This Is What Happens To Your Nervous System When You Use Biofeedback

There’s so much health and wellness technology out there these days that it seems like there’s nothing we can’t learn about ourselves, provided that we have access to the right tools. 

Continuous glucose monitors, wearable HRV trackers, and other devices are keeping the health-conscious more attuned to the inner workings of the body than ever before. And there’s definitely a point at which this can become an overload. 

But biofeedback continues to stand out as a bridge between high-tech monitoring and holistic, mind-body healing. 

Biofeedback essentially allows you to listen to your body’s subtle signals, and then actually do something about them. But what’s really going on in your nervous system when you use biofeedback? Let’s talk about how this therapy works to rewire stress patterns, enhance neuroplasticity, and restore balance to your system. 

Biofeedback: An Overview

Biofeedback isn’t a new tool, but our understanding of its possible uses is constantly expanding, and it remains a fascinating mode of healing. 

At its simplest, biofeedback is a therapy that teaches you how to control physiological processes that are typically automatic—the things that ordinarily happen without us thinking about it. 

These are things like heart rate, breath, muscle tension, body temperature, and brainwave activity. 

Sensors track these automatic processes in real-time, and relay the data right back to you. The concept is that you can learn to regulate these processes yourself, and the goal is to train your nervous system to respond to stress more consciously (without the need for the equipment). 

What I like about biofeedback is that it’s not a tool that’s just doing all of the thinking for you. The real-time loop of awareness and intentional adjustment can actually allow you to enhance your own intuition when it comes to your body, how it works, and how to support it. 

Understanding Your Nervous System 

Let’s back up for a second and talk about the nervous system itself. There are two main branches of the nervous system. The first is the central nervous system (CNS), which includes your brain and spinal cord, and is responsible for processing information. 

The second branch is the peripheral nervous system (PNS), which consists of all of the nerves throughout the body that connect back to the CNS. 

The peripheral nervous system is also divided into two primary components: the somatic nervous system, which controls voluntary movements and the conscious processing of information, and the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which controls involuntary functions like breath, heartbeat, digestion, and stress responses. 

It’s the autonomic nervous system that biofeedback targets. 

As I mentioned, the ANS controls your stress response. It has two key modes: the sympathetic (fight-or-flight) mode and the parasympathetic (rest and digest) mode. 

We need both of these modes to work together to keep us alive and functioning. We should be in sympathetic mode when faced with a stressful or dangerous situation, and we should be in parasympathetic mode during states of rest (essentially, when we are not in active danger). 

But in our modern world, where we’re overloaded with stressors all day long, many people are living in chronic sympathetic overdrive. This usually looks like a state of being exhausted, wired, anxious, and inflamed. 

Biofeedback lets us look directly at this dysfunction, and consciously influence the automatic functions we’re seeing. Basically, you’re using real-time information to teach your nervous system to shift into a more regulated, parasympathetic state, allowing it to focus on digestion, healing, recovery, and hormone regulation. 

Conditions Biofeedback Can Help With

Research has shown that biofeedback may help with all kinds of different chronic conditions, which really highlights the profound involvement of nervous system dysregulation in disease states in general. 

Some of the conditions biofeedback may help with include: 

Anxiety and Panic Disorders

This is one of the clearest examples of how increased awareness of the stress response can help to change it. HRV biofeedback has been shown to significantly reduce anxiety symptoms and improve emotional regulation. (1) In a biofeedback session, through real-time monitoring of heart rhythms, individuals can learn to slow down their breathing rate and activate the parasympathetic nervous system. 

ADHD 

ADHD is one of the most common uses of biofeedback. EEG or neurofeedback has been found to improve focus and attention by training the brain to reduce theta waves (linked to distraction or daydreaming) and enhance beta wave activity (associated with focus and alertness). (2) Retraining brain wave patterns in this way may also improve prefrontal cortex activation. 

