Neurofeedback is the most powerful form of brain training available. It is also known as Neurofeedback training, neurotherapy, and EEG biofeedback. It is a scientifically proven alternative to stimulant and mood stabilising medication, it has demonstrated effectiveness across a wide range of brain related issues.
It has 50 years of research and clinical history that demonstrates it is:
- As effective as medication
- Safe
- Produces long-term results
- Natural
What is neurofeedback and how does it work?
It is in a class of its own compared to any form of cognitive therapy, brain training or brain gym exercises, yet it utilizes the same principles of brain plasticity but in a deeper and more specific way. It is a tool that helps your brain at a very deep and fundamental level, allowing it to re-regulate or re-tune itself. This makes perfect sense as science knows the brain is the most complex structure in the universe. It is smarter than all the supercomputers in the world combined and is perfectly capable of regulating and healing itself, if given the proper opportunity, which is Dr Doidge’s message.
Neurofeedback training uses your brain’s own brainwaves to give it feedback about its own functioning. By placing one or two tiny sensors on your head, your brainwaves can be monitored. This information is sent to a computer, where the software analyses it and uses the brainwaves to control a computer game or the size of a DVD screen.
The sensors do nothing to your brain except monitor brainwaves!
The DVD screen expands and contracts, based on your real-time brainwave fluctuations. The movement of the screen is the feedback to your brain, which reflects its real-time functioning. It uses this information to change itself. The best way to understand neurofeedback is that it is a technological mirror that allows your brain to watch itself in real-time. This gives it an edge or extra ability to re-tune and untangle dysfunctional patterns that it has been stuck in.
Neuro feedback enables your brain to make tiny adjustments in the activation of sub-cortical structures, the strength of communication between structures and the firing of neurons measured as brainwaves. We can graph these changes from each training session and graph all the sessions together to get a picture of the brain tuning itself back to health, normality or higher levels of peak performance.
Your brain learns and does everything using feedback from the outside world, itself and every level of your body. Everything you ever learned from walking, talking, maths or riding a bike was all through your brain involved in feedback loops with itself, the body and the world. It does something and tests the results. If it’s no good it does something else if its good it repeats the behaviour or process, which slowly builds up a pattern of learning.
Neurofeedback is excellent for:
- Remediation of brain based problems:
- ADHD and ADD
- Autism and Asperger’s
- Learning Disorders
- Anxiety and Panic attacks
- Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
- Depression
- Behavioural disorders
- Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
- Oppositional defiance disorder (ODD)
- Developmental trauma disorder (DTD)
- Sleep disorders
- Mood disorders
- Anger and aggression problems
- Brain brightening for an aging brain
- Peak performance
Benefits of neurofeedback:
- Creates natural mindfulness
- Increases processing speed
- Improves attention, focus and concentration
- Increases mental endurance and flexibility
- Improves resilience
- Boosts feelings of happiness and confidence
- Calms and dissolves agitation
- Eliminates mood problems
- Increases awareness
- Boosts creativity
- Increases energy
The way your brain self-regulates or tunes itself, makes the difference between happiness, self esteem, success and health or depression, anxiety, poor sleep, learning issues, anger, low self-esteem, failure and ill-health. Using the analogy of a musical instrument, every musician knows that if their instrument is out of tune then no matter how brilliant a musician they are, their music will sound bad. Our brains are the same, if they are out of tune then every aspect of your experiences and abilities are compromised … you are just not at your best.
Many things in the modern world can de-tune our brains:
- Emotional trauma
- Long term stress
- Environmental pollution (both chemical and electro-magnetic)
- Accumulated bumps to the head
- Poor diet
- Aging
- Sleep deprivation
Sometimes our brains can re-tune themselves when these causes are removed, but the longer they have been there, coupled with genetic predispositions, the harder it is for the brain to fully recover.
Is neurofeedback training effective?
Neuro feedback is the most powerful, precise and effective form of brain training in a league of its own! There are hundreds of scientific papers demonstrating its effectiveness across a wide spectrum of areas and hundreds of thousands of people all around the world have benefited from children to ordinary adults, high flyers, entrepreneurs, performing artists, Olympic athletes and elite commandos, and those looking for personal and spiritual development. Read just a few of our testimonials to see the kinds of results that can be achieved.
We have a window into how the brain is performing…how it is tuned by looking at its brainwave patterns. There is a direct correlation between brainwave patterns, brain structure and human functioning on all levels. Brainwave patterns of poor functioning as well as peak performance have been identified. Therefore, an assessment can identify specific brain structures that have poor tuning and can target those structures in the training. If that structure deals with attention for instance, then your attention will improve with training. If it is fogginess and depression you will feel clear headed, happy, confident and motivated. This is why neurofeedback is the most powerful and precise form of brain training.
Fully supervised office or home neurofeedback training is a powerful and effective way to change you and/or your child’s life for the better, whether it’s something your struggling with or if you want peak performance.
