Strong Mind and Spirited Body: II – Biofeedback
3 Comments, so join the discussion!
You need to listen to your body because your body is listening to you.
- Dr. Phil Mcgraw
Strong Mind and Spirited Body: II – Biofeedback
This is the second installment of a series of articles called:
A Strong Mind and Spirited Body.
The first installment was: A Strong Mind and Spirited Body – I
Picture yourself in a chair. Not that big of a stretch, I’d imagine. But in this chair visualize electrodes and sensors attached to various parts of your body, including your scalp, ears, and fingers.
Photo by geekgirly
All of a sudden, a buzzer sounds, and it won’t stop. You grow agitated and notice that this only seems to make the sound grow stronger. You relax and think about what to do next, which, not coincidentally, softens the annoying buzz. Through further experimentation of tensing and relaxing various muscles, as well as putting yourself into differing states of mind, you successfully get the noise to stop. But what just happened?
You completed a biofeedback session.
What is it?
Biofeedback is a form of mind-body therapy that aims to give its practitioners voluntary control over what are normally thought of as involuntary bodily processes. These include, but are not limited to: metabolism, blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, and galvanic skin response (sweating). The idea behind biofeedback, then, is to provide real-time feedback of these processes in an attempt to show how you can gain varying measures of control over them.
Every time that you step on a scale, measure your blood pressure, listen to your heart rate, or use a thermometer, you are getting a form of biofeedback.
Mind-Body Applications
Here’s an example of how biofeedback can help heal your body. A migraine headache can be characterized by an intense and throbbing pain, and while each person may have their own headache trigger, such as different foods or stress, the intense and painful symptoms are commonplace among migraine sufferers. Electrical activity in the brain, produced by the trigger, eventually causes vascular irregularities, such as the constriction or expansion of your blood vessels, which produces further inflammation and that migraine headache. What if there was a way to help stabilize the vascular irregularities by diverting some of the blood to another area of the body? Is that even possible?
Amazingly enough, it is very possible, and has been done on countless occasions. By hooking your hands up to a device that measured their temperature, and provided aural or visual cues, you would eventually be able to raise the temperature of your hands, through the sheer process of experimentation. For your body to produce these results, it needs to divert some of the blood flow from where most of it is (during a migraine that would most likely be your head) and channel it all the way down to your hands. This has had amazing effects at reducing, or even completely eliminating, pain from migraine headaches and other physical ailments.
While your hands probably wouldn’t catch fire, it certainly could be trained to be an amazing alternative to prescription medicine. In fact, many have had such success with this technique that they have been able to raise the temperature of one hand more than the other!
Eventually, you would learn the skill of being able to raise the temperature of your hands without the help of a biofeedback machine. Your conscious knowledge of this newfound ability would be with you forever.
Is pain relief the only application for biofeedback? Far from it. Biofeedback has been used to treat insomnia, anxiety, diabetes, ADD and ADHD, bowel and urinary incontinence, as well as a plethora of various other physical and mental disorders.
Equipment
There are several different pieces of equipment used in any given biofeedback session. The most common are the Electromyograph (EMG), Temperature of Skin, Galvanic Skin Response (Sweating), and Electroencephalograph (EEG).
Electromyograph (EMG) – This is the machine that uses sensors to be able to tell when a particular muscle is both at rest or is contracting, and to what degree. It does this by sensing the electrical potential generated by the muscle in question.
Temperature of Skin – Temperature biofeedback can be used for everything from sensing stress to helping you divert blood flow. It is normally measured via sensors attached to your fingers.
Galvanic Skin Response (Sweating) – Like measuring the temperature of your skin, sensors are placed on your fingers to measure the electrical resistance of the skin, or how much perspiration the subject is producing. It is a method most commonly used by lie detector machines.
Electroencephalograph (EEG) – This device measures your brain waves by observing the electrical activity produced by your brain. It uses sensors attached to both your scalp and ears. Scalp EEG is able to show the patient’s different mental states, such as how relaxed they are.
Meditation = Biofeedback?
