There’s a Beat For That
Six brainwaves. One protocol. Why I spent a year getting certified in something most musicians have never even heard of.
I’ve been writing songs my whole life. Verses, hooks, bridges the stuff that helps me move stuff… the stuff that makes you feel something. That was always the job. Make people feel it. Sounds familiar, right?
But somewhere along the way I started asking a different question: what if music could do more than make you just feel something? What if it could actually change what your body and brain are doing, not just how they feel about it?
That question sent me down a year-long rabbit hole that ended with a certification in Neuroacoustic Science Training under Dr. Jeffrey Thompson through The Shift Network earlier this year. Twenty modules, thirty hours of training, the whole thing. It wasn’t about having yet another credential to hang on a wall…. (bleh)… I got it because I wanted to actually understand what was happening in the thirty seconds before a song hits you in the chest.
Here’s what I learned. And here’s what I built with it…
The Five States Nobody Teaches You
Your brain runs on electrical rhythm. Different speeds, different jobs. Five of them matter most:
Delta (0.5–4 Hz) — the deepest sleep. Cellular repair. Regeneration. The body fixing itself while you’re not looking.
Theta (4–8 Hz) — dreaming, deep meditation, creativity, the door to your subconscious. This is where memory gets filed away and where a lot of emotional processing actually happens.
Alpha (8–12 Hz) — relaxed focus. Calm alertness. The “just breathed out” feeling. Stress release lives here.
Beta (12–30 Hz) — active thinking. Problem-solving. Learning. This is your working brain — and it’s also where stress creeps in if it runs too hot for too long.
Gamma (30–100 Hz) — peak awareness. Expanded consciousness. The rarest waking state, where your senses stop operating separately and start binding into one experience.
That’s the map. Most people have never heard a clean explanation of it, which is wild, because it explains so much about why some sounds calm you down and others wire you up.
The State In Between
Here’s the part that actually stopped me in my tracks.
There’s a specific state that doesn’t get its own clean label in most brainwave charts, because it’s not a band — it’s a border. It sits right between Theta and Alpha, at almost exactly 7.5 Hz.
It’s the Flow State. The Zone. Whatever you want to call the feeling of disappearing completely into what you’re doing… and it’s not some vague metaphor. It’s a documented, measurable frequency. And it sits almost exactly on top of the Schumann Resonance, 7.83 Hz… the Earth’s own electromagnetic pulse, generated by lightning storms bouncing between the surface and the ionosphere, happening since before there were brains around to entrain to it.
If that doesn’t spark something inside of you, I’m not sure what will. Heck, I don’t even know what to do with that fact except sit with it for a minute. Think about it. The frequency our planet has been humming at for millions of years sits right on top of the frequency where humans report losing themselves completely in the moment. Make of that what you will. I choose to make music with it.
Why Breathwork Sometimes Isn’t Enough
Something I keep coming back to: breathwork, yoga, meditation — they work. I’m not knocking any of it. I do them all (almost!) daily. Here’s the thing though… they all require one thing to work: a nervous system that’s still capable of responding when you ask it to.
For a lot of people… people who’ve been stuck in fight-or-flight for years, whose stress response stopped answering the phone a long time ago. Asking them to “just breathe through it” is asking their body to do something it’s currently not even capable of doing.
What stuck with me, talking this through with my mentor, is that the goal isn’t flipping a switch from stressed to calm. It’s bringing both systems — the gas and the brake — back down to something closer to zero, so the body can find its own way back to homeostasis. Sometimes that takes two minutes of the right frequency. Sometimes it takes ten. The point is the music doesn’t need you to try. It just works on you, whether you’re capable of trying or not.
That’s the foundation underneath everything I build now. Neat, right?
What I’m Actually Doing With This
I make music as Brave as Bears. Many of you probably know that. That’s still a thing, that’s still the songs with the words and the feelings, untouched by any of this.
But underneath MusicFit Method, I’ve built something else: the Beat Protocol. Six tracks, one for each documented brainwave state — Delta, Theta, Alpha, the Flow State, Beta, Gamma — built specifically to work on your nervous system, not just in your ears.
And here’s the thing I want to be really clear about: this isn’t only for musicians.
If you produce music, you’ll learn to build your own certified track from start to finish over six weeks. You’ll walk away knowing how to make every track after that one, too.
If you don’t produce — if you’re a coach, a practitioner, someone who works with people’s nervous systems for a living — you get full access to the entire library, and you’ll learn exactly how to use it in your own sessions. Using it well is the actual skill here. Making it is optional.
Either way, you’re walking away with the ability to bring people music that does something real, not just something pleasant.
Whatever you’re carrying right now — whatever needs to come down, or up, or just out — there’s a beat for that. I spent a year learning exactly which one, and exactly why. Now I’m teaching it.
If you want to learn more there two routes for you. Reply to this post / message me or head to beat.miketheschwartz.com and see what frequency you need right now to get you back in harmony.
Love ya! ✌️
— Mike