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Biofeedback: Using your mind to improve your health
Biofeedback can help you to use your mind to manage certain medical conditions. Find out which ones, whether it's right for you and how it's done.
By Mayo Clinic staffHave you ever wished you could simply will your symptoms to disappear? With biofeedback you may be able to do just that by harnessing the power of your mind to help improve your health.
Biofeedback defined
Biofeedback is a type of complementary and alternative medicine called mind-body therapy. It's designed to enable you — in mind-over-matter fashion — to use your thoughts and will to control your body. Biofeedback is based on the idea, confirmed by scientific studies, that people have the innate potential to influence with their minds many of the automatic, involuntary functions of their bodies.
To help you develop this ability, a biofeedback specialist uses signals from special monitoring equipment to teach you to control certain body functions and their responses, such as:
- Brain activity
- Blood pressure
- Muscle tension
- Heart rate
- Skin temperature
- Sweat gland activity
You can use biofeedback to help treat many physical and mental health problems when you've learned to recognize and control these functions and responses.
Why it's done
Biofeedback can be particularly useful in treating stress-related conditions, and clinical trials are evaluating it in the treatment of many other conditions, including:
- Asthma
- Headaches
- Hot flashes
- Raynaud's disease
- Irritable bowel syndrome
- Nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy
- Irregular heartbeats (cardiac arrhythmias)
- Chronic low back pain
- Chronic constipation
- High blood pressure
- Incontinence
- Epilepsy
Biofeedback may appeal to you for several reasons:
- It may reduce, or even eliminate, your need for medication.
- It has the potential to help conditions that have not responded to medication.
- It helps put you in charge of your own healing by providing measurable feedback, which allows you to monitor your progress and learning.
- It may decrease your medical costs.
Risks of biofeedback
Biofeedback is generally considered safe. It should generally not be used, however, if you have depression, psychosis, or another major mental health disorder. Biofeedback can potentially interfere with some medications, such as insulin, so patients with diabetes should exercise extra caution. Talk to your doctor to see whether biofeedback therapy is an appropriate treatment for you.
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