Biofeedback and Neurofeedback in Talk Therapy | Neurofeedback Training

Psychologists and psychotherapists are not all just having people sit in a chair or lay on a couch to just have people talk to them about their problems.  They are using evidence-based, science-based tools to help them address the body as well as the mind.  Science is proving that the body is involved in problems like anxiety, PTSD, and trauma.  It’s not all in the mind.  The mind has to work through the brain, so problems of the mind also involve the brain.

Neurofeedback is among the tools that can be used to affect the brain.

Encouraging the brain to increase or decrease various signals that can be picked up with neurofeedback equipment can help to train the brain to decrease unhealthy patterns that may be related to clinical symptoms.

Experts including Stephen Porges, Ph.D., author of the Polyvagal Theory, and Bessel van dir Kolk author of The Body Keeps Score are two proponents of the idea that the body is very much involved with problems of the mind.  Talking alone often will not solve problems like anxiety, PTSD, and trauma.

EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy, tapping, binaural sounds, singing, dancing, tai chi are among the tools that involve the body and can have an effect on connections and activity in the brain. Since neurofeedback directly records and gives feedback information from the brain, it also can help to normalize problematic patterns and activity in the brain.  Once the normalization takes place the talk therapy can be more effective.

While neurofeedback deals more specifically with brain activity in the central nervous system, peripheral biofeedback measures activity from the peripheral and autonomic nervous system.  When someone has anxiety, panic attacks, PTSD, or trauma, you can bet that they have at least one of the following: fast, shallow breathing, excess muscle tension, cold hands, sweaty hands, fast, erratic heartbeat.  Biofeedback allows measuring and training any or all of these signs that the body is reacting and out of balance.  It helps the therapist show their clients that the body is reacting and it can also tell them when it calms down and is more in balance.  Biofeedback equipment can be used as a training tool itself and it can be used as a way to monitor the effects of other tools a therapist is using.

Harry L. Campbell

914-762-4646 – Harry@biofeedbackinternational.com

Author of What Stress Can Do, Available on Amazon.com

Biofeedback Resources International Corp.

Get More Info : Visit Here : Neurofeedback  Training

How to Reduce Stress

Stress is a problem that we all experience.  It is not getting less, if anything it may be increasing.  Recent political and racial tension and the current pandemic have added layers to the stress that we all have been already living with.

Here are a few things you can do to reduce the negative effects of stress on your physical and mental health.

Reduce your exposure to stress.  Identify sources of stress in your life.  This includes people, places, and things.  Note the ones that you can make choices about that will reduce your stress.  There may be people that you feel stressed around.  Even though you may still need to spend time around them, you may be able to arrange to spend less time around them.

If you tend to feel stressed while you are driving because you are running late and stuck in traffic, decide that you will add an extra thirty minutes to the time that it should take you to arrive.  This way, if you get stuck in traffic, you will probably still be on time.  If you don’t run into traffic you will arrive early and have some extra time to relax, read, or listen to some music or talk radio.

If your old computer is getting super slow and keeps freezing on you, rather than cursing it every day and getting upset, plan to buy a new computer.  You won’t be stressed by it every day any longer and you will work more efficiently and probably make more than the cost of the new computer because you aren’t wasting so much time and you are in a better mood.

Monitor your muscles.  At random times during the day take a few moments to mentally scan your body from head to toe for any areas where you might be holding tension in your muscles.  You might notice that you are frowning, biting your teeth together, raising your shoulders, or holding tension in your arms, hands, legs, or feet.  Simply release the tension and notice how much better it feels.  You can also do this when you are feeling stressed.

Slow down your breathing.  Most of us breathe faster and shallower than we need to.  Males tend to breathe 12-14 breaths per minute.  Females breathe about 14-16 breaths per minute on average.  Richard Sherman, biofeedback expert (2002) states that 4 breaths per minute or less go along with a relaxed state, and 18 breaths per minute or more goes along with a tense or anxious state.  In my experience, many people who are anxious are breathing 15-20 breaths per minute.  Simply practicing breathing at a lower pace can reduce anxiety and decrease the negative effects of stress.  Find a pace that is comfortable for you so that you will feel good about practicing it.  There are computer programs and smartphone apps that help you to practice slow-paced breathing.  Some Heart Rate Variability biofeedback experts suggest practicing slow-paced breathing for twenty minutes two times each day to relieve stress symptoms.  I believe that if you practice for 2-5 minutes several times throughout the day you can still produce noticeable stress reduction.

Harry L. Campbell

914-762-4646 – Harry@biofeedbackinternational.com

Author of What Stress Can Do, Available on Amazon.com

Biofeedback Resources International Corp.

