What’s Biofeedback Therapy?
Biofeedback is a kind of therapy which uses sensors that are attached to the patient’s body to measure key functions of the body. It’s made to help you with learning more about the way the body works. The information could help you with getting better control over different functions of your body and address concerns about your health.
It’s built on the idea that with some proper techniques you can alter your health by knowing the way that your body is responding to stimuli like stress.
Being chronically stressed can dramatically affect your body. This could include high blood pressure, an increase in body temperature, and your brain functions being disrupted. Because biofeedback promotes a better physical and mental stress response, it does its best to help you with controlling body processes such as blood pressure and heart rate. It used to be though that these types of body processes were totally involuntary.
Kinds of Biofeedback
Biofeedback’s three most used methods are:
- EMG or electromyography biofeedback – This measures the tension in muscles as time goes by and it changes
- Temperature or thermal feedback – This measures the changes in body temperature as time goes by
- Electroencephalography – This measures activity in brain waves as time goes by.
Other biofeedback types include:
- Heart variability – Measures your heart and pulse rate
- Galvanic skin response training – This measures the sweat amount on the body as time goes by.
Biofeedback’s Purpose
Biofeedback is aimed at fighting stress through techniques for relaxation. You’re able to consciously manipulate heart rate, breathing and other functions that are usually involuntary to override the response of your body to situations that are stressful.
This type of therapy seems to be best for the conditions that stress heavily influences. Some of these examples are eating disorders, muscle spasms, learning disorders and bedwetting.
There are different mental and health issues that it can help with treating, like:
- Anxiety or stress
- Asthma
- Chemotherapy side effects
- Chronic pain
- Constipation
- Elevated blood pressure
- IBS
- Incontinence
- Raynaud’s disease
Depending on what kinds of problems you have, you might be able to benefit from biofeedback therapy. Think about talking about it with your doctor and see if this can help you.
