BIOFEEDBACK NEUROFEEDBACK THERAPY AT HOME

Definition: Biofeedback refers to a group of therapeutic procedures that use electronic instruments to record and display to the patient information about the ongoing activity of various body processes of which the person is usually unaware. The goal of biofeedback therapy is to help the patient achieve voluntary control over body processes that are normally involuntary or that have become involuntary through accident or disease. Biofeedback is used in the treatment of many medical and psychological disorders.
Biofeedback is a powerful, painless, and non-invasive technique for mind-body training. It uses monitoring devices to give you feedback about body functions such as heart rate, muscle tension, or nervous system tension and teaches you how to use your mind to regulate your body. By using biofeedback training you can learn to control and alter your physiological functions about healthy behavior. Such self-regulation skills can help you move towards a more optimal level of functioning.
It is beneficial in reducing symptoms of stress, decreasing anxiety, headaches, high blood pressure, pain management, and improving health. More detailed information regarding indications and use of biofeedback can be found on the page above.

Biofeedback therapy is a process of training as opposed to treatment. Much like being taught how to tie their shoes or ride a bicycle, individuals undergoing biofeedback training must take an active role and practice to develop the skill. Rather than passively receiving treatment, the patient is an active learner. It’s like learning a new language.
Research has shown that biofeedback interventions are efficacious in treating a variety of medical conditions. Clinical biofeedback training is growing increasingly popular all over the world, as many people are seeking out relatively new approaches to healthcare.
Biofeedback became popular in the late 1960s. The term “Biofeedback” was used to describe laboratory procedures being used to train research subjects to alter bodily functions such as blood pressure and heart rate – which are not usually controlled voluntarily.
Today Biofeedback is recognized in many countries and the USA by the National Institute of Complementary and Alternative Medicine as one of the mind-body therapies and many doctors and patients think of biofeedback as a form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

Physiological processes that normally happen involuntarily such as heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, muscle tension, breathing, or brain wave activity are measured by sensors placed on your skin and displayed on the computer screen. Biofeedback training is the process where you learn to read your body’s feedback (biofeedback) to sense when your body is stressed or relaxed. It is just as looking into a mirror allows you to see and change positions, expressions, etc., biofeedback allows you to see inside your body. You receive immediate visual or acoustic feedback from a biofeedback device. By becoming consciously aware of the processes in your body you can identify which cognitive or behavioral processes are influencing it. You learn to use your CONSCIOUS mind to guide the part of your brain that runs your body.

Biofeedback training is proven to be highly beneficial and provides long-lived or permanent relief for a wide range of health conditions such as migraine and tension headache, anxiety, depression, respiratory disorders, sleep disorders, stress management, high blood pressure, chronic pain, and many others.
Using biofeedback you can learn how to achieve your maximum performance by enhancing your:

Attention & concentration
Relaxation & well-being
Intellect & Memory

More detailed information regarding indications and use of biofeedback can be found on this page above.

Several Biofeedback (BFB) techniques may be used to gather information about an individual’s bodily responses. The one used may depend on individual health conditions objectives and is determined by a specialist. Isolated one or combined many physiological parameters such as brain wave activity – Neurofeedback, heart rate variability – NRV BFB, muscles tension – EMG BFB, breathing (Breathing BFB), skin conductance (Electro-Dermal Activity (EDA) BFB) or temperature (Thermal BFB) and other can be used. A brief description of these types of BFB is above on this page.

Yes, it can!
It is very important to realize that biofeedback is a form of active learning rather than therapy. However, the degree to how effective it is depends on the combination of your ability to fully participate in the training and the efficiency of your body to respond to the learning process.

The main area that seems to prevent people from gaining benefits from Biofeedback training is if the person is unwilling or unable to practice the skills they are learning.

You will find the Biofeedback technique very fascinating and simple to understand and put to use, even on your own with a home use device. You will learn to reinforce your Biofeedback training with a series of simple guided exercises to do yourself. Your body will gradually re-learn how to recover on its own effectively from the disliked states and conditions.

Your goal with Biofeedback training is to FIRST gain Conscious awareness of the sensations of change in your breathing, your muscle tension, and your nervous system tension, and also learn to track changes in the tone of your thoughts. Your SECOND goal is to use and apply skills for guiding your body back into a sense of calm where your stress or pathological state is back in a recovery stage.

Yes, Biofeedback training has successfully worked with children and teens to teach them a drug-free way to deal with different pathological states and conditions, including stress.
Children and teens, just like adults around them increasingly experience stress in their lives.
Whether it’s the stress of “test anxiety” the desire for sports excellence or looking for optimal performance in an imperfect world, children and teens are not immune to the negative effects of too much stress in their lives.
Children and teens often learn these skills very quickly and enjoy the experience of gaining control of their bodies and feelings.

The techniques you learn can help you sense and Consciously regulate tension in the muscular, respiratory, and nervous systems.
This is important because the nervous system also regulates the cardiovascular system, digestive elimination, the immune system, and the respiratory system.
It is the nervous system that feeds into the development of things like anxiety, migraine headaches, sleep disturbance, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, hypertension, and dysfunctions in the immune system.
Biofeedback training leads the Conscious mind into a position where it can learn to sense and then guide these systems into recovery periodically.
This can gradually lower the ongoing tension in these systems and decrease the build-up of symptoms such as anxiety.

