Biofeedback therapy is the process of learning to regulate your autonomic nervous system and somatic nervous system. These nervous systems are involved in the body’s stress and relaxation response and muscle movements. When your system is dysregulated, you may experience symptoms like muscle tension and muscle pain, irregular breathing, causing panic-like symptoms, anxiety, chronic fatigue, and irritable bowel syndrome. Biofeedback can help you develop techniques to alter your physiological activity and improve your health and well-being.
Biofeedback therapy is the process of learning to change your physiological activity for the purpose of increasing self-regulation and decreasing mental and physical symptoms. Your heart rate, breath rate, finger temperature, skin conductance, and muscle tension are recorded and analyzed in real-time by a computer-based program. Through sounds or visual graphs, you learn to change your physiological activity and alleviate symptoms.
Precise, non-invasive instruments measure physiological activity, such as heart rate, breathing, muscle activity, skin conductance (sweating), and skin temperature. These physiological processes are measured by sensors placed on your skin and body. You will immediately receive auditory (music or tones) or visual feedback (graphs, pacers, and video) based on what is monitored. You learn to adjust your activity through operant conditioning and positive reinforcement. Using this visual and auditory feedback, you learn to increase your nervous system’s flexibility and adaptability. Over time, these changes can endure without further feedback sessions.
For example, people with muscle tension will see a graph with a green light when they meet their goal (decrease in muscle tension). The light turns red if muscle tension increases. This feedback signals you to relax your muscles. Over time, you increase your awareness of muscle tension and relax your muscles automatically, and the feedback is no longer needed.
At Hills Neuroscience, we select the types of biofeedback training that are best for you based on your stress profile, muscle assessment, clinical interview, and symptoms.
Biofeedback therapy can help you alleviate unwanted symptoms, decrease the severity of medical conditions, and achieve peak performance. Through biofeedback training, you’ll learn to control your breathing, muscle tension, body temperature, and skin conductance. You learn to increase your heart rate variability, a measure of psychological and physical health. As a result, you’ll gain relief from troublesome symptoms like panic attacks, depression, headaches, and abdominal pain and learn to function optimally. Repeated training can get you to a place where you no longer need instruments to reinforce healthy responses and behaviors.
In biofeedback therapy, we assess your functioning using a stress profile, which helps us understand how your nervous system functions at rest, under stress, and during recovery. Results from this assessment drive your treatment plan. For example, if your finger temperature remains lower than normal during recovery, you learn to increase your finger temperature. This is a common training approach for Raynaud's Syndrome and anxiety.
Next, we find your resonant frequency. Resonant frequency refers to the breathing pace at which your heart rate variability (HRV) is the highest, and other physiological measures show the most balance. During this assessment, you will be connected to a heart rate (HR) and respiration (RSP) monitor. You will follow a breathing pacer at different speeds, at two-minute intervals. We will assess your heart rate variability and other variables to determine your resonance. Over time, by monitoring your HR rhythm and RSP, you can increase your HRV, which can help with executive functioning, sustained attention, depression, PTSD symptoms, anxiety, TBI, and many health conditions.
Learn to mindfully breathe low and slow from your diaphragm, which calms symptoms of stress and anxiety. Many people struggle to breathe properly when faced with stressful situations. In many disorders, the breathing chemistry becomes abnormal, causing symptoms. We monitor gasses involved in over-breathing (End-tidal pCO2) and train to its optimal ranges. We want to shift breathing to the abdomen and coordinate the rate and size of your breath with equal inhalation to exhalation. For example, people with panic disorder often show similar physiology as people who are hyperventilating. When we over-breathe, it can lead to a decrease in oxygen and glucose delivery to our organs and tissues, as well as electrolyte imbalances. This condition is called hypocapnia, which can contribute to a myriad of different symptoms and illnesses.
HRV is the interbeat interval of successive heartbeats. The time difference between two beats is your HRV. Clinical research shows that people with anxiety, depression, TBI, PTSD, cardiovascular disease, and many other conditions have lower HRV. Significantly low HRV has also been shown to be an indicator of cardiac death and early mortality rates. Higher HRV is correlated with physical and psychological health. We train you to increase HRV by monitoring your heart rate rhythm and respiration. We find the breathing rate that increases HRV the most, and you train at this pace. You practice increasing the coherence of HR and respiration, called respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). HRV training exercises the baroreceptor, which is the stretch receptor involved in the regulation of blood pressure. You train to increase parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activation, which creates a calm, relaxed state. For example, we aim to decrease sympathetic nervous system activity for muscle spindles or trigger point involvement in chronic pain by increasing the PNS activation through HRV training. By training the heart, you also influence brain function. Many disorders we treat involve both systems. HRV training helps increase flexibility and complexity in the nervous system, self-regulate after disruption, increase your ability to cope with stress, alleviate symptoms, decrease chronic pain conditions, increase positive health, and enhance peak performance.
Increase your awareness of muscle tension in your body and learn to release unnecessary muscle tension. Using sensors placed on the skin, we measure the contraction and relaxation of muscles. We can misplace effort and energy by clenching our jaw or furrowing our brow while trying to concentrate. This misplaced effort is referred to as dysponesis. The goal of sEMG biofeedback is to increase your awareness of and allow ways of releasing unnecessary muscle tension. This can result in a decrease in voluntary skeletal muscle activity from tension and dysponesis. Many conditions, including anxiety, depression, and IBS, involve the symptoms of pain and tense muscles. We start your treatment by conducting a baseline assessment based on your symptoms. Sensors will be placed along various muscles, and you will be asked to engage in various movements while the frequency of your muscles is being measured. Based on your comprehensive assessment, we design a unique treatment plan for your training sessions.
Learn to shut off your "fight or flight" nervous system by increasing your finger temperature to achieve a calm and relaxed state. When you have a stress response, your sympathetic nervous system releases norepinephrine, which leads to blood vessels constricting, causing decreased blood flow and thus a decrease in temperature at the fingers and toes. The sympathetic nervous system is what prepares your body for vigorous activity. The parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for more relaxed and vegetative states. The goal of peripheral finger temperature training is to learn to turn off the sympathetic fight or flight response to raise finger temperature, increase self-regulation, and decrease symptoms. For example, people with migraine headaches, Raynaud's syndrome, and anxiety benefit from vasodilation training.
Learn to decrease your stress response by training to lower your skin conductance. When your sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is activated, your sweat glands produce more moisture and the skin conductance reading increases. The goal of skin conductance biofeedback is to learn how to decrease skin conductance, thereby decreasing sympathetic activation. This feedback, combined with mindfulness strategies, is used to facilitate disengagement from the struggle with difficult thoughts and feelings, to decrease anxiety.
We offer intensive treatment for faster results. When time is limited, or you live outside the San Diego area, we welcome you to fly in and engage in more intensive work. Our intensive therapy program runs for two weeks, with two sessions a day of neurotherapy and biofeedback, plus two hours of processing with EMDR twice a week.
Many of our services can be conducted via phone or video conference – all in compliance with HIPAA privacy standards.
Contact us to schedule a free, 15-minute phone consultation to learn more and see if our integrative psychology services are right for you.
Hills Neuroscience
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