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) 

IBS has long been linked to stress and gut-brain axis dysfunction, as well as impaired vagus nerve activity. (3) HRV biofeedback may help to improve vagal tone and reduce gastrointestinal symptoms by enhancing autonomic balance. (4, 5) 

Chronic Pain and Migraines 

Those experiencing chronic migraine headaches and/or pain can often find relief through muscle tension biofeedback, essentially training the body to release muscle tension and increase peripheral blood flow. Research has shown that migraine patients using biofeedback may have reduced frequency and severity of attacks, and require less medication over time. (6) 

Insomnia and Sleep Disorders 

Neurofeedback may help to reduce sympathetic activity and hyperarousal in patients with insomnia, allowing them to fall asleep faster, wake up less throughout the night, and increase sleep efficiency. (7) 

Other Conditions 

An overactive or dysregulated stress response and/or poor vagal tone play a role in so many other conditions. A few others that may be helped by biofeedback include: 

• Cognitive dysfunction
• Chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia (8) 
• Pelvic floor dysfunction
• High blood pressure (9) 
• PTSD and trauma (10) 
• Parkinson’s disease (11) 
• Raynaud’s

How Different Types of Biofeedback Affect the Nervous System

Biofeedback therapy encompasses a number of different tools and technologies. Here are a few of the most popular types of biofeedback and how they work. 

Neurofeedback (EEG Biofeedback)

While all forms of biofeedback work on the nervous system, neurofeedback specifically focuses on monitoring brainwaves. EEG sensors are used to monitor and help train your brain to regulate patterns that affect focus, anxiety, sleep, and cognitive function. 

Neurofeedback may help improve neuroplasticity, cognitive flexibility, and brain inflammation. (12) It may also help reduce hyperactivity in conditions including ADHD. (13) Neurofeedback may be used for anxiety, PTSD, and other mental health conditions. 

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Biofeedback 

The variations between your heartbeats (HRV) can indicate how resilient your nervous system is (it’s also often used as an indicator of physical fitness). With HRV biofeedback, the goal is to learn how to activate your parasympathetic system, which you can do with the help of breath, mindfulness, emotional regulation, and relaxation techniques. 

Basically, you’re recognizing what’s going on, and then using conscious strategies to adjust. 

This type of biofeedback training can help to enhance vagal tone, improve your stress response and resilience, and reduce inflammation. It may be used to help with anxiety or panic disorders as well as IBS and any condition that involves a dysregulated stress response. 

Muscle Tension Biofeedback

This technique uses electromyography (EMG) to detect muscle tension or clenching. You’re becoming aware of when your body is tensing up, and learning to release. This is most commonly used for pain disorders, migraines, and pelvic floor dysfunction. 

Chronic muscle tension often mirrors emotional tension and things that we’re holding inside of us, so this form of biofeedback may offer widespread benefits for those experiencing both physical and emotional stress. 

These are just a few examples of biofeedback techniques. Others include thermal biofeedback and galvanic skin response.

How Biofeedback Helps You Rewire Stress Your Stress Response

What I love about biofeedback is that it can help people break through chronic stress cycles, which can have widespread and long lasting effects. 

Biofeedback teaches you to become aware of how stress actually feels in your body. It’s basically enhancing mindfulness by showing you how your vitals or other autonomic functions show up and shift. 

Then, when you try a technique like deep breathing or meditation, you can see what happens to these autonomic signals in real time. Over time, the idea is that your nervous system learns to both recognize when sympathetic function is taking over, and to shift effortlessly into a parasympathetic state as the default. 

This is an example of neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to change itself): you’re changing how your body responds to stress. 

As a functional medicine practitioner, I recommend pairing biofeedback with other root-cause focused interventions. 

For example, in the case of IBS, nervous system dysregulation is often underlying symptoms, and biofeedback paired with mindfulness can be huge in helping to resolve this dysfunction. And, we usually need to address imbalances in the gut microbiome (which are also directly tied to the stress response). 

For those who haven’t seen results using diet and lifestyle strategies and supplements alone, biofeedback is definitely a worthwhile option to consider adding in. 

Using Biofeedback At Home 

There are an increasing number of non-invasive biofeedback tools you can use at home. Any wearable device and/or app that provides real-time information about what’s going on in your body can be used to practice adapting your stress response. 

Depending on your individual goals, you can also work with a trained biofeedback therapist or an experienced functional medicine practitioner who can provide guidance and support you along the way. At our telehealth clinic, we always tailor biofeedback protocols and all other modalities to the individual. 

Tuning In To Your Body’s Guidance 

Ultimately, biofeedback is a tool that allows you to enhance your own intuition and awareness of the information your body is providing you. 

If you’re looking for a personalized, supportive, holistic approach to whole body and mind healing, including biofeedback, we’d love to work with you at the telehealth functional medicine center. You can book your consultation here. 

As one of the first functional medicine telehealth clinics in the world, we provide webcam health consultations for people around the globe.

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