Biofeedback

The New South Wales Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors (STARTTS), in Sydney,  is one of Australia’s leading organisations that helps refugees recover from their experiences and build a new life in Australia.  Most of these refugees have been exposed to multiple traumatic events and suffer severe PTSD.

STARTTS currently employs over 170 professionals from a diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds speaking at least 25 different languages and they utilise a bio-psycho-social model in assessing the impact of trauma, planning treatment and framing interventions. Their services include:

• Neurofeedback and biofeedback
• Counselling and psychotherapy
• Physiotherapy and acupuncture
• Naturopath consultations
• Psychiatric assessment/treatment
• Group therapy/treatment
• Yoga, Capoeira classes

Neurofeedback was added several years ago, and their rate of success in fully rehabilitating these refugee victims has skyrocketed. The Neurofeedback group had reduced symptoms of Trauma, Anxiety and Depression from Pre to Post assessments compared with the waiting list control group. They also increased their cognitive and verbal ability and were able to discharge many of the experimental group as fully rehabilitated citizens able to contribute to society.

The results have been so meaningful that STARTTS now offer neurofeedback to all their clients.  

In the US, where trauma treatment is fragmented, driven by the pharmaceutical companies, and dictated by insurance firms, wraparound services are not available, neurofeedback is offered only to clients who search, and our treatment outcomes are poor.  Perhaps we could take the Australia lead and provide a wide range of services to those who are in need.

We are proud to announce that Brain Mapping using Brain Master Mini Q, read through New Mind Brain Mapping is now available at Windward Biofeedback Associates.  Brain mapping allows more accurate training,  and the New Mind Brain Mapping access portal permits clients and parents to rate symptoms regularly on a personalized symptom tracking site.  This means our training is more precise, and feedback is more targeted.

We’re so excited! Our brain mapping equipment has arrived, and very soon we will be able to match a map of your brain to the symptoms you mention to make our training even more effective! Imagine – you’ll be able to see what parts of your brain manage various tasks in a real time situation. Cool!

This article comes thanks to LA Times Blog

Biofeedback technique eases musicians’ anxiety

June 17, 2010 |  7:00 am

If you’ve ever sat down at the piano to play a Mozart sonata and couldn’t find middle C, you know the feeling of performance anxiety. The condition, often called stage fright, is anxiety that is so severe it can impede performance. As many as three-quarters of musicians have musical performance anxiety. Thus, for serious students, learning to master this condition may be as important as learning all the scales.

A new study shows that a specific biofeedback technique is highly effective in decreasing stage fright. Researchers studied 14 college-age musicians. The musicians’ tendency to have stage fright was estimated in a performance before an audience at the start of the study (with questionnaires and heart rate measurements). Half of the musicians repeated the performance four weeks later. The other half received training in biofeedback that was designed to teach them how to control their heart rate through thoughts and emotions. These students also performed again after four weeks.

The study showed a 71% decrease in performance anxiety in the biofeedback group compared with the control group. The biofeedback group had a 62% improvement in performance. The musicians in the biofeedback group also said they had an overall increased sense of calmness, slept better, were more relaxed and had less anger in their everyday lives.

Biofeedback helps coordinate the brain-heart-body processes, the authors wrote. This synchronicity defeats performance anxiety and gives musicians a feeling of “flow,” the authors said, which they defined as “when a person is functioning at peak capacity, including mind, body and energy.”

The study appears in the current [June 2010] issue of Biofeedback, published by the Assn. for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback.

Staff at Windward Biofeedback are interested in helping people maximize brain functioning in order to live more joyfully– neurofeedback training is useful for waking up lazy, bored brains, like ADHD kids have, for quieting down fast, obsessive brains, like many executives have, and for helping people sleep better when they haven’t been able to for awhile.  Neurofeedback is a no medication – learn to control your own processes approach to functioning better.  And yes, when it would help, our staff can provide psychotherapy, hypnosis, parent counseling, and marriage counseling, too.

And you get to play with all my gadgets as well – Breath training programs, Heart Math Biofeedback, alpha stimulation for pain management, Audio visual Entrainment Devices.

Sovereign Health, the largest nationally recognized behavioral health inpatient program in the country, with hospitals in nearly every state, has added neurofeedback to its evidence-based treatment program. They cite studies in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse showing that neurofeedback increases success rates in treating addictions, eating disorders, and other mental health problems because neurofeedback addresses the underlying issues of anxiety, stress, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

At the conscious level we observe our own behavior and can act to modify our own behavior.

At the same time all of our acts, thoughts, and feelings are handled by the brain in its own code.

And the brain reads its own code by a kind of pattern recognition.

If we now allow the brain to witness its own behavior, it simply applies its pattern matching skills, realizes what the game is about, and is then capable of altering its own behavior.

In neurofeedback, we allow the brain to track its own behavior in our digital mirror. At the same time, we reward the brain if it happens to change in a favorable direction, in a sophisticated game of “warmer/colder.”  Since the brain is  a voracious learning engine, so it incorporates the new information and that becomes new learned behavior, or new functional capability.

Why is Neurofeedback useful for sports?

The skill of the game of golf is recognized to be largely a mental skill. Training a person to play better golf is largely a matter of developing and honing brain-based skills. What makes this all possible is that immediate feedback is always available on the person’s performance because in the motor act the brain’s capacities are on display, in a manner that all can judge. Skill learning is absolutely dependent on feedback—to the trainee and also to the coach. The brain’s trainability is a general property of the brain, one not restricted to motor function. The missing piece is feedback. If we can allow the brain to observe its own behavior, we can train it just as effectively as we can train motor competence. In neurofeedback, that is just what happens. We allow the brain to witness those aspects of its own behavior that relate to issues identified by the therapist. And this opens the door to shaping the brain’s behavior in all of those areas that matter to us in mental health, in education, in our relationships, and even in our deepest inner core of the self.

Neurofeedback and the brain.

Merleau-Ponty urged many years ago that the brain is best regarded not as an observer or witness to its world, but rather as an actor in it. It is especially attuned to its own impact on its surroundings. It is not simply or primarily a respondent. In the feedback screen, the brain recognizes its own agency with regard to the changing signal, and it can’t help but be intrigued. So the same process that works at the level of the person also happens at the level of the brain, in the brain’s own code. The brain’s code is reflected in the EEG. The EEG, in turn, is mapped into the feedback game. And the brain’s pattern recognition skills are such that it is still able—-even after so many levels of abstraction—to discern the correlation of the feedback information with its own internal activity. In this manner, we beguile the brain into altering its own state. Over time and by repetition, functionality is restored to brain networks, and new functional capacities open up.