Biofeedback works on the principle that if you have information (feedback) on how close you are to your goal, you can make adjustments to get closer to the goal. A baseball pitcher gets feedback about each pitch from the umpire (low and outside, strike, and so on) and is thus able to make adjustments in the next pitch. When you are trying to lose weight, you step on a scale to get feedback (your weight) in order to adjust your diet and exercise.
At times it is helpful to be able to control bodily functions such as muscle tension. Muscle tension can cause severe headaches or can increase pain near a surgical site. Muscle tension is not something that you can easily measure just by looking at or feeling your muscle. Biofeedback is a technique that overcomes the limits of your senses by using a machine to give you information about your muscle tension in a signal that is easy for you to measure. Sensors attached to your shoulders, for example, measure the tension in the underlying muscles. The measurement of muscle tension is converted to a signal such as sound, light, or a line on a graph. As your muscle tension gets higher, the sound gets louder, the light gets brighter, or the line goes higher on the graph. You use this information to learn how to reduce your muscle tension. With time and practice, you can learn how to respond to the subtle information from your leg muscles on your own, without the amplification provided by the biofeedback equipment.
Since the physical changes that accompany stress can worsen your pain and your perception of it, learning to counteract your body’s stress response is helpful. Biofeedback can help you recognize and counteract your physical responses to stress and anxiety.
For example, one woman had bone pain in her leg after her cancer surgery. Whenever her bone hurt, she became anxious that her cancer was back. Her anxiety would cause her to tense her leg muscles unconsciously, which would cause her pain to increase. By learning to relax her muscles through biofeedback, she decreased her pain significantly without adding pain medicines. Relaxing her muscles also helped her block the vicious pain-anxiety-pain cycle without resorting to tranquilizers.
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