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Have medications failed?
Too many side effects?
Maybe it’s time to consider the Biofeedback Solution
By Michael Cohen, Founder, Center for Brain
Feeling Overwhelmed?
You don’t have to live with chronic anxiety anymore, and you don’t need to live with feelings of being overwhelmed or burned out. There’s something new that can change how you feel and help you take back control of your life.
Biofeedback, enhanced by 21st century technology, helps you feel better, manage stress better and improves your ability to handle the challenges of everyday living – without being overwhelmed.
Biofeedback is one of the most powerful methods available today for minimizing anxiety and panic attacks. With practice and reinforcement, you can train your brain and body to respond more calmly to stress and significantly reduce the need to try to avoid it or live with it.
The Center for Brain has helped countless people (both children and adults) get control of their anxiety and take charge of their life again, frequently in a surprisingly short time.
Most people with anxiety have tried medications to feel better, often with disappointing results. Medications may not eliminate your symptoms and don’t teach your brain and body to make permanent changes. Medications don’t help you learn to quiet your mind or to be calm without them. Unfortunately for sufferers of anxiety, many doctors are unfamiliar with treatments other than medication. Other approaches like nutritional changes and acupuncture can have disappointing results as well.
What can Biofeedback Do?
Biofeedback has been proven to greatly reduce or even eliminate anxiety symptoms. For people taking medication, biofeedback can help lessen reliance on medicines. In some cases people are able to stop taking anxiety medication entirely.
Consider the experiences of three patients who sought the Biofeedback Solution from Center for Brain.
52-year-old Cecily had suffered from depression and anxiety since her late 20s following a car accident. She was taking medications for depression and sleep, but over time these didn’t help. Doctors ran out of ideas, and her anxiety surged. Cecily became increasingly fearful and anxious of everything in her life, stopped participating in normal activities, and felt completely overwhelmed. An intensive and comprehensive intervention of biofeedback therapy, an adjustment of her hormones and acupuncture broke her cycle of anxiety and depression. Today she is sleeping without medication and living a calm and peaceful life.
24-year-old Brett had become so paralyzed by panic attacks that he had been unable to work or drive for two years. He was on heavy-duty mood stabilizers, an antipsychotic medication and other drugs. The medications helped somewhat but not enough for him to function. After one month of biofeedback sessions 3-4 times per week his panic attacks and extreme anxiety diminished and he was able to drive again. Now that he knows how to calm himself he reports feeling “completely normal.”
Melissa, 47, had anxiety so severe that she was unable to drive, couldn’t pay attention to anything and was afraid to leave her house. She took numerous medications for anxiety and sleep but she did not get better. At the time she came to Center for Brain she had been suffering extreme anxiety for a solid year with very little relief. After a month of biofeedback she began feeling much calmer and was sleeping better. She started leaving the house and was even able to get and keep a job. Following three months of treatment she appeared in our office bright, cheerful and engaging without any anxiety symptoms.
Why Can’t You Simply Talk Yourself Out of Anxiety?
People who don’t understand anxiety may tell you to calm down and not let things bother you. If it were that easy, you’d already do it, right? When you have anxiety, the parts of your brain that are supposed to keep you calm aren’t working very well.
As a result, anxiety sufferers are often overwhelmed, exhausted, and feel the people around them don’t understand. You can’t talk yourself out of an entrenched emotional pattern.
Can You Learn to be Calmer?
Absolutely! Biofeedback is one of the most powerful technologies in the world for reducing anxiety and panic attacks. It helps the brain change the stuck patterns that cause the anxiety. While everyone experiences anxious moments, with chronic anxiety, your brain gets stuck in that state, and it’s difficult to change it.
Biofeedback worked for 65-year-old Jacob who developed severe agoraphobia (fear of leaving the house). Antidepressants didn’t help. Either did Valium, other calming medications and even daily medical marijuana. He suffered through eight months of non-stop anxiety. He fantasized about “walking in front of a bus” rather than go on living the way he was. Center for Brain provided biofeedback services to him at home, five times a week for two weeks. Within ten days he had stopped the medical marijuana. Over the course of three months he significantly reduced his other medications and once again was able to leave his house.
“We’ve developed a unique comprehensive program to help those with chronic Anxiety and Depression to change their life. It helps your brain to manage mood and anxiety successfully.”
Michael Cohen, President and Founder, Center for Brain
How Does Biofeedback Work?
Biofeedback training helps change brain patterns. It measures the body and brain’s rhythms and rewards you when you make healthy patterns. With repeated training, the brain and body learn to maintain those healthier patterns. Correcting anxiety with biofeedback takes practice and reinforcement. The more your brain learns how to be calm through biofeedback, the more it becomes a normal state in everyday life.
“With biofeedback training, you learn to moderate your response to stress so anxiety occurs less frequently and is less intense and debilitating if it does happen. Biofeedback helps you calm the over-reactive patterns that make life more difficult and allows you to take charge of your life again.”
Michael Cohen,President and Founder, Center for Brain
We also offer other tools that can be helpful with anxiety, and we encourage our clients to try different methods to see which work best. Some of these tools, such as heart rate variability training, can even be used at home.
Michael Cohen,
President and Founder of the Center for Brain Training is one of the leading experts in brain biofeedback. For 16 years, he’s taught courses and provided consulting to MD’s and mental health professionals around the world, helping them incorporate new biofeedback technologies for chronic pain, anxiety and mood disorders, ADHD and neurological problems.
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