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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.
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.
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.
Most of us spend at least 8 hours of our day at work. If you ask many people, they will say they hate their job. Even if you don’t hate your job there are usually many moments every day at work that you would describe as stressful. It’s nice to visit a therapy office for a biofeedback, talk therapy, or relaxation session where you sit in a nice comfortable chair and listen to relaxing music. For a moment your troubles can seem to disappear and you feel totally relaxed. This is helpful. It can break the chronic stress condition that many people are stuck in. The problem can be that after the session you go back out into the real world and have to manage until the next visit that may be a week or two away.
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Biofeedback and Neurofeedback Training for APA Continuing Education Credit