Mind Over Body with Biofeedback

Biofeedback is a therapy that helps you harness your mind’s power to help improve your health.  It is a type of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatment called mind-body therapy, which helps enable you to use your thoughts and will to control your body. The therapy is based on the idea (and confirmed by scientific studies), that people have the innate potential to influence with their minds many of the automatic, involuntary functions of their bodies.  So how do you develop such an amazing ability of mind over matter?  With the help of a biofeedback specialist, who uses signals from special monitoring equipment to teach you to control certain body functions and their responses, such as: brain activity, blood pressure, muscle tension, heart rate, skin temperature, and sweat gland activity. Biofeedback is particularly useful in treating stress-related conditions like asthma, headaches, hot flashes, irritable bowel syndrome, nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy, irregular heartbeats, chronic low back pain, high blood pressure, incontinence, and even epilepsy.  Biofeedback puts you in charge of your own healing by providing measurable feedback, which allows you to monitor your progress and learning, and may decrease medical costs too.

A typical biofeedback session lasts 30 – 60 minutes during a session, a therapist will apply electrical sensors to different parts of your body which monitor your body’s physiological response to stress, like your muscle contraction during a tension headache, and then feed the information back to you via cues such as a beeping sound or a flashing light. This allows you to begin to associate your body’s response — in this case, headache pain — with certain physical functions, such as your muscles tensing. When you begin to realize that your headache is a result of tense muscles, the next step is to learn how to invoke positive physical changes in your body, such as relaxing those specific muscles, when your body is physically or mentally stressed. The goal is to produce these responses on your own, outside the therapist’s office and without the help of technology so your condition can improve and give you techniques for living a healthier life.