What is biofeedback?

“Biofeedback is a technique you can use to learn to control your body's functions, such as your heart rate. With biofeedback, you're connected to sensors that help you receive information (feedback) about your body (bio).

This feedback helps you focus on making subtle changes in your body, such as relaxing certain muscles, to achieve the results you want, such as reducing pain, managing anxiety, overcoming a specific phobia and more.

In essence, biofeedback gives you the power to use your thoughts to control your body, often to improve a health condition or physical performance."[Learn more: Mayo Clinic]

Although general relaxation training and mindfulness techniques can be extremely helpful and beneficial, they lack the individualized monitoring and therefore higher treatment success that biofeedback offers. This is because the feedback provided to Dr. Davidson during a biofeedback session is 100% specific to that individual patient and can facilitate in coaching different methods to achieve something called heart rate variability (HRV).

HRV is a state we enter that disables our fight-or-flight responses, making it impossible to experience panic. When we stop fearing panic (or a complete loss of control of our physical state) and begin to think clearer (when our physical state is in control, our cognitive state becomes more rational) we feel less anxiety, less depressed, and more capable of dealing with whatever problems come our way.  This is specifically important when considering the treatment of OCD. Exposure therapy may seem very overwhelming to some (or most), leading to treatment avoidance or previous failures. Providing a specific tool that literally shuts down the fight-or-flight response while engaging in a specific exposure increases the rate of success dramatically and provides patients with a feeling of more control and higher motivation.

common disorders treated with biofeedback: 

Anxiety disorders (OCD, GAD, PTSD, social anxiety, phobias, etc), migraine headaches, tension headaches, muscle spasms, learning disabilities, pain, TMJ, digestive/GI upset, ADHD, etc.

What you should know

Sessions: The average biofeedback session lasts 45 minutes. Patients typically come in 1-3x per week. 

The Process: All new patients will first complete the initial consultation, a 30-minute preliminary conversation between the patient or parent / guardian and Dr. Heather Davidson. The general framework of what biofeedback will look like for that individual patient will be discussed at the initial consultation.

About: Dr. Heather Davidson is a Licensed Psychologist and Board Certified Neurofeedback Provider in both New York State and Virginia. Although she is an expert in Child Psychology, Dr. Davidson works with patients of all ages.