Healing from traumatic brain injuries or spinal cord injuries involves a variety of mental and physical processes and responses. “Biofeedback is a technique that uses monitoring instruments to measure and feed back information about muscle tension, heart rate, sweat responses, skin temperature, or brain activity” – all pertinent indicators of the healing process.
How can this help you with the healing process? Understanding how your body is reacting to stress, pain and yes, even your thoughts, can help you to gain a better grasp on exactly what will and won’t help and hinder your healing from these injuries. “Biofeedback can help you learn to influence your own physiological responses to physical, emotional or psychological stress” by pinpointing thought patterns and emotions that are working against the healing process.
Does this sound a bit “new-age”? Give it a chance. Picture electrodes hooked up to the affected areas of your body that are involved with your injury or are tight from the resulting stress and pain. Now as you work through various thoughts and emotions, the machine responds with beeps or in a visual display that alerts you to which part of your body is reacting to that thought.
With this knowledge and the immediate feedback from the machine, you are able to work on changing your thoughts and your reactions to strong stresses and even figure out how to catch the stress before it begins to rise and negatively influence your body. After practice creates a familiarity with your physical responses, you will be able to work through this without the biofeedback instruments.
For more information, visit the Mayo Clinic.