Breathing is essential to life, but good breathing can enhance our health and well-being. Breathing incorrectly for years can predispose you to chronic illnesses. Breathing incorrectly for 3 minutes can decrease oxygen to the brain and heart by 30%. This is why respiration training is so important.

Through biofeedback training you will learn how to better regulate your breathing pattern which can have numerous positive effects on you mental and physical health. With biofeedback respiration training, you will learn how to properly breath from the diaphragm and learn various types of breathing patterns. Respiration training can help improve conditions such as insomnia, anxiety, muscle tension, high blood pressure, and certain forms of pain.

Heart rate variability (HRV) refers to the spontaneous change in your heart rate and is influenced by the rate of your respiration. This change in heart rate is due to the interaction between the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of your autonomic nervous system. Your heart rate increases (sympathetic) with inhalation and decreases (parasympathetic) with exhalation. As the exhalations become slower and longer, there is more activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, which will lower your heart rate and increase your HRV. This phenomenon is referred to as vagal tone, which is an internal biological process that represents the activity of the vagus nerve. Increased vagal tone is associated with lower heart rate, increased HRV, and leads to relaxation. Biofeedback training is an excellent way to help train yourself to breathe slower, increase HRV, strengthen vagal tone and to recognize the sensations of relaxation so that you are able to return to this state of relaxation quicker and easier with practice.

Surface electromyography (sEMG) is the process of placing sensors on a muscle in order to detect the activity of that muscle. This biofeedback modality is great for helping people become more mindful of the tension they may be holding in an area of their body, for instance in the upper shoulders. Training how to relax a muscle through sEMG is called “down training”. SEMG is also used for “up training” a muscle that has become atrophied from an injury or has become inhibited from lack of use.

Temperature biofeedback training involves learning how to regulate blood flow to various parts of our body. Vasoconstriction and vasodilation are functions of the status of our autonomic nervous system. Basically, temperature training is about decreasing sympathetic nervous system arousal in order to warm a part of the body, usually the hands, as in the case of Raynaud’s syndrome.

Skin conductance (SC) is also known as galvanic skin response (GSR) and it refers to the ability for the skin to conduct electricity. SC depends on the amount of moisture produced by the sweat glands in your hands or feet. The more sweat that is produced, the more stimulated the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system is activated. With increased stress or emotional arousal, our skin conductance increases (hands get sweaty). Biofeedback training helps to reduce the moisture on your skin by activating the parasympathetic nervous system through slow breathing techniques.