Biofeedback is scientifically proven to have a powerful, positive effect on your emotional and physical well-being by teaching you to alter your brain activity, blood pressure, muscle tension, heart rate and other critical bodily functions. For more information about biofeedback, Read Dr. Bob Whitehouse's article on the Science of Biofeedback or visit the Mayo Clinic's Complimentary & Alternative Health Center.

Biofeedback uses your mind to control your body. Biofeedback is a type of complementary and alternative medicine called mind-body therapy. Using feedback from a variety of monitoring procedures and equipment, a biofeedback specialist will try to teach you to control certain involuntary body responses, such as:

  * Brain activity

  * Blood pressure

  * Muscle tension

  * Heart rate

Once you learn to recognize and control these responses, you can use biofeedback to help treat a wide range of mental and physical health problems. Even if you don't have a specific disease or condition, biofeedback may help your overall health and sense of well-being.

What conditions benefit from biofeedback?

Biofeedback has been shown to be helpful in treating about 150 medical conditions, including:

  * Asthma

  * Raynaud's disease

  * Irritable bowel syndrome

  * Hot flashes

  * Nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy

  * Incontinence

  * Headaches

  * Irregular heartbeats (cardiac arrhythmias)

  * High blood pressure

  * Epilepsy

Clinical trials are evaluating biofeedback in other conditions as well.

What happens during a biofeedback session?

You can receive biofeedback training in physical therapy clinics, medical centers and hospitals. A typical biofeedback session lasts 30 to 60 minutes.

During a biofeedback session, a therapist will apply electrical sensors to different parts of your body. These sensors will monitor your body's physiological response to stress — for instance, your muscle contraction during a tension headache — and then feed the information back to you via auditory and visual cues. These cues may take the form of a beeping sound or a flashing light. With this feedback, you'll start to associate your body's response — in this case, pain — with certain physical functions, such as your muscles tensing.

Once you begin to recognize that your headache, in this case, is a result of tense muscles, the next step is to learn how to invoke positive physical changes in your body, such as relaxing those specific muscles, when your body is physically or mentally stressed. Your eventual goal will be to produce these responses on your own, outside the therapist's office and without the help of technology.