Get More Info : Visit Here : How to reduce stress

Stress Symptoms | Stress Minimizing Books | Stress at work

 There is a lot of talk about stress these days.  First of all, here is how dictionary.com defines stress.

1. pressure or tension exerted on a material object.
2. “The distribution of stress is uniform across the bar”
3. synonyms:
4. pressure · tension · strain · tightness · tautness · tensity
5. a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances.

In this article, I am going to be focusing on number 5, the mental or emotional strain or tension definition.  Stress tends to trigger the fight, flight, or flee response which is supposed to be an emergency state which lasts for only a short time.  When there is not a short-term emergency requiring a physical response then the state can last for a long time and even become chronic.  It may also be triggered repeatedly over a long period of time.  When this happens, negative symptoms can result.  Here are just a few of the negative symptoms that can develop as a result of mental or emotional stress.

Excess muscle tension can produce headaches, neck pain, back pain, improper movements, and problematic tension during activities like sports, music, and dancing.

Stress can cause negative effects on the cardiovascular system.  Heart Rate speeds up.  Blood vessels constrict.  Heart Rate Variability decreases and blood pressure increases.  These changes cause the heart to work harder than necessary.  This can weaken the heart and the blood vessels over time.

Insomnia can also be a symptom of stress.  Sometimes the problems of the day are not resolved by bedtime and the brain and body are not in an appropriate state for good sleep.

When your brain is moving too fast, trying to process many thoughts about what you are worried about, it is very difficult to sleep.  You can have trouble falling asleep and or staying asleep.  If you don’t sleep well your physical and mental health is negatively affected because your brain and body don’t get a chance to restore themselves.

Finally, stress can cause cognitive problems, which have to do with the quality of a person’s thinking.  Here is another definition from dictionary.com for a term used to describe the thinking function of the brain:

Executive Function

A set of cognitive skills used to control one’s thoughts and behavior, especially the skills needed to focus on and organize tasks.

The area of the brain that is most involved with executive function is the frontal lobe.  Stress causes this part of the brain not to function properly.  The brain switches into an emergency state which is best for survival rather than thinking.  This is why it is not easy to do mental work when you feel stressed.

These are just a few of the negative effects of stress.  I hope you see why it should be a priority to work on managing stress.

Harry L. Campbell

914-762-4646 – Harry@biofeedbackinternational.com

Author of What Stress Can Do, Available on Amazon.com

Biofeedback Resources International Corp.

Website : www.biofeedbackinternational.com

Get More Info : Click Here : Stress Symptoms | Stress Minimizing Books | Stress at work

Skin Conductance Biofeedback | Biofeedback Resources International

 Skin Conductance can be both one of the simplest yet one of the most complex modalities of biofeedback at the same time.  More stress, the reading goes up.  More relaxed, the reading goes down.  Simple, right?  Not so fast.  Make sure we are not actually talking about resistance measures which are exactly opposite from conductance.  Besides two opposite measures of conductance and resistance, we should also add skin potential.  When I was introduced to biofeedback way back in 1984, GSR or Galvanic Skin Response was the common feedback modality for monitoring changes based on sweat activity.  The readings in Ohms would go down when there was more sweat on the skin because resistance was decreasing and it would go up if the amount of sweat decreased because resistance was increasing.  The audio tone was reversed so that it went up when the subject was responding to something and got lower when they recovered or calmed down.

Besides the devices like the GSR-2, made by Thought Technology (still available), there was a GSR device that you could buy at that time from Radio Shack (no longer available). This was more of a toy than a serious biofeedback instrument.  Most of the more modern instruments use skin conductance measures instead of resistance.  They measure in units of mhos (ohms spelled backwards because conductance is the opposite of resistance – kind of silly to me).  This has sort of been replaced by a newer term, micro Siemens.  I know that this term honors Ernst Werner von Siemens, 20th-century electrical engineer and electrical researcher but it does make it more difficult to teach about skin conductance even to a group of adults much less a group of teenagers.  I always get some laughs when I say siemens.  I’ll just leave it at that.  You figure it out.

Now I will talk about using skin conductance biofeedback therapeutically.

Skin conductance can be a very powerful indicator of stress reactions.  For most people when they become stressed, the skin conductance level increases.  When they calm down the skin conductance level decreases.  It sounds simple; however, it is more complicated than that.  If you tell your clients that when skin conductance level increases that means that you are stressed, you are not being fully accurate.  Many things can cause skin conductance to increase that would not be considered a response to stress.  Here are a few.  The startle response, make a loud noise and skin conductance will rise as the nervous system responds to help you figure out what the source of the noise was and if it was dangerous.  Some people who are anxious or suffer from PTSD may have an exaggerated startle response but it is normal for skin conductance to increase after a loud noise.  How much it increases and how quickly it returns to baseline is more important than the fact that it increased.

