Toll Free: 1-877-669-6463
Direct: 914-762-4646
There are several options for people who are interested in receiving training in biofeedback and neurofeedback for certification through the BCIA (Biofeedback Certification International Alliance). Each has pros and cons. I will discuss several options in this article.
Stress is unavoidable, right? That is a practical reality. We can’t totally avoid stress as long as we are alive in this world. We can reduce our exposure to stress. We can counteract stress by doing relaxation exercises, yoga, exercise, meditation, and other things like biofeedback.
Why is it worth the effort to reduce or manage stress? Here are a few reasons.
Concussions happen in many ways including sports and motor vehicle accidents, slip and falls, military blast injuries, and physical assaults. Effective treatment methods are limited. Because a concussion involves an injury to the brain, it makes sense that therapies should involve the brain. Neurofeedback training is a therapy that helps to regulate dysfunctional activity in the brain that might be causing symptoms.
When the brain operates it produces electric impulses that can be measured by neurofeedback instruments. These instruments then display the information from various parts of the brain. If the information shows that the brain is not functioning normally, the software can encourage the brain to go back to functioning in a more effective way. With this neurofeedback training symptoms tend to resolve.
If you are a psychologist in the United States of America, depending on which state you are licensed in, you may need a few or a large number of continuing education credits each year to maintain your license.
There are many topics to choose from to study. Some are an absolute must like ethics. Others are optional. Since subjects like brain plasticity and the poly vagal theory have really taken off over the last several years, subjects that incorporate mind body technology and therapy have become of more interest to psychologists.
Psychologists and psychotherapists are not all just having people sit in a chair or lay on a couch to just have people talk to them about their problems. They are using evidence-based, science-based tools to help them address the body as well as the mind. Science is proving that the body is involved in problems like anxiety, PTSD, and trauma. It’s not all in the mind. The mind has to work through the brain, so problems of the mind also involve the brain. Neurofeedback is among the tools that can be used to affect the brain. Encouraging the brain to increase or decrease various signals that can be picked up with neurofeedback equipment can help to train the brain to decrease unhealthy patterns that may be related to clinical symptoms.
Stress is a problem that we all experience. It is not getting less, if anything it may be increasing. Recent political and racial tension and the current pandemic have added layers to the stress that we all have been already living with.
Here are a few things you can do to reduce the negative effects of stress on your physical and mental health.
Reduce your exposure to stress. Identify sources of stress in your life. This includes people, places, and things. Note the ones that you can make choices about that will reduce your stress. There may be people that you feel stressed around. Even though you may still need to spend time around them, you may be able to arrange to spend less time around them.
There is a lot of talk about stress these days. First of all, here is how dictionary.com defines stress.
In this article, I am going to be focusing on number 5, the mental or emotional strain or tension definition. Stress tends to trigger the fight, flight, or flee response which is supposed to be an emergency state which lasts for only a short time. When there is not a short-term emergency requiring a physical response then the state can last for a long time and even become chronic. It may also be triggered repeatedly over a long period of time. When this happens, negative symptoms can result. Here are just a few of the negative symptoms that can develop as a result of mental or emotional stress.
Skin Conductance can be both one of the simplest yet one of the most complex modalities of biofeedback at the same time. More stress, the reading goes up. More relaxed, the reading goes down. Simple, right? Not so fast. Make sure we are not actually talking about resistance measures which are exactly opposite from conductance. Besides two opposite measures of conductance and resistance, we should also add skin potential. When I was introduced to biofeedback way back in 1984, GSR or Galvanic Skin Response was the common feedback modality for monitoring changes based on sweat activity. The readings in Ohms would go down when there was more sweat on the skin because resistance was decreasing and it would go up if the amount of sweat decreased because resistance was increasing. The audio tone was reversed so that it went up when the subject was responding to something and got lower when they recovered or calmed down.
Sleep problems including insomnia are an excellent application of Peripheral Biofeedback and EEG Biofeedback (Neurofeedback). They are also among the major symptoms caused by stress. It is difficult to fall asleep while the body is tense or your brain and nervous system is in fight-fight-freeze (emergency) mode. It is difficult to fall asleep if you close your eyes and your brain is still too busy.
Not getting enough sleep is a problem for between 28.5% – 41.1% of adults in the USA according to CDC 2014 statistics. The term they use is “short sleep duration”, defined as less than 7 hours of sleep per night for adults (see CDC – Data and Statistics – Sleep and Sleep Disorders). People who have short sleep duration also have other health risks at a higher rate than others. Some of these shared risks include obesity, physical inactivity, alcohol use, and smoking. Short sleepers also reported these ten chronic disorders at a higher rate than those who get enough sleep:
In Biofeedback when we talk about B.A.R.T we are not talking about that crazy kid on the popular cartoon series, The Simpsons, we are talking about a very popular protocol which can be widely applied for various conditions. Rather than seeing it as a specific protocol I see it more as a concept. When practitioners are learning biofeedback for the first time, they are usually very interested in learning very specific protocols for the conditions they expect to be working with like headaches, anxiety, insomnia, and depression.
They expect a specific guide as to which modalities, what goals, and the number of sessions to work on each modality for each application. That would be nice. It makes things simpler and makes it easier to plan. It doesn’t always match reality for the individual that is in front of you. Now, what is B.A.R.T.? It is an acronym for Biofeedback Assisted Relaxation Therapy. It’s kind of like a generalized protocol that helps to counter the stress response by using biofeedback to teach clients to regulate their physiology using multiple modalities including surface EMG, Skin temperature, Skin conductance, Heart Rate/Heart Rate Variability, Respiration, and EEG. I decided to talk about this after reading Don Moss’s article, Biofeedback-Assisted Relaxation Training: A Clinically Effective Treatment Protocol in the Summer 2020 issue of Biofeedback Magazine.
In order to serve you better we would like to ask you a few questions. With this information we will be better equipped to advise you.
Complete this form and Receive a $50 savings certificate good towards training or equipment ($500 minimum purchase).
Click Here to Complete the Form
Biofeedback and Neurofeedback Training for APA Continuing Education Credit