Understanding how our body is responding to certain triggers as a way to manage medical or physiological conditions is an emerging field known as biofeedback. Therapeutic approaches that use biofeedback are seeing some excellent results where patients become more involved in their own treatment by using the feedback from sensors to learn to better control their responses. In time, this often leads to breakthroughs in personal management and a lessoning of symptoms with problematic conditions like ADHD, anxiety and migraines.
Here are four conditions that can be managed better when using biofeedback.
Anxiety or Panic Attacks
One of the clear benefits of biofeedback is in treatment for people who suffer from bouts of anxiety, or worse still, full blown panic attacks. The panic disorder malady relates to stimuli in the environment they live in or come into contact with. Sometimes, this is a conscious thing and other times, it’s completely subconscious.
By using biofeedback, a patient can visually see their body’s responses heightened based on known triggers. For patients willing to try, they can gradually adjust the way they handle their difficulties until they’re able to feel anxiety rising up and calm themselves down using positive self-talk.
Headaches and Migraines
Getting regular headaches is a painful thing, but migraines are much worse. A single migraine can cause a lost day at work and persistent migraines make being a reliable employee next to impossible.
While medicating for migraines and headaches is the usual treatment protocol, learning through biofeedback when the muscles are getting tenser and the body’s core temperature is rising allows for behavioral adjustments. If certain actions or situations tend to bring on a migraine, then with these indicators, the patient can switch away from those situations to remove the trigger or delay it.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is thankfully becoming better understood. While it’s most commonly associated with soldiers returning from the battlefield, a wide range of traumatic experiences as a child or an adult can result in a form of PTSD.
Using biofeedback, a patient suffering from flashbacks and heightened anxiety can learn to modulate their brain’s response to gain control over their symptoms. For sufferers of PTSD, even a slight reduction in the severity of their symptoms leads to a more rewarding life.
Pain Management Through Better Awareness
When suffering chronic pain that’s been continual for half a year or longer, it makes basic functioning a challenge. Using biofeedback, how the brain acts when the patient feels pain is clarifying. Learning how their body responds to pain is also useful to work through the process to make chronic pain conditions more livable. While unlikely to remove the pain entirely, understanding its pathways and functions helps to ease their body responds to pain is also useful to work through the process to make chronic pain conditions more livable. While unlikely to remove the pain entirely, understanding its pathways and functions helps to ease the suffering.
Dealing with a severe medical condition on an ongoing basis like chronic pain, PTSD or persistent migraines interferes with each day. Sometimes from the first waking moment, the symptoms begin. For patients using biofeedback, they have a new coping mechanism and some measure of relief too.
