Remember When. . .
Remember when you learned to ride a bicycle? Remember how you constantly adjusted, overadjusted, and readjusted your body and the bike, trying to realign your muscles and vehicle to avoid the neighbors’ flowerbed, bumps in the sidewalk and your kid brother? Now imagine trying to learn to ride that bicycle blindfolded and with no sense of balance. Without the necessary cues, you wouldn’t recognize your errors (unless your kid brother yelled when you hit him) and you wouldn’t observe your appropriate responses. Those cues are “feedback.” We use feedback so regularly in our everyday lives that we seldom realize how pervasive and important it is.
What is Biofeedback?
Feedback is an essential ingredient in all learning. It has been defined as a “method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the result of its past performance.” Biofeedback? The term is short for biological feedback. One of the first researchers in this field defined it as “the feedback of biological information to the person whose biology it is.” Biofeedback, then, is a particular kind of feedback—feedback from different parts of our body such as the brain, heart, circulatory system, and muscle groups—amplified by an instrument and displayed as visual or auditory information (such as lights or tones) so that the individual receiving this information can learn to regulate his or her own physiological functioning.
When Does Biofeedback Occur?
Biofeedback occurs naturally all the time. If your are running and your side begins to hurt so that you slow down, you are responding to a biological signal. The signal is true if you feel lightheaded from pushups and stop. Both situations involve processes and parts of the body that are readily accessible to conscious control. with the appropriate instruments, people can also learn to control processes and parts of the body previously thought to be unconscious, autonomic, and outside voluntary control.
With training, we can consciously affect the internal world of the autonomic nervous system, which controls sweating, blood vessel expansion and contraction, blood pressure, heart contraction, respiratory rate, smooth muscle tension, and even blushing and goosepimples.
Biofeedback makes information about certain biological activities available to the mind. When the mind receives information about itself and the body (information about how it reacts to stress and how it can return to well-being), it can use this information to restore the body to a state of balance, thus relieving the effects of stress.
An Example of Biofeedback
For example, researchers have found that a person attached to an instrument that shows blood pressure can learn to lower the blood pressure simply by concentrating on watching the pressure drop on the dial. When asked how this was done, the person may be unable to verbalize what happened, or may say: “I just relaxed.”
Yet at the same level that one “knows” how to ride a bicycle, drive a car, or play tennis, that person now knows how to lower her or his own blood pressure. Part of the information is mental and part is physical. Synthesis of both kinds of information allows us to perform, and we acquire this synthesis through trail-and-error, experience, and practice.
It is important to remember that the equipment does not produce the change; the person produces it by using information from the instrument. Biofeedback instruments are only a temporary necessity for practice and learning, once we “know” how to change, the instruments can be discarded.
Demonstrate Biofeedback to Yourself
You can demonstrate biofeedback to yourself by using an ordinary thermometer. Tape the bulb of the thermometer to the pad of your middle finger with masking tape. Make sure you have good contact, but with no constriction of circulation.
After five minutes of sitting quietly, note the temperature and begin repeating a few phrases to yourself such as: “I feel relaxed and warm. My hands feel warm. My hands feel warm and relaxed.”
Repeat the phrases slowly, allowing the suggestion to take effect every 5 to 10 minutes, take a reading of the finger temperature. Most people will show a rise in finger temperature after 10 to 20 minutes, ranging from one to ten degrees.
Benefits of Biofeedback
What benefits can we gain from learning to regulate our internal autonomic processes? Consider how those processes participate in our response to stress. When we are frightened or upset, our bodies respond with an increased heart rate, a feeling of butterflies in the stomach, more rapid breathing, and excess sweating.
These stress reactions have been named the “fight or flight” response. By stimulating the adrenal gland to release epinephrine, they ready the body for action in emergency situations. Blood shifts away from the digestive organs and to the muscles, lungs, and brain. Blood pressure rises, oxygen consumption increases, and our bodies are ready to fight or run.
Such response is automatic and occurs regardless of whether the situation frightens (angers or annoys) us in the external world or is an image held in the mind. Similar body changes take place in response to socially threatening situations (competition for jobs or affection) or life-threatening situations (a car driving toward you in your lane), and they can be recorded biomedically, although the person affected often may be unaware of them.
If there is neither fight nor flight (and often these are socially inappropriate responses), then one has no release for all the body’s preparedness. This can lead to ulcers and other digestive disorders, headaches, hypertension, heart palpitations, anxiety, insomnia, and various other ailments.
Just as we all experience fear and other forms of excitation, we all experience the feeling associated with relaxation. These more subtle feelings include a slowing of heartbeat and breathing, and a lack of tension in the skeletal muscles. As children we relax naturally and easily, but as we mature and acquire more responsibility, we often forget how it felt to “just relax.” Through biofeedback and other coping strategies, we can respond to stress more effectively and counteract the stress response’s wear and tear on our bodies.
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Biofeedback at CMHC