For the past eight years, my life between midnight and 8 a.m. has been an excruciating stream of intensely vivid nightmares and sheet-soaking night sweats. I?ve sought out neurologists, psychiatrists, and acupuncturists, and have undergone sleep studies, unloaded my deepest fears in therapy, and popped any sleep aid a doctor would give me.
Fed up with costly medications, nasty side effects, and no success, I was ready to give up on a good night?s sleep and simply accept the few choppy, interrupted hours I was getting per night—until I heard about biofeedback from a friend.
This mind-body therapy, introduced in the 1960s, helps you tune in to body signals (heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension, skin tem�perature), and then teaches you to control the ones that may contribute to insomnia (or panic attacks, migraines, and other problems). You learn to work with your body, not against it, and studies show it can be effective. I thought it was worth a try.
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How it works
A child learning to wink by looking in the mirror is using biofeedback, says psychophysiologist L. John Mason, PhD, founder of Stress Education Center in Oak Harbor, Washington. After practicing, she sees the way it?s done and eventually can do it without the mirror.
Now imagine that, rather than a mirror, you?re looking at a computer monitor with two undulating lines; one tracks your current breathing pattern (via soft straps around your chest and tummy), while the other shows what breathing at a relaxation-inducing pace looks like. By consciously trying to match up the two lines—in short, by breathing deeper and slower—you?re applying basic biofeedback principles. The payoff: a way to quickly decelerate your heart rate and calm down.
