What is Biofeedback?

Biofeedback involves teaching you how to become aware of your body’s involuntary functions, and to change them in order to improve your health. During a biofeedback session, we place sensors on your hand which measure your heart rate, heart rate variability, breath speed and quality, temperature, and skin-sweat response. Graphs are generated that show you your body’s patterns, and we use this data to create a specific plan for you to improve these functions.

In people with anxiety, trauma histories, chronic pain and illness, and with migraines or head injury, these biological functions are often impaired. Our nervous systems often go into “fight, flight or freeze” when we become anxious, leaving us in a state of sympathetic nervous system overload. Biofeedback teaches you how to return to the “rest and digest” state of parasympathetic nervous system calm that allows us to be more regulated, less anxious, and more present in our bodies.

People who struggle with nervous system overload don’t often take a full breath, or exhale properly. When going into fight or flight responses, we often hold our breath, sweat out of fear and preparation to protect ourselves from an imagined predator, and have cold/clammy hands.

Biofeedback will teach you how to breathe optimally, create optimal breath and heart rate variability (HRV) patterns, to slow down the sweat response, and to raise your temperature. Biofeedback empowers YOU to become the master of your own nervous system, without drugs or outside interventions.

As part of a biofeedback assessment, we will determine your individual optimal breathing speed. Practicing optimal breathing patterns can steady our heart rate variability (HRV). HRV is the variation in time between heartbeats. It serves as a measure of how stressed your nervous system is. In a biofeedback session we will use a belly belt and other methods to teach you how to breathe properly so that your body and nervous system can finally learn how to relax. We also teach you to increase your hand temperature and decrease the sweat response. The skills you learn in our office are skills we encourage you to practice at home in order to decrease stress.

The best news is…we can often accomplish your goals in as little as 5-10 sessions.

What’s the difference between neurofeedback and biofeedback?

This video from Medical Knowledge Online explains it well: