How does a person with insomnia improve when treated with Neurofeedback?

In the field of mental health, the brain is the structure of the human body to which the most time and efforts have been devoted by researchers around the world for several decades, coming to create various methods of monitoring brain functions in real time.

Thanks to the knowledge about the brain that we have achieved through the combination of scientific development and technological, today there are resources such as neurofeedback, very valuable in the treatment of several alterations. In this article, in particular, we will focus on explaining how neurofeedback is used in the treatment of insomnia.

• Related article: "Insomnia: what is it and how it impacts our health"

What is neurofeedback?

Neurofeedback, or neurofeedback technique, is a form of psychotherapeutic intervention that links psychology and neuropsychology, since it is based on keeping the patient informed in real time about the nervous activation patterns of their brain.

Neurofeedback uses the electrical impulses emitted by brain neurons during their connections or synapses and

transcribes them into a clear image of that brain activity, at the time it occurs.

In this way, said electromagnetic impulses emitted by the neurons can be monitored, measured and observed by the patient who becomes aware of the logics that operate behind these activation patterns cerebral.

• You may be interested: "How do neurons work?"

How does neurofeedback work?

As indicated, through the use of neuroimaging we can identify what type of electrical signal corresponds to each psychological state, that is, to altered states such as anxious or stressed, or calm, for example.

These brain impulses are measured by placing electrodes on the person's scalp and some clips on each earlobe, which will function as a neutral reference to measure the activity of the brain. It is therefore a painless and non-invasive procedure.

When starting the neurofeedback session, the person receives a series of visual or auditory content such as a certain music, a sound, movie, or video game that is interrupted whenever the person experiences abnormally strong electrical activity or variable.

This interruption informs the person of the negative patterns her brain is having and forces them to modify them for more positive or adaptive ones, which is known as feedback neural.

In this way, the brain is trained to change its maladaptive responses each time a high variation in the electromagnetic impulses of its internal activity is experienced.

This training, in the long run, will allow the person to modify their brain activity by themselves and without need to go back to neurofeedback, since these brain correction processes will have become automatic.

• Related article: "The benefits of neurofeedback treatment in cases of anxiety"

The use of neurofeedback in the treatment of insomnia

The main uses for which the neurofeedback technique was created were psychological alterations classic, that is: cases of anxiety, depression, stress, insomnia, autism, hyperactivity, ADHD or the chronic pain.

However, today there are many other uses and benefits of neurofeedback to improve any type of skills and abilities in a wide variety of professions or human activities diverse. In the case of insomnia, neurofeedback is used on the premise that problems such as disability to fall asleep when going to bed is due, at least in part, to thought patterns that lead to self-sabotage, and more specifically, to keeping stress or anxiety at high levels (when just the opposite should happen to enter a state of deep relaxation that precedes sleep).

In this way, neurofeedback offers a context in which the person trains himself to detect in time the dynamics of thought management that feed stress, so that you interrupt them when they occur and can redirect your attention to other mental processes more compatible with the relaxation, before falling into psychological rumination (the vicious cycle of intrusive thoughts that keep us in vilo).

Thus, the possibility of the patient ending up in a vicious cycle of anxiety and stress that causes insomnia is prevented. The objective is that, spontaneously and almost without realizing it, the person quickly detects the routes of thought that will not do them any good when going to sleep, so that it does not contribute to expanding and intensifying those ideas, mental images, catastrophic predictions, etc.

Do you want to have the therapeutic support of neurofeedback?

If you are interested in starting a treatment based on neurofeedback, Get in contact with us; in neurocenter we can help you.