Anxiety
Anxiety is a part of healthy life. It is a signal that there might be something to be afraid of. We check that out, reassure ourselves or act to defend ourselves and move on. Anxiety becomes a mental health disorder when the feelings of fear and worry persist and interfere with life. However, here at Advanced Therapy Center, we have met many individuals with lifelong anxiety that don’t even know it is there. It is their “normal”.
Examples of anxiety disorders include generalized anxiety, panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Symptoms include stress that is out of proportion to events, and an inability to set aside worry, restlessness and fear.
Medicating anxiety can lead to a life long dependence on drugs that all have side-effects. Counselling can help us cope with our anxiety. Brain training finds the brain source of the excess anxiety and retrains to a calmer state.
How does Neurofeedback therapy help?
Anxiety often presents as an excess of fast (beta) brain waves at the front of the head. These are the areas of the brain that control approach and avoidance behavior. Anxiety can make us overly avoidant, or impulsive and reckless.
Neurotherapy often includes using neuromodulation to support the parasympathetic nervous system that is responsible for allowing us to feel safe and be bodily healthy. In addition, we will target areas of excessive fast wave to entrain a slower pattern and then use Neurofeedback to reinforce the learning of that new, calmer pattern.
Success stories
Meet Jill
One of the most severe and uncomfortable anxiety disorders is OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. Jill spent way too much time on her hygiene at bedtime to the point that she was up too late, missed morning appointments and felt like life was unmanageable. Using stimulation and neurofeedback in 30 sessions we were able to help her achieve increased relaxation and release from her prison of patterns.
Meet Harry
Harry is one of those people who no one would expect to be anxious. He has a rewarding and complex career, good family life, and takes good physical care of himself. However, he was aware that he often made decisions impulsively simply to get over the sense of anxiety he had about whatever was in front of him. He was aware that those decisions often were not the best ones he could have made.
Harry had a less common brain signature for his anxiety. It lived in the center of his brain, in the cingulate cortex. This is a brain structure that links the emotional brain to the executive function centers. Here he had high amounts of fast wave that were taking their energy from the slow waves that should create rest and restoration. We helped him entrain flexible slow waves and reduce the ‘static’ in the cingulate. We also used a Loreta 19 channel form of neurofeedback to ensure that his brain had ‘learned’ the new behavior. In 20 sessions, he was happy with his decision-making process and better able to handle the stresses of life.