How You Can Train Your Brain to Help Reduce Stress

By Blaine Greteman, Ode. Posted February 28, 2009.

An overabundance or deficiency at one of these frequencies often correlates to conditions such as depression and other emotional disturbances and learning disabilities. Children with ADHD, for example, often have too many slow brain waves (delta or theta) and not enough of the faster waves that allow them to focus, engage and think productively.

Neurofeedback reads these waves, feeds them into a computer and translates them into visual form—in my case, the ladybug's states of lethargy correlate to levels of electrical activity in my brain. The underlying principle is that by seeing your brain waves you can gain control over them, training your brain to produce desired levels of activity, much like you train your voice to produce certain musical notes. And once those brain waves are in play, the desired brain state comes with them. If, for example, you've got too much anxiety-producing beta, try inducing some theta to calm down.

That might sound like trippy science fiction, but it's based on technology that's been around since the German psychiatrist Hans Berger began using electrodes to measure and categorize human brain waves in the 1920s. The recordings of the human brain-wave activity produced by this technology—electroencephalography, or EEG—are the cornerstone of neurofeedback. By the 1970s, it was possible to feed that information back to patients who heard a rewarding tone when they produced a pre-selected frequency of brain waves. What's new is both the sophistication of the feedback display and the precision with which therapists can target different parts of the brain wave spectrum. On top of that, neurofeedback has become cheaper, more efficient and more readily applicable to a vast array of brain disorders.

"When I was doing quantified EEG back in the 1970s, computers were the size of filing cabinets," says James R. Evans, a former University of South Carolina psychology professor and current clinician at the Sterlingworth Center in Greenville, South Carolina. Evans, who has written and edited dozens of articles and books on neurofeedback and is a consulting editor to one of the field's flagship publications, The Journal of Neurotherapy, says those technological hurdles limited neurofeedback's therapeutic reach in the early years: "You had to have a large-scale grant to afford the equipment and electrical engineering people to keep it going."

By the early 1990s, the same technology that brought us personal computers and Xboxes had changed all that, and without huge research investments therapists could focus specifically on brain waves that correlate to mental states. A quantified EEG could show that a patient's brain contained waves outside the normal range, and new software made it easier to create training protocols or use existing ones to boost or reduce activity across a frequency or region of the brain. Neurofeedback began to gain a devoted following of patients and clinicians who swore by its effects. Martin Wuttke is one of those clinicians, a neurofeedback pioneer known for getting remarkable results—starting with himself.

A former heroin addict, Wuttke discovered meditation could help him beat the drugs, and soon he was running meditation and counseling sessions for other addicts. "I found that the key to recovering from addiction was a spiritual experience," Wuttke says. "That's what the Twelve Steps [of Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous] are all about, but I felt like that had gotten lost." To facilitate that experience and give it credibility by grounding it in science, Wuttke turned to neurofeedback.

Alcoholics and drug addicts often have too many fast brain waves—which is perhaps why they seek a chemical fix to calm and soothe overactive brains, he says. With the right technology, neurofeedback practitioners believe they can wake up parts of the brain that are too sleepy and calm down regions that are spinning out of control.

For Wuttke, the results were life-changing. As people moved through his program, he says, "Their depressions went away, their pains went away, their anxieties went away." Wuttke believes patients become less likely to backslide once they realize they have access to inner calm without drugs or alcohol, an insight he describes in terms of "awakening."

Neurofeedback's potential hit home when Wuttke's son, Jacob, was born with brain injuries and major developmental problems. "At age 2, he had no muscle tone and some severe difficulties," says Wuttke, "but the pediatric neurologist couldn't give us any answer about why or how to treat him." Wuttke and his wife at the time, Amy O'Dell, took matters into their own hands, developing a comprehensive treatment regime incorporating neurofeedback.Facing the difficulties of asking a child so young to control his brain waves, Wuttke and O'Dell observed the feedback screen and stimulated their son when his brain produced the desired patterns. "We would be very quiet when his brain wasn't within parameters, and then when it was, we would squeeze him and say, 'Good work!' and orient his brain to those moments."

See more stories tagged with: mental health, therapy, anxiety, creativity, neurofeedback

Blaine Greteman trains the brains of undergraduates as a professor at Oklahoma State University.

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