Dallas Integrative Counseling
Counseling Biofeedback
Comprehensive Counseling Approaches
Adult - Adolescent - Pediatric
Biofeedback Services
Biofeedback is a process that enables an individual to learn how to change physiological activity for the purposes of improving health and performance. Precise instruments measure physiological activity such as brainwaves, heart function, breathing, muscle activity, and skin temperature. These instruments rapidly and accurately "feed back" information to the user. The presentation of this information — often in conjunction with changes in thinking, emotions, and behavior — supports desired physiological changes. Over time, these changes can endure without continued use of an instrument.
-Definition adopted by BCIA, AAPB, and ISNR (May 18, 2008)
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Heart rate variability (HRV) is the measure of variations between consecutive heartbeats. HRV is controlled by your autonomic nervous system (ANS), which regulates involuntary body functions, such as your heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, respiratory rate, etc. It also regulates your body’s fight-or-flight system, which tells your heart to speed up, and your relaxation response, which tells your heart to slow down.As your brain processes information and reacts to stimuli, it transmits signals to the rest of your body through the ANS to either stimulate or relax certain functions.
When your system is in fight-or-flight mode, the variation or difference between heartbeats is minimal (a faster heart rate), and when it is relaxed, the variation is
significant (slower heart rate). The goal is for our heart rate to
respond appropriately to stimuli and be flexible.
The study found that HRV biofeedback training significantly improved attentional capacity, particularly in younger children.
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By teaching children to regulate their breathing, they increased their HRV, which correlated with enhanced performance on attention tasks.
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The impact of biofeedback was most notable in the youngest group of students (ages 7-8), suggesting that earlier interventions may yield better results.
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The program also demonstrated that HRV, as a physiological marker, could be reliably influenced by teaching slow breathing patterns and that this influence is linked to cognitive improvements such as attention.
Click below to read the most recent research supporting HRV Biofeedback for the treatment of ADHD (2024).
The skin tells everything about us – our skin provideds a lot of information on how we feel when we’re exposed to emotionally loaded images, videos, events, or other kinds of stimuli – both positive and negative. No matter whether we are stressed, nervous, fearful, excited, or surprised – whenever we are emotionally aroused, the electrical conductivity of our skin subtly changes. The measure of the skin's sweat gland activity and the small changes that can occur is measured by small sensors. This information is "fed-back" to the client by visual games with auditory prompts on a computer screen.
The temperature at the surface of the skin changes according to blood circulation through body tissue. Peripheral skin temperature can give us information about the state of our nervous system. When stressed, vasoconstriction occurs and the blood in your body rushes toward the body's vital organs, such as heart. When relaxed, vasodilation occurs (think of a free-flowing water hose) and blood that is warmed by the heart is now able to flow to the body's extremities. Measuring your periphrial temperature can allow you to view the small changes in temperature as you practice relaxation skills in real time. Connecting with this feedback will allow you to learn to have independent control over your body's nervous system and it's response to stress.
Using high-tech electrodes placed in specific areas of muscle contraction, we can measure the smallest action potentials at the surface of the skin that cause a muscle to contract. These potentials and contractions are typically not obvious to an individual until measured, and viewed via feedback on a computer screen. These contractions are obvious, however, to those who experience these small contractions over time, which can cause chronic pain, headache, and other muscle aches like TMJ and shoulder and neck pain. Using sEMG biofeedback your biofeedback clinician will guide you through exercises (breathing, postural) in order to to "connect" with ways in which your sEMG reduces to a normative range. Biofeedback sessions will allow you to familiarize and train your body to correct problematic muscle tension caused by stress. Over time, you will experience a decrease in symptoms such as pain, headache and tension.