An Overview of Biofeedback Therapy and Benefits

Biofeedback is a mind-body therapy that can help people enhance their physical and mental well-being. Here's what you need to know about Biofeedback therapy.

Biofeedback is a non-drug treatment that makes the patient learn to manage involuntary body processes such as blood pressure, heart rate, etc. Still, many people get confused about what is biofeedback therapy, and they perceive the wrong notion for the same.

A practitioner or a therapist utilizes painless sensors to measure specific body systems during a biofeedback session. The findings get displayed on a screen, and you will experiment with different ways to alter them. Let's get into depth and understand it briefly.

What is Biofeedback Therapy?

You control your body actions when you raise your hand to wave hello to a friend or run to catch the train. In contrast, you have no control over your body's physiological functions, such as heart rate, skin temperature, and blood pressure involuntarily, and your nervous system controls these physiological functions.

You don't try speeding up your heartbeat, but it simply speeds up due to the things happening around you or the things you are doing, such as when you're frightened by something or exercising.

There is a way to gain more control over these generally involuntary functions with one simple strategy. Professionals call it biofeedback. Biofeedback is a type of therapy that can assist you with migraine headaches, chronic pain, incontinence, and high blood pressure, among other things.

Biofeedback treatment can help you gain more control over your health by harnessing the power of your mind and being aware of what's going on inside your body.

How Does the Therapy Work?

Biofeedback's mechanism and mechanism of action are unknown to researchers. They are aware that biofeedback promotes relaxation, which can aid in relieving a variety of stress-related disorders.

Electrodes get placed on your skin during a biofeedback session, and finger sensors are also an option. These electrodes/sensors give impulses to a monitor, which shows a sound, flash of light, or image representing your heart and breathing rate, blood pressure, skin temperature, perspiration, or muscle activity as a sound, flash of light, or image.

These functions change when you're stressed. Your heart rate accelerates, your muscles tense up, your blood pressure rises, you begin to sweat, and your breathing becomes more rapid.

On display, you can watch these stress responses as they happen and get quick feedback as you try to stop them. Biofeedback for pain is usually held in a therapist's office. However, computer programs allow you to connect the biofeedback sensor to a computer.

A biofeedback therapist guides you through relaxation exercises to fine-tune to control various body functions. The therapist may adopt a relaxation technique to reduce the brainwaves that activate when you have a headache.

Examples

Biofeedback therapy employs various relaxation techniques; an exercise routine is one of the most common examples of biofeedback therapies. The therapist adopts it to cure different problems of their patients.

Below are some of the other examples include:

●      Deep breathing

●      Mindfulness Meditation - concentrating your mind and releasing unpleasant feelings.

●      Progressive muscle relaxation

The list of therapy does not end here, and there are many more points where the treatment proves to be better than medication.

What is a Session Like?

The person in therapy will often have a variety of sensors attached to different regions of the body while working with the therapist. The therapist installs these sensors, which send electrical impulses to a display monitor usually visible to the person receiving treatment.

The information is shown to the person through flashing lights, visuals, or noises, each corresponding to a different physiological activity. The person learns to control body reactions by altering their thoughts, emotions, or conduct. Learning to control one's body's actions can help physical and mental well-being.

A person suffering from regular headaches, for example, could learn to recognize stiff muscles that cause headaches and relax them to relieve discomfort.

The length of each session, the number of sessions required, and the sort of biofeedback techniques employed will all depend on the issues getting addressed and how quickly the individual in therapy learns to manage involuntary physiological activities without equipment assistance.

Benefits of Therapy

According to recent research, it is unclear how biofeedback for pain works, but it appears to help people with stress-related disorders.

Internal systems, such as blood pressure, can become erratic when a person is stressed. Relaxation and mental exercises are taught in biofeedback treatment, which helps

to ease discomfort.

●     Migraine

Although studies on their usefulness have yielded inconsistent findings, biofeedback and relaxation techniques frequently treat headaches and migraines.

The therapy reduced the frequency and severity of symptoms in persons with migraine headaches, according to a Japanese study published in 2015.

Other studies, however, observed in 2009 that while relaxation tends to help persons with migraine headaches, combining ease with biofeedback does not appear to provide any extra benefits.

●     Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may benefit from some types of such therapy.

According to a study, integrating heart-variability biofeedback into traditional PTSD treatment did not improve outcomes.

However, in 2016, researchers found that using EEG biofeedback "substantially improved PTSD symptoms" in 17 PTSD patients.

●     Raynaud's Disease

In response to cold weather or emotional stress, Raynaud's illness causes various body portions to feel numb and chilled. It gets caused by an issue with the skin's blood supply.

Studies have shown thermal biofeedback to help with Raynaud's disease symptoms.

According to the Raynaud's Association, 80 to 90% of Raynaud's patients observed improved circulation and a lower frequency of symptoms after treatment.

●     Urinary Incontinence

People who have problems regulating their urge to go to the restroom may benefit from biofeedback. The pelvic floor muscles that control bladder emptying can be found and strengthened with biofeedback.

Women with incontinence may minimize their urgent need to urinate after many biofeedback sessions.

Children who wet the bed and those with fecal incontinence can benefit from biofeedback (the inability to control bowel movements). Biofeedback, unlike medications, is used to cure incontinence and has few side effects.

●     High Blood Pressure

The evidence for using biofeedback to treat high blood pressure is inconsistent. Although biofeedback appears to lower blood pressure marginally, it isn't as effective as medicine in controlling blood pressure.

●     Chronic Pain

Biofeedback may help decrease the discomfort of diseases such as low back pain, abdominal pain, temporomandibular joint disorders (TMJ), and fibromyalgia by assisting you in identifying tense muscles and learning to relax them.

Biofeedback can help people of all ages reduce pain, from children to the elderly.

Other biofeedback uses include:

1. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
2. High blood pressure
3. Injury
4. Asthma
5. Constipation
6. Epilepsy

To Conclude:

So, now you know what is biofeedback therapy, it will be easier for you to analyze whether going through the therapy will benefit you or not.

If biofeedback therapy proves to be effective for you, it may help you manage your symptoms or lower the quantity of medicine you take. You will be able to try the biofeedback techniques you learn on your own at some point. However, don't stop medical treatment for your ailment without consulting your medical team. If you know more about biofeedback therapy find here Advantage medical clinic.