I want to tell you how brainwave entrainment has personally helped me on my life journey.

For about 40 years of my life, since I can remember being conscious, I have been what I would term “clinically depressed.” I wasn’t diagnosed as such by doctors. Back in those days, they didn’t really do that. They didn’t give pills for these kinds of things as well.

To give you an idea of what my life was like, look at the darkest black that you can find around you. That would be, pretty much, a bright, sunny day for me.

I went through my life every morning, waking up, crossing my fingers, hoping that when I looked out the window, I would see mushroom clouds. That’s how bad my life was. I just wanted a nuclear war. I wanted an end to everything.

I couldn’t feel anything that was good. I felt only things that were bad and painful.

Something could happen to you that would make you go, “Well, isn’t that nice?” And I would look at it and be so envious or jealous of it. I would think it was the most horrible, cruelest joke in the world.

We could both be out for a walk together, and you would look at this gorgeous rose with a beautiful bee pollinating away, hopping from flower to flower, thinking to yourself, “Wow, isn’t that just a miracle of nature? Look how beautiful it is, and it serves a purpose. It promotes life and beauty.”

And I would look at it and say, “Yeah, sure. Rub it in my face, that there’s a reason for everything except me.” That’s how I felt—that I was here to suffer. I was here to be in pain.

I got injured incessantly. I’ve broken my kneecap. I’ve dislocated almost every bone in my body. I’ve cracked ribs more times than I care to think of. I’ve broken my nose so many times that I actually have people asking me where I had it done. I smashed out my teeth. I deal with vertigo all the time.

It’s difficult to express multiple suicide attempts—just not wanting to deal with life at all. How do you have multiple suicide attempts? If you really want to die, one should be enough, right?

I tried to kill myself, I tried it a bunch of times, and it didn’t work, that’s when it struck me that maybe I didn’t really want to die. That more of me wanted to live, than didn’t. If I couldn’t find a way to die, I had to find a way to live.

If you instead find something as a learning experience and educational, you tend to look for a lesson. And when I started looking for lessons, things started changing, as opposed to thinking everything was bad and the world sucked, people sucked, and I sucked.

I went camping with my friends sometimes. When I went camping, I would be sitting around a fire pit. And I would hear the wood crackling and watch the flames dancing up and down. The coolest thing was, I noticed that time seemed to move weirdly. It wasn’t so slow. For people like me who’ve had depressive episodes or even thought bad things, time passes really slowly, agonizingly slow.

When I was staring at this flame, it felt like five minutes, and yet hours had passed. And that gave me an incredible amount of relief. Finally, I found something after trying everything under the sun, reading every self-help book, and learning from all the big names of those who are the best people in the world for self-improvement.

This flame, at least, gave me a break. And that’s interesting. I thought, “What is it about me staring at this flame and hearing all this crackling that made me at least feel better for a short time?”

I started realizing that it was the flickering. It was the sound. It was the noises that the fire and wood made that were actually leading me to believe and to think differently than I thought before.

I thought, “Well, how could that have anything to do with it? Was it just a distraction?” Something told me in my head, “It’s not just a distraction,” because I’ve been distracted before. We’ve all been distracted, no matter how bad things are going around us. We can get distracted away from them.

It hit me that I need to investigate this more. As I was investigating it, I came across something called brainwave entrainment. And I started studying the neurophysics behind what happens to your brain when you hear and see things.