Healingme4me - Yeah, I can understand that. I was looking online to see if I could figure out under what circumstances you shouldn't use them... for example, it looks like if you have issues with low blood pressure, you should avoid, since the heat makes your blood vessels open up a bit more, which reduces the pressure. I'm sorry that you can't use them though!

Ptak Ah, thanks! That's interesting (re: blood vessels) and makes sense then with the sauna.

There's a whole discussion of neurofeedback in the "Alternate Treatments" forum, here: Neurofeedback Therapy

(Though it kind of devolved in to me talking about my current experiences, since I can't find anywhere else to really talk about it!)

The shorter version: Are you familiar with the idea of "brain waves" - like, how we produce slower (delta) waves when we sleep? Neurofeedback involves using sensors on your scalp to detect the types of waves you're producing at different locations (which correlate with different structures in your brain), and then giving you feedback on the computer to make more or less of different types of waves.

It's basically a specialization of "biofeedback" dealing with brainwaves, instead of things like heart rate or skin temperature.

The "rewards" are things like sounds from the computer, or if you're watching a game... you might see a rocket move forward (with sounds) when your brain does what you're trying to train it to do. When your brain doesn't do the right thing, the feedback stops (so no sounds, the rocket may slow down or stop).

It's actually amazingly cool, and I wish it were more well-known and available. I'm working remotely with a cognitive neuroscientist out in California, so I have the equipment at home and hook myself up, and he updates the protocols (i.e. where to put the sensors, what frequencies to reward) each week for me.

From what I've seen - it can help with an amazing amount of stuff. Focus, depression, anxiety, ADD. A really good book, if you're interested, is Seburn Fisher's "Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma: Calming the Fear-Driven Brain" - the beginning was a bit of a slow read (talking about parts of the brain), but as she gets in to describing her work with people, it becomes absolutely fascinating.

I have a long history of failed therapy, including my most recent attempt, which ended pretty badly. So, I'm hoping the NFB will help... And for the first couple weeks, something got better! But, we've been constantly tweaking and trying to figure out how to get it work without overtraining (my brain seems to be sensitive) - so I lost the gains that I made.

If you're curious, I wrote a ton in that other thread!

Hope that made sense... I haven't found a really great way to explain it succinctly yet! Thanks for asking!