I think the key is to use it in moderation, so I think I will sometime go back to using it but maybe only 20minutes a day or something low so that it doesn't send me into that weird type of stress/depression. I did like the feeling it gave me being excited for the next day to come. BTW the entire time I was using isochronic tones not binaurals.