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Is there a need for a stress management book for black people?
There are plenty of books on stress management. They should be good enough for everyone no matter what color right? Stress is stress and how to reduce the negative effects should be the same for everyone, you would think.
There are a lot of differences in our backgrounds, cultures, experiences, and environments. Some of these have nothing to do with the color of our skin and some do.
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.
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.
Biofeedback is usually a face to face, one on one activity. If you were providing biofeedback prior to the start of social distancing and stay at home orders, things have surely changed drastically for you very quickly. Now what will we do? Many of the people who provide biofeedback also provide psychotherapy. It is much simpler to provide psychotherapy virtually than it is for biofeedback. All you need is for the provider and the client to have a computer, smartphone, or tablet and access to a software program or application like GotoMeeting, Zoom, or Skype. Even though this is considered simple, there can still be impediments. Some clients don’t have smartphones, tablets, or even computers. Some also do not have internet access. If both parties do have access to the necessary technology then the sessions can take place fairly easily and inexpensively.
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