Stress, Anxiety, Biofeedback, Relaxation Skills: Dr. Weil

Dr. Weil - Ten Ways to Reduce Stress

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1) Breathing strongly influences mind, body and moods. By simply focusing your attention on your breathing, and without doing anything to change it, you move in the direction of relaxation.

2) Progressive relaxation is a way of releasing tension in muscles. Often taught in yoga and exercise classes, on self-help tapes and by various instructors - from massage therapists to psychologists - there are many variations of progressive relaxation.

Deep Muscle Relaxation

5) Visualization and guided imagery. While we all look at our internal images from time to time, especially when we daydream or fantasize, few of us have learned how to develop our imaging capacity and take advantage of its ability to affect our minds and bodies.

Guided Imagery Relaxation

6) Biofeedback. The idea of biofeedback is clever and simple: by using technology to help you learn faster relaxation, you can develop sensory awareness of an involuntary function and learn to change it. In a common biofeedback setup, temperature sensors are connected to your fingers, and skin temperature is converted to an audible signal, perhaps a beep tone: the faster the beeps, the higher the temperature. Your job is to make the beeps go faster by raising your skin temperature. The tone gives your ears and brain feedback from a body function that is ordinarily unconscious and beyond the reach of your will. Skin temperature is a measure of blood flow into the hands, and that is determined by the size of little arteries. The autonomic nervous system regulates this flow by causing arteries to constrict (sympathetic influence) or dilate (parasympathetic influence). In order to raise your skin temperature you have to relax your sympathetic nervous system. Unless you do this on a regular basis, you will have wasted your time and money, because the point is to incorporate what you learn into daily life. Ideally you should spend 15 to 20 minutes a day at this practice, preferably after a few minutes of progressive relaxation, visualization or meditation to set the stage.

Biofeedback works best for people whose tension is expressed in bodily complaints such as migraines, hypertension, cardiac arrhythmias, ulcers, chronic intestinal problems, Raynaud's disease and bruxism. It may also benefit those who feel they need outside help in learning to reduce anxiety and internal stress, or who doubt they can do it on their own. A typical biofeedback training program consists of 10 hour-long sessions, often spaced a week apart.

Biofeedback Machine