Understanding how your body works can help you reduce chronic pain, muscle tension, headaches and a variety of other conditions. When you have an awareness of how your mind and body interact, you can essentially learn to use your thoughts to control your body’s responses. Highly trained biofeedback therapists teach you how to recognize internal signs of distress and modify how you respond.
During a biofeedback session, your therapist connects you to electrical sensors that can monitor your body’s basic functions, such as muscle contractions, breathing, brainwaves, heart rate, sweat glands and temperature. These sensors “feed back” information about your body’s condition in a way that you can see or hear, such as flashing lights or beeping noises. Say, for example, your muscles become very tense and sensors start beeping. Using techniques suggested by your therapist, you work to relax the muscles and stop the beeping.
Biofeedback can help you:
- Maintain proper posture and muscle utilization.
- Learn to ease muscle tension that leads to headaches and chronic body pain.
- Teach you breathing exercises to reduce anxiety.
- Learn how to slow your heart rate and reduce your blood pressure.
- Retrain your pelvic floor muscles to treat urinary and fecal incontinence.
- Learn stress relief and relaxation techniques for use at home or work.