Contact me via email or phone and we can discuss how I can help you and/or your child with home neurofeedback in the convenience and privacy of your own home or office, fully supervised by a caring professional with over 20 years neurofeedback experience.
02-42836344
How is neurofeedback training different from other forms of brain training?
If we use a sports analogy, cognitive based brain training can be compared to skills training such as dribbling and bouncing the ball, passing the ball or kicking the ball, etc. Whereas, neurofeedback training can be compared to physical fitness training such as muscle strength, flexibility and cardio-vascular exercises. An athlete can’t expect to perform well without good fitness, no matter how much skills training they do, as they need both. In fact the worse an athlete’s overall fitness is the less able they are to learn skills and execute them at a high level of perfection and consistency. Even if they were unfit, skills training could keep their skill level the same but there wouldn’t be any dramatic improvement in their overall performance. Imagine if you could improve an athlete’s cardio-vascular fitness, muscle strength and flexibility. Their performance would show a huge overall improvement along with their capacity to learn, perfect and execute skills at their personal best.
Online cognitive brain training only has a mild effect and only works for people with mild cognitive issues. It has no impact on more difficult issues or for any emotional issues
How is neurofeedback different to cognitive approaches?
Cognitive approaches include all forms of talk therapy like cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), neurolinguistics processing (NLP), counselling, psychotherapy, rational and positive thinking. It is much easier to change the mind via the brain than the other way around.
Fix the brain first then the thinking.
This is because the deep thinking, emotional and behaviour patterns exist at a sub-cortical or unconscious level. It is extremely difficult to affect this level of the brain with language and conscious thinking. Using a computer analogy the brain is the hardware and thinking is the software. All talk therapies are working at a software level, they attempt to change the hardware by changing faulty software ie beliefs, thinking patterns etc, by helping you to identify faulty beliefs and thoughts and change them in situations where you might feel depressed, anxious and unconfident etc. By doing this it’s supposed that your emotional responses and behaviours will completely change.
However, there are two big problems with this approach. Firstly only about 20% of people get any significant results ie their thinking and beliefs change enough to seriously alter their hardware and therefore emotional and behavioural responses. Although a small minority through a lot of really hard work and years of effort change their brain function by changing their thinking the other 80% only get varying degrees of symptom management at best or complete failure.
Secondly there is a huge learning curve and so a great deal of failure with any cognitive approach as people battle against hardwired thinking habits, emotional reactions and behavioural responses. It’s extremely difficult to watch yourself in situations where you are experiencing intense negative emotions or habitual reactions or even just trying to focus, remember or understand things when that is very hard for you.
Back to the computer analogy. Even if you fixed the software glitch or installed a newer version if there are hardware issues then the software will still run badly. If you fixed the hardware there is a good chance the old software will run just fine. If you fix the hardware so the brain is functioning really well, it saves a great deal of time, hard work and possible failure trying to fix the brain through the software level of beliefs and thinking. When the brain is functioning better that’s the time to use cognitive strategies to work on better beliefs and thinking strategies. It’s easier to fix the brain first, then the thinking.
Is mindfulness better than neurofeedback?
Mindfulness is an excellent practice for life like deep relaxation, meditation or physical exercise. It helps to maintain resilience against the stresses of life. However, mindfulness is very difficult especially if you are struggling with a mood disorder and almost impossible if you have ADHD or ADD, or just a very busy mind. So there is a lot of failure with this practice. Even if you are able to practice regularly it takes years to gain any long term benefits.
Neurofeedback training doesn’t require you to learn a skill while you are changing your brain function and eliminating anxious thoughts and emotional fear or negative depressive thoughts and low energy or quieting a busy mind or sharpening focus and concentration. This is why neuro feedback is so easy.It creates a natural organic state of mindfulness because it sharpens and quiets the mind. So once again it is far easier to do neurofeedback first and develop a level of natural mindfulness then learn to practice mindfulness and this approach will put you years ahead of others.
If you have PTSD, anxiety, rage, anger, depression etc you might be able to fight a heroic battle against your negative thoughts and feelings trying to replace them with positive ones or just attempting to mindfully observe them or try and meditate to calm yourself. However, most people are never able to actually stop what is driving those thoughts and feelings, which are sub-cortical structures operating outside of conscious awareness. With neurofeedback training you don’t have to struggle to learn a skill and successfully use that to heal yourself. It’s a real physical brain training tool that doesn’t require you to learn a skill to be successful. If you can watch a DVD you can do neuro feedback, as it doesn’t require any conscious effort because it is working at a sub-cortical level.
Office or home Neurofeedback is a powerful and effective way to change you and/or your child’s life for the better.
Contact me via email or phone and we can discuss how I can help you and/or your child with home neurofeedback in the convenience and privacy of your own home or office, fully supervised by a caring professional with over 20 years neurofeedback experience.
02-42836344