How Does Neurofeedback Work and Is It Really Effective?

What Is Neurofeedback?

Neurofeedback uses the power of neuroplasticity to bring balance to the electromagnetic patterns in your brain. It uses real-time displays of brain activity to teach your brain more beneficial patterns. In this way, it helps your brain learn to regulate itself.

How Does Neurofeedback Work?

To understand how neurofeedback works, we have to take a step back and look at how our brain cells, or neurons, work. 

Neural Pathway Formation

The brain is always communicating with the outside world. We’re born with billions of neural connections and the capacity to learn almost anything. As we grow, these connections are either reinforced or not reinforced. 

For example, babies have the capacity to learn any language, but only those languages they’re exposed to get reinforced as neural pathways. That’s why language learning is so much harder as we get older. 

The connections that are reinforced form strong neural pathways that serve as a constant source of information and regulation for us over time. The connections that aren’t reinforced are eventually lost in a process called pruning. In this way, the brain is constantly learning from the outside world, and growing and changing as a result. 

The important thing to remember is that the brain always wants to repair itself, and it always wants to be more efficient and regulated.

Your Brain’s Electromagnetic Patterns

There are different types of neurofeedback, but they’re all designed to train your brain to create more regulated and efficient patterns – and less dysregulated patterns. In fact, certain brainwave patterns are actually associated with specific psychological disorders. 

For example, you may feel like you’re just an anxious person. Your thoughts race and you find it nearly impossible to slow down your mind long enough to relax. It turns out we’re often able to see that specific pattern when we look at an EEG of your brainwaves.

While CT and MRI scans assess the structure of your brain, neurofeedback can assess the functioning of your brain, or how it’s working. The assessment identifies the electrical frequency or pattern that isn’t working properly or efficiently. Then, the system sends that frequency back to your brain, allowing it to “see” the inefficiencies and self-correct. 

Sound confusing? 

Imagine you’re trying to become a better public speaker. You might record yourself delivering a presentation and then watch your performance – looking for specific things that need to be improved. Seeing your own mistakes makes you more able to correct them. This is what neurofeedback does, except it accomplishes this “learning” in a matter of seconds or minutes. 

Some people are born with specific areas of the brain that aren’t working properly. For most people, however, dysregulation happens through the course of everyday life through something we’re all pretty familiar with – stress. 

How Chronic Stress Affects Your Brain

Stress is simply your brain’s response to a demand. Some stress is good. Getting married, starting a new job, or welcoming a child into the family are all exciting and pleasant events, even if they’re mildly stressful.

Other stress may not be pleasant, but is still necessary for survival, like the immediate rush of stress you feel to suddenly escape from danger. How harmful stress is to the body is ultimately determined by how intense it is and how long it lasts. 

Chronic stress isn’t pleasant or beneficial to our survival – and it takes a tremendous toll on our brains over time. But it’s not the feelings of stress itself that harm our brains. Rather, it’s the biochemical processes that occur in our body as a response to chronic stress.