Skin conductance responds to touch.  If you or someone else touches the person who is connected to skin conductance biofeedback the level will usually increase.  Although this can be a negative stress response because the person does not want to be touched it doesn’t have to be.  Similar to the startle response, the nervous system is alerted by the touch and signals the person to assess if the touch was dangerous or not.  If it is not then the skin conductance should return to baseline.  If the person interprets the touch as pleasant that can be another reason for a response.  The level tends to increase even if the subject touches their own skin read more...

Harry L. Campbell

914-762-4646 – Harry@biofeedbackinternational.com

Author of What Stress Can Do, Available on Amazon.com

Biofeedback Resources International Corp.

www.biofeedbackinternational.com

Get More Info : Click Here : Skin Conductance Biofeedback | Biofeedback Resources International

Stress and Sleep | Stress Minimizing Books | Biofeedback Training

Sleep problems including insomnia are an excellent application of Peripheral Biofeedback and EEG Biofeedback (Neurofeedback). They are also among the major symptoms caused by stress.  It is difficult to fall asleep while the body is tense or your brain and nervous system is in fight-fight-freeze (emergency) mode.  It is difficult to fall asleep if you close your eyes and your brain is still too busy.

Not getting enough sleep is a problem for between 28.5% – 41.1% of adults in the USA according to CDC 2014 statistics. The term they use is “short sleep duration”, defined as less than 7 hours of sleep per night for adults (see CDC – Data and Statistics – Sleep and Sleep Disorders).  People who have short sleep duration also have other health risks at a higher rate than others.  Some of these shared risks include obesity, physical inactivity, alcohol use, and smoking.  Short sleepers also reported these ten chronic disorders at a higher rate than those who get enough sleep:

• Heart Attack
• Coronary heart disease
• Stroke
• Asthma
• COPD (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease)
• Cancer
• Arthritis
• Depression
• Chronic kidney disease
• Diabetes

Teenagers need even more sleep, 8-10 hours per night.  A stunning two thirds of adolescents reported getting less than 8 hours.  This can easily be related to the high incidence of anxiety and attention issues in student populations.

“Not getting enough sleep can lead to motor vehicle crashes and mistakes at work, which cause a lot of injury and disability each year. Getting enough sleep is not a luxury—it is something people need for good health.” CDC – Sleep Home Page – Sleep and Sleep Disorders.

Enough with statistics and quotes let’s just talk common sense.  If the body, including the brain, needs sleep to restore energy, rest, and repair, doesn’t it make sense that if it isn’t getting it that there would be consequences? When this happens on a regular basis then it becomes chronic and compounds the problem.

EMG biofeedback can be used to help a person relax the muscles to get the body into a more physically relaxed state to promote sleep.  Heart Rate Variability biofeedback can help to calm and balance the autonomic nervous system which is more ideal for sleep. I often notice, during biofeedback sessions, that clients begin to yawn and become drowsy while doing the slow, paced breathing that goes along with HRV biofeedback.  I tell them to take note of that effect and suggest that they practice this kind of breathing before bedtime.  Most report that it helps them fall asleep.  EEG biofeedback (neurofeedback) can be used to decrease fast wave activity – beta and high beta and increase mid-range SMR (Sensory Motor Rhythm) and slower waves Alpha and Theta to promote sleep.Improving sleep can be an important part of decreasing many physical and mental health symptoms and simply improving overall health and wellness as well as performance.

Harry L. Campbell

914-762-4646 – Harry@biofeedbackinternational.com

Author of What Stress Can Do, Available on Amazon.com

Biofeedback Resources International Corp.

www.biofeedbackinternational.com

Get More Info : Click Here : Stress Minimizing Books

BioFun Games | Biofeedback Resources International

BioFun is a newly released software add-on for BioGraph Infiniti, consisting in a series of video games and toy interfaces to help your clients become healthier by teaching strategies of self-regulation and developing voluntary control while having fun!

Travel the World

You are invited to participate in the “Fly around the World” competition; a prestigious hot air balloon race inspired by Jules Verne’s classic novel.

Control a balloon with your physiology and fly over famous cities such as Vancouver, Hong Kong, Moscow, Cairo, Paris, Montreal and New York. Do not limit yourself, fly up and reach the stars!

PhysioRacer – MyoRacer – NeuroRacer

Three variations on the same theme: you guide a craft in a path using your physiology. Choose a character: a race car driver, a spy flying a stealth plane, a submarine in a secret mission, a clown fish or even a super hero!

BioFun Toy Interface

Connect BioGraph to toys such as Raceways, electrical train or robots and use your physiology to control them.