If all of this seems a little too far-fetched for you to believe, you probably aren’t alone. It is always commonplace to have a heavy dose of skepticism when incredible claims are made. Which is exactly how Henry Benson felt.
Could meditation be a form of biofeedback? Does it help you become so in tune with your body, that you can observe all of its processes and thereby have some control over them?
Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute and associate professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, seems to think so. In fact, he developed the relaxation response, which is based on a form of mediation called g Tum-mo. He calls his relaxation response a physiological state which is opposite to that of stress.
But it wasn’t enough to just believe the claims of g Tum-mo, so Benson decided to put it to the test.
During visits to remote monasteries in the 1980s, Benson and his team studied monks living in the Himalayan Mountains who could, by g Tum-mo meditation, raise the temperatures of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. It has yet to be determined how the monks are able to generate such heat.
The researchers also made measurements on practitioners of other forms of advanced meditation in Sikkim, India. They were astonished to find that these monks could lower their metabolism by 64 percent. “It was an astounding, breathtaking [no pun intended] result,” Benson exclaims.
To put that decrease in perspective, metabolism, or oxygen consumption, drops only 10-15 percent in sleep and about 17 percent during simple meditation.
If there was one treatment option that defined the link between a strong mind and spirited body, biofeedback would be it.
Most Popular Posts
- Unsolicited Criticism: It Stinks And So Do You (28)
- Curing Happiness: What It Means And Why You Need To (20)
- Morbidity Affected by Social Isolation: But Why? (10)
- Raw Foods Diet: Day 21 (9)
- Raw Foods Diet: Day 6 (8)
via RSS
February 4th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I have also heard of certain monks that could even change the blood flow in their body to the point of being able to reduce flow so much that they could stick a nail through one hand it upon removal there would be no bleeding. I think that this mind body connection and the power that mind can have over what most see an involuntary processes is what the chinese were getting at when they describe the Chi-energy. this is how certain kung fu masters can be hit in the head with a brick and have the brick break when they have their heads laid down on a pillow of concrete, or how some can bend swords with their abs by having the blade thrust at their stomachs. being able to train your mind to sense and be aware of these minute processes can enable some extraordinary things to happen.
Personally I can do none of these things, but i can meditate, and I am always amazed at how much better I feel after a meditation. No matter how I feel going in, no matter how stressful my day was and how skeptical I feel that meditating is going to make me feel better, it always works. There are also many many different meditation techniques and styles to suit many different types of people and it doesnt have to be religious. on the other hand if you want it to be religious, it doesnt have to be buddhist or hindu. saying the rosary over and over, is like reciting a buddhist mantra.
to me saying you dont have time to meditate in a hectic day is just an excuse. its like something I heard someone say about exercising. Its not that exercising takes time out of your life, its that exercising puts time back IN your life. its the idea of delayed gratification. If you take a little time to do something you may not want to do now, the benefits will be ten fold later.
February 4th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
What an interesting subject! I would prefer meditation to a bunch of machines any day. I believe getting your vitals checked often is important, I prefer the gentler method of meditation, yoga, and positive thinking. However, this method of biofeedback is effective, and agree with Giant that mediation also makes my stress levels diminish, and my body feel at peace.
February 5th, 2008 at 3:14 am
Blake,
I agree with your perception on meditation, it is truly an amazing phenomenon.
Rebecca,
It is interesting that you say that. Biofeedback machines give us the ability to sense things that you nor I would probably be able to sense. Yes, advanced practitioners of different meditation techniques have been able to become very in tune with their body. Probably not to the specifics that a biofeedback machine could tell you, but still with very amazing control.
The point of a biofeedback machine is to make you more aware of what is going on. You could do one session of biofeedback and know more about what is going on SPECIFICALLY than if you did a year of meditation. Is meditation pointless then? No, not at all. It is a form of biofeedback, but it shouldn’t be compared to a biofeedback session, only a different form of biofeedback itself.
The idea of biofeedback definitely excites me. I am interested in trying out a session sometime to see if it delivers on its promises. I think if I was able to see myself with the ability of controlling my heart beat, it would freak me out.