Biofeedback is like a window into your soul. It picks up the subtlest physiological changes that occur in response to your thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Physiological monitoring devices measure, amplify, and reflect back information that may normally go undetected, and offers an insightful tool to help individuals improve self-regulation. Just as a mirror reflects your appearance, biofeedback reflects information about your physiology, so that you can make changes. It allows you to experiment with stress management techniques, and lets us know when we are changing our physiological response in the desired direction. Biofeedback training is an educational process for learning specialized mind/body skills. Learning to recognize physiological responses and alter them is not unlike learning how to play the piano or tennis. It requires practice.
Typically, biofeedback training is done over the course of 6-8 weeks, adjusted based on the severity of the symptoms. In the first session, a biofeedback clinician would do an initial history intake to become aware of any dietary or lifestyle habits that may correlate with their symptoms. Afterwards, a patient undergoes a physiological stress test. In other words, the therapist purposefully stresses the client in a controlled environment, while hooked up to a variety of modalities that measure various aspects of the stress response such as: breathing, heart rate, peripheral temperature, muscle and sweat gland activity (similar to the lie detector – very reactive to emotional stress).
The goal isn't to torture the client, but rather to discover their physiological signature. Everyone has a particular response pattern to stress that reflect the various accommodations to stress that he or she has made over the years. Some breathe irregularly, while others have an increased heart rate or muscle tension as their dominant response. The client’s most reactive stress response is known as their physiological signature that will be the focal point of retraining.
Subsequent sessions would focus on learning relaxation skills to cultivate lowered stress arousal. The client is seated in a comfortable chair, and hooked up to the physiological monitoring device with sensors attached to the surface of the skin at various locations on the body (usually the shoulders, fingers, back, and head). Electrical impulses from these locations are recorded and reflected on a computer monitor in the form of graphs or other visual and auditory displays. Visual and auditory feedback provides a way to gain control of one’s physiology and alleviate symptoms of stress-related disorders by using a variety of relaxation and visualization techniques.
