Mental Health

The National institute of health estimates roughly 20% of people with PTSD attempt to address their symptoms with drugs or alcohol; often making the condition worse in the process.

One cutting edge method used to address PTSD symptoms without the danger that comes from “self-medicating” is Neurofeedback. A Biofeedback approach that focuses specifically on brain activation.

Given the number of pharmaceutical approaches to ADHD many people are looking for an approach with fewer side effects either to supplement existing treatment or in some cases replace it entirely.

The current science indicates a variety of effective ADHD treatments emerging from Biofeedback. But one of the biggest strengths of implementing biofeedback is its ability to create personalized treatment plans.

People for whom existing biofeedback treatments are insufficient to fully manage their ADHD symptoms and choose to turn to pharmaceuticals can still use biofeedback approaches to manage the symptoms of those treatments as well.

Depression is often characterized by a lack of motivation, enjoyment, or energy. Increased or decreased appetite, insomnia or oversleeping. People often associate depression with the feeling of melancholy or sadness, and sometimes that is exactly what someone experiences when depressed.

A lot of depression; however, is more subtle than that. Even people who know they have chronic depression can go through cycles where it feels like things aren’t so bad.

These experiences are often incredibly subjective, and this is further complicated by hundreds of other factors.

However, we can attach quantifiable data to these subjective experiences by understanding how an individual responds physically. That same data might differ wildly, even from those people would describe the same symptoms. But by increasing our awareness of how a specific individual responds we can also find effective interventions to identify problems and retrain thought patterns to increase our control of the experience.

Insomnia, restless legs, sleep apnea. 50 million people just in the United States are estimated to have one or more sleep disorders.

Biofeedback can help address these issues by identifying your patterns of behavior, thinking and intervening with evidence based training to address even chronic insomnia.

Biofeedback has a few common interventions when it comes to managing anxiety. Heightened states of activation are often accompanied by faster breathing, heart rate, pupil dilation, muscle contractions, and more. People often feel restless, lose focus, and become nervous, sometimes without direction and sometimes focused on specific things.

By interrupting the physiological responses to the inner experience we can regain some measure of control as we manage those experiences.

Every experience is unique. Even when experiencing the same things different people have different reactions. Many of these reactions are easily noticeable when someone is in the right state of mind. Some, however, occur in ways that are too subtle to see without the proper equipment and training.

When anxiety is particularly bad, these reactions can feed on themselves and grow out of control. Biofeedback is about retraining the ways our body responds to specific thoughts, feelings, and unconscious bodily responses to interrupt these cycles rather than allow them to feed on themselves to run rampant.

Stress is one of the most caustic and pervasive afflictions experienced by modern mankind and effects all systems of the body including the musculoskeletal, respiratory, cardiovascular, endocrine, gastrointestinal, nervous, and reproductive systems.

Pharmaceuticals often attempt to treat one or more of the symptoms of chronic stress and talk therapy attempts to address how people manage it for themselves. Biofeedback marries these approaches, using the symptoms to understand the management and using the management to gain control of the symptoms.