Anxiety can be excessive and become an exaggerated worry about everyday life events with no obvious reasons for worry. People with symptoms of generalised anxiety disorder tend to always expect disaster and can’t stop worrying about health, money, family, work, or school. The worry often is unrealistic or out of proportion for the situation. Eventually, the anxiety so dominates the person’s thinking that it interferes with daily functioning, including work, school, social activities, and relationships. A lot of the work with anxious people involves teaching them the ways in which they can help their own condition with conscious influence on their own physiology.
Neurofeedback is yoga for the mind, specifically for a person who suffers from anxiety. Gently the brain is trained to operate out of a calmer place. The benefit of relieving anxiety conditions does not restrict itself to anxiety per se, but will influence the person’s entire life quality. The changes will reflect improved attention and focus of the person; emotional relationships will progress; and the person will relate differently with his or her perceived “self.”
The occurrence of depression has increased for over a century, to the point where it is becoming the single largest cause of loss of years in productive life around the world. Depression does not have the visibility that cancer and heart disease have in our culture, but it has an impact that is comparably devastating. Depression can affect populations of all age groups. Depression is a complex disorder that affects people in different ways and can cause a wide variety of symptoms. They range from lasting feelings of sadness and hopelessness, to losing interest in the things you used to enjoy and feeling very tearful. Many people with depression also have symptoms of anxiety. There can be physical symptoms too, such as feeling constantly tired, sleeping badly, having no appetite or sex drive, and complaining of various aches and pains. The severity of the symptoms can vary. At its mildest, you may simply feel persistently low in spirit, while at its most severe depression can make you feel suicidal and that life is no longer worth living.
Neurofeedback can train the brain to pull itself out of depression and to maintain itself in a better state of dynamic equilibrium. The appropriate Neurofeedback technique can pull people out of suicidal thinking, often in a single 45-minute session. Over time, the brain is trained toward stability and then a recurrence is no longer expected. Neurofeedback created endurance for the brain, so that it is able to resist and maintain the equilibrium sought by the body when a person falls into depression. With successful Neurofeedback training, medications targeting brain function may no longer be needed, or they may be needed at lower dosages, as the brain takes over the role of regulating itself.
When external or internal factors affect the way one feels, it is considered stress. Because of the overabundance of stress in our modern lives, we usually think of stress as a negative experience; but from a biological point of view, stress can be a neutral, negative, or positive experience. Stress management should be a very important goal for everyone. It is an essential task for health care in general. For mental health in particular, one must train the central nervous system towards a greater tolerance of the stresses it encounters.
Anyone can suffer from stress, but Neurofeedback may help those who look for a way to successfully handle stress. As previously stated, stress is related to both external and internal factors. External factors include the physical environment including your job, your relationships with others, your home, and all the situations, challenges, difficulties, and expectations you’re confronted with on a daily basis. Internal factors determine your body’s ability to respond to, and deal with, the external stress-inducing factors. Internal factors which influence your ability to handle stress include your nutritional status, overall health and fitness levels, emotional well-being, and the amount of sleep and rest you get.
Neurofeedback alleviates the symptoms of stress by replacing feelings of anxiety, worry, fear, and pressure with a feeling of euphoria, mental calmness, and tranquility. This proves to be a very effective way to manage of stress in particular, but contributes to a more general self-care model. It helps one focus on how to respond to stress in a more positive manner. External factors that affect stress can be diminished by allowing the person to concentrate on what is important.
There is no way to get there except by improved brain self-regulation, and Neurofeedback not only provides a pathway for this, but also enforces general relaxation. Neurofeedback helps reduce the negative effects that stress can cause and turn them into positive mental and physical states of being.
Sleep disorders may include difficulty with sleep onset, frequent waking, bedwetting in childhood, nocturnal myoclonus, restless leg syndrome, nightmares, night terrors, central and obstructive sleep apnea, nocturnal bruxism, snoring, sleep paralysis, sleep walking and sleep talking, insomnia, amongst several other sleep disorders that many of us deal with on a day to day basis. The complex organisation of our sleep takes us through a variety of states of arousal. And it is in sleep that we witness this process absent of any conscious control of our arousal states. So any improvement we are able to achieve with Neurofeedback should show up readily in sleep behavior
The impact of Neurofeedback on sleep disorders is evident because it targets very basic regulatory functions in the brain, such as management of physiological arousal.
Neurofeedback applies to any aspect of brain function that we can measure; sleep disorders fall into this category and through the self-regulation training that your brain receives from Neurofeedback the central nervous system is allowed to function better. Neurofeedback diverges from medical remedies for sleep disorders.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
A migraine is usually a severe headache felt as a throbbing pain at the front or on one side of the head. A migraine headache is a form of vascular headache.
