Sleep Disorders Current Topics in Sleep Disorders

Teaching Yourself to Feel Better

Summary & Participants

Can a machine teach you how to help yourself feel better?

Medically Reviewed On: August 04, 2008

Webcast Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Can hooking yourself to a machine actually make you feel better? The answer is no - but what a biofeedback machine can do is teach you how to make yourself feel better. It does this by measuring your biological functions – and helping you learn to control them.

BENJAMIN KLIGLER, MD, MPH: It might be skin temperature, it might be blood pressure, it might be brain waves. And while they're hooked up to that machine, they learn breathing and visualization techniques to help them relax and, in response to that, they get to see a change in the physiological measure that they're monitoring,

ANNOUNCER Watch what happens when the patient tenses his muscles. He learns how to relax those muscles by controlling that beep.

ANDREW ELMORE, PHD: The aim of biofeedback is to make an awareness of what's going on in these parts of your bodies, these aspects of your nervous system

ANNOUNCER: Many conditions are treated with biofeedback, often along with conventional medicine.

ANDREW ELMORE, PHD: Headaches, attention deficit disorder, irritable bowel syndrome, panic disorder, sleep disorders, stress and tension. Any time there's a medical condition that a patient's physician thinks is exacerbated by stress, you know, physiological stress, high blood pressure - it's really a partnership with traditional medicine.

ANNOUNCER: Biofeedback devices can already be found in most households; a thermometer and bathroom scale are two kinds of devices that “feed-back” information about your biological condition - your temperature and your weight. It takes serious commitment to be successful with biofeedback and experts say it can take months to master the techniques. The goal is for the patient eventually to control relaxation responses without the machine.

ANDREW ELMORE, PHD: Once you've learned it, it becomes part of the way you think about what you're doing with yourself

ANNOUNCER: Thanks for joining us on today’s Once Daily.