James V Lunden asked:




Over time, the human body has developed the ability to control itself without requiring the constant attendance of the conscious mind. Subconscious activities such as the beating of the heart of the breathing of the lungs can be done without the mind having to actively will them to happen. This is largely a measure of self preservation; it frees up the consciousness to be able to freely engage in higher thought, and also allowed for us to survive long lapses of consciousness like sleep.

The idea behind biofeedback is simple: by teaching ourselves how to tap into the part of our brains that’s responsible for maintaining all of the underlying functionality of our bodies, we can become more in tune with what keeps them running at their peak. By learning to listen to and read the “biological output” our bodies generate in normal operation, we can learn to control certain aspects of ourselves that ordinarily wouldn’t be accessible to us. Things such as brainwave output, monitoring skin temperature and blood pressure, and employing better breathing habits can all be put under direct and conscious control, and the theory goes that by paying closer attention to what our bodies are saying to us, we can have an easier time using them to fight off illness and poor health.

Typically, the only way to go about accomplishing this is through the use of highly sensitive medical equipment. Using heart monitors, and devices which measure things like muscle tension and other physical manifestation of stress, medical professionals can help their patients to actually see a visual representation of their mental state. Things like the natural electrical impulses of the skin, and the distribution of body temperature over various areas of the body are also measured. Every piece of data yields useful information, but the aspects of the biofeedback session that a medical professional might choose to focus on the most will depend greatly on what’s afflicting the patient.

If the goal, for example, is to lower a patient’s blood pressure to a more healthy level, a biofeedback session can be used to gauge exactly what level of relaxation and stress release is required on the part of the patient to be able to attain the appropriate results. This allows medical patients to have a more more tuned relationship with their bodies, since they will know exactly how they’ll react to certain levels of external stress and stimuli.

The equipment necessary to measure biofeedback is going to depend on what aspect of a patient’s health the examiner wishes to adjust. By and large, once the instrumentation is in place, the rest is mostly trial and error. The patient runs through a gamut of emotional and physical states, and the data that’s produced gives them what they need in order to come to a reasonable determination about which aspects of their life may be causing them to experience stress-related disorders, to that they can make proper adjustments for the future.

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