It is caused by the enlargement of blood vessels that causes the release of chemicals from nerve fibres that coil around the large arteries of the brain. These chemicals cause inflammation, pain and further enlargement of the arteries. The increasing enlargement of the arteries magnifies the pain, which is usually located in a specific area of the head, depending on each person.
Some people also have other symptoms, such as nausea and sensitivity to light and sound.Migraine is a common health condition, affecting about 15% of adults in the UK. Everyone will experience migraines differently. Some people have attacks frequently, up to several times a week. Other people only have a migraine occasionally. It is possible for years to pass between migraine attacks. Some people find that migraine attacks are associated with certain triggers, which can include stress and certain foods.
Migraine headaches could be very painful and vexing. Therefore, the diminishing of the symptoms have been the focus of migraine treatments. The main focus of the treatment is to reduce the likelihood of migraine symptoms until completely eliminating migraine headaches, whether chronic or not. Complete elimination of symptoms may or may not occur depending on the person. In some cases it has been reported that those who choose Neurofeedback as a way to relieve a migraine and its symptoms can often complete one Neurofeedback session with no sign of a migraine at all. In most cases, however, symptoms and chronic migraines can be highly diminished after the required amount of Neurofeedback sessions. Simply put, Neurofeedback does in fact relieve and may even sometimes completely eliminate the possibility of recurring migraine headaches.
Addiction is a seriously debilitating, mental health disorder. If left unchecked, addiction strips people of their self-respect, their ability to function optimally, their relationships, their reputation, careers, and their soul. It’s a disease that affects thinking – and causes a person to engage in behaviour that is self-destructive and painful. It’s often accompanied by anxiety, depression, and bipolar or other comorbid mental health disorders. Addiction is a strong, uncontrollable need to take drugs, drink alcohol or carry out a particular activity, such as gambling. Regularly drinking alcohol or using other substances, or spending time gambling or on the internet (including porn sites), may be pleasurable or relaxing. Some people experience these feelings particularly intensely and have a strong desire to repeat them more often. You're more at risk of developing an addiction if other members of your family have addiction problems, you experienced stress or abuse while growing up or if you have a mental health problem.
A life-threatening traumatising event, or a sequence of such events can evoke our core emergency response system. One aspect of that response system is for our memory to be strengthened for such events. The traumatic event is recorded by our brain, but what is remembered is our experience of the event, and that experience also includes our response to the crisis. So the body and mind remember a unitary experience that merges the external sensory inputs with the internal responses. In subsequent recall of the event, it is this unitary experience that re-emerges together with the exalted sensation of panic, fear, etc.
Neurofeedback can alleviate many symptoms caused by PTSD. The focus of the therapy is to allow the person the possibility of recalling the traumatic event without reliving the experience. Calming the physiology and taming the fear response is the first thing to do. The original memory is literally being reprogrammed in a process reminiscent of physical therapy. It is a matter of reaching balance and strength for your brain, so that it can accomplish self-regulation and help you gain control of your mind and body. The result is that the traumatic memory assumes its rightful place as a biographical, historical memory like all the others. The person can function normally, in this respect, from that time forward.
Brain training is a new approach that can help teach self-control by decreasing stress, increasing reasoning, and override irrational thoughts. Combined with addiction treatment, it dramatically increases the success rate of treatment. Because addiction is a brain disorder, not a moral issue or a lack of discipline. Neurofeedback training stimulates the brain to retrain patterns of dysfunction and helps teach you how to calm down. It connects to the reasonable, rational regions of the brain during stressful times. When people gain control of their emotions, they can start choosing the option to remain clean and sober. There have been several research studies that show those who use Neurofeedback as part of an addiction treatment programme show much higher success rates and much lower relapse rates than the same programme without Neurofeedback. This appears to be true for every age group. We teach the brain to remain calm, relaxed, and focused. Training helps support more clear thinking.
Conduct disorder represents a group of behavioural problems where a child is aggressive, antisocial and deviant to a much greater degree than expected for the child’s age. To get a diagnosis of conduct disorder, the child must have shown at least three of the core symptoms over the past year: aggression to people and animals, destruction of property, deceitfulness, lying or stealing, serious violations of rules.
The aim of each Neurofeedback session is to improve and to promote self-regulation. Therefore, in cases such as behavioural problems in children (e.g., temper tantrums, aggression), Neurofeedback may help children learn to control impulsive behaviours.