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 menta health disorder when the fear of feelings of worry persist and interfere with one’s daily activities. 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’s out of proportion to the impact of the event, inability to set aside a worry, and restlessness.
Treatment often includes counseling or medications, including antidepressants. Anti-anxiety medications have long term addictive potentials and counseling often helps with coping and not the anxiety itself. Neurofeedback finds the brain source and corrects it.
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 Lisa
Lisa had always been an anxious person but lately, it had gotten much worse. She felt unable to move forward in her schooling and was barely holding on to a very simple job. Her finances were in terrible shape and she was in constant conflict with her boyfriend. A friend she worked with told her about Advanced Therapy Center. To help her keep her costs down, we skipped our usual QEEG brain mapping and used NeuroField and four-channel Z-score training. She felt almost immediately better! In 15 sessions she was ready to take on her life with enthusiasm.
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.