Biofeedback is a broader category of methods. These methods use the feedback of various physiological signals, such as the electrical activity of muscles (EMG), bladder tension, the electrical activity of the skin (EDA/GSR), or body temperature. These methods are applied to the treatment or improvement of organism functions as reflected by these signals.
EEG biofeedback or Neurofeedback belongs to the most sophisticated of biofeedback methods. Utilizing signals coming directly from the Central Nervous System has a wider range of influence. This allows the capture of some indicators of higher mental activities as well.

Successful outcomes, not limited to those listed below, have been reported by Neurofeedback Practitioners for:
• ADD/ADHD
• Addictions
• Anger
• Anxiety
• Autism
• Bulimia
• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
• Chronic pain
• Closed head injuries
• Concentration
• Depression
• Fetal Alcohol Syndrome/Effect
• Headaches and Migraines
• Learning Disorders
• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
• Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)
• Pain management
• Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS)
• Reactive Attachment Disorder
• Reading skills
• Seizure Disorders
• Sleep Disorders
• Stroke
• Tourette Syndrome
Neurofeedback has also proven effective when used for Peak Performance Training, such as developing memory skills, focusing abilities, and increasing concentration.

At a training session, sensors are placed on your head. The sensors pick up information on your brain’s activity at very specific locations. No electricity enters your brain. The sensors merely read information from the brain and relay it to the computer.
You then sit back in a comfortable chair as you watch a computer monitor that displays a computer game, a movie, a bar graph, or simply colors that change as your brainwaves change.
As you watch the computer monitor, your brain receives its feedback via the monitor display. When your brain produces brainwaves favorable for the remediation of your problems, the game or the movie will play (or the bar graph will move up or down), and a musical tone may sound. On the other hand, when your brain produces brainwave patterns that contribute to your problems, your computer screen either freezes or goes dark.
This process gives your brain instantaneous feedback about its performance during the training session. On a subconscious level, the brain begins to “work out” what it needs to do to make your computer screen active and to produce more of the helpful type of brainwave patterns and less of those that are correlated with the symptoms you wish to address. With practice, your brain learns new patterns. Desirable neuronal pathways are strengthened and new pathways may be created.
As your brain learns what it needs to do to make your computer screen active, you can gradually make the goals a bit more difficult to challenge your brain to do even “better.” This is analogous to weight training workouts: as your muscles become accustomed to one weight, a little more is added until over time you build new muscle. With neurofeedback training, gradually your brain learns how to work at a more optimal level.

The brain is amazingly adaptable and plastic. It is capable of making adjustments to improve its performance if given cues about what to change. When the brain is regulating itself well and is alert and attentive, brainwaves (EEG) show particular patterns. Gradually, after 20 or more training sessions, the brain learns to stay in this high-performance state for longer periods and to retain these new skills.

In most instances, once the brain has learned how to perform at its optimum level, it stays there and no further sessions are needed. Think about learning to ride a bicycle. Remember how difficult that was? Did you fall? And then, after a while, you didn’t even have to think about balancing anymore? At a subconscious level, your brain was sending messages to your muscles to do what they needed to do to keep you upright. Even if you haven’t ridden a bicycle in years if you were to get on one today your brain would quickly remember what it is supposed to do to help you remain balanced.
This is what happens through neurofeedback training. Neurofeedback trains your brain to work in a way that will help keep you “balanced.” You will not need to concentrate consciously on what you need to do to “stay relaxed” (for example). Your brain will simply function the way it needs to, for you to be comfortable.

There are a few instances when several “booster” sessions might be needed:
• If the client has been involved in a long-term traumatic situation (for example, an abusive relationship or a family member suffering from a prolonged and difficult illness).
• If the client has undergone long-term medical help (such as chemotherapy).
• If the client has experienced head trauma after training is completed (such as an automobile or skiing accident involving brain trauma).
• If the client’s main presenting problem is depression. Often people who receive neurofeedback for depression will benefit from one to three booster sessions a few times per year.
• If the client is still growing. Young children will often have to return for booster sessions as their brains and body develop.

Results from neurofeedback training are seen gradually, over time. Initial progress can be seen within 10 – 15 sessions for most conditions. A typical treatment program consists of between 20 and 60 sessions, depending upon the conditions being addressed, with the average being 40 sessions. The current understanding among neurofeedback providers is that it takes a minimum of 20 sessions for learning to be consolidated so the client can maintain the gains that have been made. Sometimes a client will complete 20 sessions, take a year off, and then return to complete training.

When starting neurofeedback training, sessions should be regular and frequent at two or three (or more) sessions per week. As learning begins to consolidate, the pace can be reduced.

Each session takes between 45 and 60 minutes. The actual training period lasts a maximum of 30 -45 minutes. Additional time is needed beforehand for sensor placement and adjustment.

Biofeedback is an incredibly powerful tool that helps rebalance your body, mind, and soul. With this in mind, during the treatment, you may notice you begin to feel more relaxed or even sleepy, (especially if you’ve been particularly stressed or busy).
Once your treatment has finished you may want to just go home to rest, give what your body needs.
Conversely, if your cognitive functions have been slower than usual it can stimulate that area of your brain as we’re bringing you back to balance.