BioFun contains ready-to-go screens for all our popular Suites (English only): EEG, Physiology, Z-Score, Rehab and Continence Suites.

Comprehensive instructions are provided to create your own screens and find new ways to use these games.

Physiology Suite

Train to relax or take control of your HRV while flying around the world in a balloon. Drive, fly or dive and boost up your engine using physiological control.

EEG Suite & Z-Score Mini-Suite

Train your brain with NeuroRacer – a fun and engaging racing game. Provides contingent, relevant feedback, as vehicle speed, track size and obstacles are directly controlled by EEG activity. Avoid obstacles and receive points in reward conditions, while discouraging artifacts and inhibit-band activity.

Rehab Suite & Continence Suite

Fly a balloon while working your muscles. Gain control over your muscles and movements while swimming like a fish, piloting a race car, or even flying like a super hero!

Buy Now : https://tinyurl.com/y3t433qk

Price : $ 150

Harry L. Campbell

914-762-4646 – Harry@biofeedbackinternational.com

Author of What Stress Can Do, Available on Amazon.com

Biofeedback Resources International Corp.

Get More Info : Click Here : Biofeedback Training Florida

Biofeedback Assisted Relaxation Therapy

 In Biofeedback when we talk about B.A.R.T we are not talking about that crazy kid on the popular cartoon series, The Simpsons, we are talking about a very popular protocol which can be widely applied for various conditions.  Rather than seeing it as a specific protocol I see it more as a concept.  When practitioners are learning biofeedback for the first time, they are usually very interested in learning very specific protocols for the conditions they expect to be working with like headaches, anxiety, insomnia, and depression.

They expect a specific guide as to which modalities, what goals, and the number of sessions to work on each modality for each application.  That would be nice.  It makes things simpler and makes it easier to plan.  It doesn’t always match reality for the individual that is in front of you.  Now, what is B.A.R.T.?  It is an acronym for Biofeedback Assisted Relaxation Therapy.  It’s kind of like a generalized protocol that helps to counter the stress response by using biofeedback to teach clients to regulate their physiology using multiple modalities including surface EMG, Skin temperature, Skin conductance, Heart Rate/Heart Rate Variability, Respiration, and EEG.   I decided to talk about this after reading Don Moss’s article, Biofeedback-Assisted Relaxation Training:  A Clinically Effective Treatment Protocol in the Summer 2020 issue of Biofeedback Magazine.

With the B.A.R.T. protocol you look at how a person’s physiology reacts to stress, i.e. increased muscle tension, respiration, skin conductance, heart rate, high beta, and decreased skin temperature, and alpha and teach them to reverse it using the appropriate biofeedback modalities to do it.  Clients are also instructed to practice appropriate relaxation exercises between sessions at home to initiate the relaxation response more often than when they are in the office for biofeedback sessions.  They are also instructed to keep records of their frequency and severity of symptoms and the conditions surrounding when they experience the symptoms as well and their practice.

When I talk to clients who are suffering from stress related disorders, I like to discuss the concept of levels of stress response that they may be walking around with.  The level is variable.  If the level is low then they have more capacity to deal with the stress that comes along to add to it.  If they already have a high level of stress then their capacity to deal with more is not as great.  For those who suffer with things like panic attacks those times when their stress level is already high are times when it is more likely for them to go into a panic attack.  During times when their stress level is lower it would be less likely for a stressor to push them into a panic attack.  They would still feel stressed but be more able to manage it.  I suggest that training with biofeedback and doing home relaxation practice can help bring their average stress level lower and thus increase their capacity to manage the stress that they will inevitably have to deal with in life.  Besides the biofeedback we do during office sessions I ask clients to practice relaxation exercises at home and I ask them to practice awareness of muscle tension by passively scanning their bodies for areas of tension and releasing any tension that they identify.  I also suggest that they take opportunities during everyday situations like standing in lines or waiting at red lights to practice slow breathing for short periods of time so that they are not always having to find 15-20 minutes for relaxation practice.  This also helps them to be turning on the relaxation response more often during the day.

When in doubt, if you don’t find the ideal protocol for biofeedback, the B.A.R.T. protocol is a good option.  It involves a thorough intake and history, tracking symptoms, doing a stress profile measuring multiple modalities under baseline, stressor, and recovery conditions as part of a complete initial assessment followed by training on the appropriate modalities plus homework of practicing relaxation exercises outside of the office.

Harry L. Campbell

914-762-4646 – Harry@biofeedbackinternational.com

Author of What Stress Can Do, Available on Amazon.com

Biofeedback Resources International Corp.

Get More Info : Click Here : Biofeedback Training Florida