As I walk into Cereset in Encinitas, I wonder if tonight will finally be the night I get the kind of sleep I remember from my childhood: fully knocked out, vivid dreams, pillow lines on my face. As I get situated in a La-Z-Boy chair, head tech coach Madolyn Dolce places electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors around the crown of my head and on my ear lobes to track my brain’s at-rest activity. I sit with my eyes closed in a dark room for several minutes at a time as headphones relay a symphony of the sounds firing off in my skull.
“Those sensors read a signal, and then the technology translates them into musical tones that you listen to in your ear buds. You’re basically hearing your brain back to you,” Dolce says. “It’s completely non-invasive.”
It had been nearly five years since I had slept without any type of assistance. I’ve struggled with irregular sleep patterns and insomnia for almost two decades, and, eventually, shuteye was only possible if I took prescription sleep aids or 12.5 milligrams worth of cannabis gummies. Without them, I was sleeping about two to three hours non-consecutively.
At the start of this year, I learned about Cereset, a wellness company that claims to use sound to help the brain relax and rebalance, ultimately promoting restorative sleep. Founded in Arizona in 2000 by Lee Gerdes, it’s reportedly aided more than 150,000 people with its BrainEcho technology.
Today, it has over 60 franchise locations in the United States and abroad, including San Diego County. According to the company, Cereset’s neurotechnology employs sensors to observe brain activity and then assigns an auditory tone to dominant brain frequencies. The idea is to hold up an “acoustic mirror” to your brain to help it find balance. While these sounds are incoherent to the human ear, the brain understands them, then self-corrects, Cereset argues.
Since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, research has shown that changes in brain wave patterns can indicate various mental health conditions. Recent studies in journals such as NeuroImage, Basic and Clinical Neuroscience, and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience have also looked at the brain’s ability to self-regulate and correct itself by monitoring its own electrical activity, especially through the use of EEGs. Some research argues that the use of feedback mechanisms (like sound mirroring) can potentially help alleviate symptoms of certain disorders. Though the data is not significant, I’m still hopeful. I’d try almost anything for a full night’s sleep.
Some doctors see promise in this alternative therapy’s potential to enact lasting change. “It’s totally legitimate to take brain activity and reflect it back to kind of help affect the behavior or the function of your brain. We’ve known about it ever since [Russian physiologist Ivan] Pavlov,” says Scripps neurologist Dr. James Grisolia.
He reminds me of Pavlov’s work focusing on classical conditioning. You know the one—dogs, a bell, kibble. His goal was to elicit a learned response, and soon, his dogs began to salivate any time a bell rang, knowing that their food would soon appear.
“You’re conditioning a response. Biofeedback, [what Cereset is doing with its program], is like that, too,” Grisolia says. Enough researchers are curious enough about the power of biofeedback that the technique became its own field of study in the 1960s.
“These types of mechanisms absolutely can work,” Grisolia adds. “[But they aren’t] used very much by regular MDs because, ordinarily, insurance doesn’t really cover them.”
For neuropsychologist Dr. Marian Rissenberg, though, the research isn’t sufficient. “The process and the rationale for [Cereset’s program] did not really make sense to me from a neurological perspective,” Rissenberg says. “[Cereset’s studies] showed a lack of significant effectiveness.”
While Rissenberg can’t back Cereset’s methods, she’s quick to add that she believes in individuals pursuing all avenues to cure their chronic illnesses and physical or mental health conditions.
“If there is no risk to the treatment and … there are no negative psychological or physiological side effects, then I think that there’s nothing wrong with trying something when you’ve run out of options,” she says. “We know that there is a placebo effect and that it does work. Belief seems to play a part in the healing of our immune system.”
After my own research and a quick phone call with Cereset Encinitas’ co-owner Jason Prall, I found myself in an office park listening to the melodies in my head.
Before the first session, Prall asked that I go three weeks without any sleep aids, so I had to say goodbye to my security blankets. It was tough, but I stepped into that initial appointment free of sleep meds for the first time in years.
Going over my charts after my session, Dolce tells me that my brain’s sound waves show that my mind spends its time split between fight-or-flight and freeze modes, which can affect blood pressure, heart rate, and respirations. Dolce also notices that my temporal lobes (the area of the brain that plays a crucial role in processing information from our senses, managing emotions, and retrieving memories) are “overactive.”
According to Dolce, this is often indicative of sleep disruptions. Across five sessions once a week, she adds, we’ll aim to bring my brain back to a more balanced, harmonic state, so I can hopefully operate in fight-or-flight and freeze states less frequently.
I wouldn’t be the first to find relief from a chronic concern. Cereset Encinitas’ co-owner Andrew DeGregorio experienced a traumatic brain injury in 2014. “Years later, I had this mysterious chronic illness,” DeGregorio says. “I ended up becoming allergic to most foods […] and soaps, warm water, and sunlight.”
After trying everything he could—doctors, naturopaths, shamans, psychologists—and getting no answers, DeGregorio decided to look toward the one part of the body that controlled it all: the brain. That’s when he learned about Cereset’s program.
“I went and did [the treatment] in January of 2023. Six months later, I opened this center,” he says. “It ended up being the thing that cleared up and eliminated 99 percent of my symptoms.”
His story gives me hope for my own success. Leaving the office on day one, I feel noticeably more centered, but I can’t quite be sure if it’s a placebo effect. After straining to stay awake all afternoon, I go to bed at 6 p.m. the following night, potentially a sign that something has shifted. Throughout the week, I experience restless nights, followed by days where keeping my eyes open at lunchtime feels impossible.
During the second week of treatment, I begin wearing a sleep tracker and notice that I’m getting between three to five hours of shuteye a night. There’s no consistency, but snoozing that long consecutively is already a win.
After my third session one Saturday, I leave the office annoyed at nothing in particular. By Tuesday, I’m so irritable that I email Dolce to ask whether this is part of the rebalancing. “Yes, irritability can be a common, [temporary] response,” she writes back.
Week three feels lighter—I am more alert at work, spend an entire weekend deep-cleaning my apartment, and am getting seven to eight hours of sleep a night. For the first time in years, I’m not stressed at the prospect of going to bed. I look forward to my sessions.
After I sit down for my final BrainEcho, Dolce and I review my charts from the past few weeks. Dolce reminds me of the conflicting states I started in—“basically like one foot on the gas, one foot on the brakes,” she says. “This [chart explains] where we ended today. Things are nice and balanced and in the green— in alignment.”
The charts suggest that my brain is spending less time swinging between fight-or-flight and freeze states and more time at a happy equilibrium. To continue the car metaphor, my once-relentlessly active brain was finally able to flip on cruise control, hypothetically giving me the opportunity to get some rest.
The data felt true to my experience. Though things weren’t perfect, I was starting to feel like I could finally get enough sleep. As I write this nearly seven weeks post-program, some of my earlier symptoms have returned. Falling asleep is beginning to take one to two hours again, and I’m waking up more often during the night. But I’ve stayed off sleep aids to continue working on my insomnia naturally.
Cereset recommends 10 to 15 sessions initially to start seeing tangible results, but everyone’s experience is different. The company says that some patients require at least 20 to begin to reach their goals. I’d need to participate in more sessions (which start at $225 per visit) to fully understand the technology’s effectiveness; however, this is the furthest I’ve gotten in my sleep journey thus far.
For all clients, Prall encourages monthly “tune-ups” to continue strengthening and stabilizing the brain, likening it to learning an instrument: You’ve got to keep practicing to get better.
