Changing Your Brain Can Change Your Mind

An individualized approach to neurofeedback may finally make it a valued treatment for mental health conditions.

Photo by Михаил Крамор / Pexels

Almost a quarter of adults in America are living with a mental health condition, which, on average, lead to more lost days of work, more dysfunction, and lower income than do physical ailments. For decades, talk therapies or medications have been the leading treatments for mental health conditions, with other approaches being labeled “alternative.”

But talk therapies tend to require hours of investment, work slowly, and are highly reliant on how good a match there is between patient and therapist. Medications have the potential for side effects, sometimes serious, and often only treat a limited range of symptoms, leaving others untreated. It’s not surprising that people seek out alternatives.

One such alternative, neurofeedback, involves:

• recording an aspect of an individual’s brain activity,
• displaying some distillation of the activity back to the individual,
• in close to real time,
• usually in the form of computer graphics,
• and then training the individual to change the computer screen image