Approximately one in six adults in the United States suffers from migraines. Finding the right treatment can be challenging, especially if you are unfamiliar with your triggers. While most migraine treatments involve medications and lifestyle changes, there are also cutting-edge options that can improve your quality of life with computer-assisted technologies. These modalities offer proactive solutions and permanent changes for migraine sufferers with potential minimal side effects.
At Integrative Mind and Body Services, we are pleased to offer our clients Biofeedback and Neurofeedback therapies, which are designed to help migraine sufferers find lasting relief from this debilitating condition.
What Is Biofeedback?
Biofeedback therapy is a treatment that teaches you to control certain automatic body functions, such as your heart rate, breathing, perspiration, muscle tension, and other bodily processes. It helps you enhance your ability to voluntarily manage processes once thought to be involuntary. As you develop greater awareness of your physiological functions, you will learn to regulate them better, potentially interrupting a migraine before it starts.
What Devices Are Used During Biofeedback Therapy?
Several biofeedback devices are used to monitor various body functions that may change before migraine development. Usually, an electromyogram device monitors and observes muscle and skeletal tension. Electrodes are placed along three muscles across the upper body that usually tense up before a migraine attack. These muscles include:
- Masseter: The muscle located along the jaw
- Frontalis: The muscle along your forehead
- Trapezius: The muscle across your shoulders
During Biofeedback therapy, two electrodes are placed along the targeted muscle while the third is placed on an unrelated spot on your body as a reference point. During Biofeedback therapy, these sensors send information to a computer and record various physiological signals, including:
- Electrical brain activity
- Muscle movement
- Breathing rate
- Sweat
- Heart rate
- Skin temperature
This feedback gives your clinician a clearer picture of what happens to your body when you experience stress. With this information, our therapists suggest ways to make conscious changes to affect these involuntary functions.
How Does Biofeedback Therapy Provide Migraine Relief?
Understanding what happens to your body when you experience stressful or emotional situations is the first step toward learning how to interrupt this process before your migraine develops. Over time, you can learn specific techniques to relax the tension in these muscles and better identify your triggers to stop or decrease the intensity of your migraines.
What Is Neurofeedback?
Neurofeedback therapy is a safe and non-invasive migraine treatment that uses sensors to monitor brainwave activity. This helps you gain valuable feedback that enables you to learn to regulate your brain patterns, enhancing various mental functions such as relaxation and emotional control.
During a Neurofeedback therapy session, a member of our team will attach a series of non-invasive sensors to your scalp to monitor the brainwaves and activity in those regions. These sensors are connected to a computer while you focus on a video, listen to music, or play a game on a monitor. As you focus your attention, the technician monitors your brain activity and analyzes your brainwaves as you attempt to achieve a particular state of mind, such as relaxation or calmness. If you meet your goal, you receive a visual or auditory reward. As you improve at this practice, the brain learns to create new neural pathways over time.
How Does Neurofeedback Therapy Help With Migraines?
Neurofeedback therapy helps you ‘retrain’ your brain to respond in a better way to stressors or triggers that may lead to migraine attacks. This technique allows for improved brain functioning and may reduce the intensity and/or frequency of your migraines by training you to regulate abnormal brainwave patterns that are frequently associated with them. As you learn how to consciously modify your brain activity by understanding real-time biofeedback from the sensors placed on your scalp, you can learn how to create a more stable and balanced state within your brain. Through Neurofeedback therapy, you can:
- Learn how to modulate brainwave activity to achieve a more relaxed state of mind.
- Understand how to manage stress better, which is often a significant trigger for migraines.
- Improve your autonomic nervous system balance, which may become dysregulated during migraines.
Neurofeedback therapy is an effective way to help you become more familiar with how your brain works. As you better understand your brainwave patterns, you can learn how to achieve an ideal state when facing a migraine trigger, potentially stopping it from occurring or decreasing its duration and/or intensity.
The Benefits of Biofeedback and Neurofeedback Therapies Over Other Therapies
While Biofeedback and Neurofeedback therapy may not provide instant relief for migraine sufferers, the insight it offers can be extremely helpful over time. Biofeedback and Neurofeedback therapies are non-invasive, safe, and have minimal potential side effects. Short-term side effects like tiredness, mood changes, or sleep disruptions are sometimes reported following Biofeedback or Neurofeedback sessions.
These treatments help you understand how to gain better control over your health by making conscious changes to affect your physical responses to stress. With this knowledge, you can learn how to identify the physical changes that happen before your migraine and potentially stop them from occurring.
Biofeedback and Neurofeedback therapies may also reduce your need for medications and can be used to complement your existing migraine treatment plan. Reducing or eliminating your need for migraine medications can mean no longer experiencing the side effects of these medications as well.
Additional Considerations Before Using Biofeedback and Neurofeedback Therapies
While Biofeedback and Neurofeedback therapies are safe treatment options with minimal side effects, they are not a cure-all for migraines and may not be appropriate for everyone. Before scheduling Biofeedback or Neurofeedback therapy, there are a few things you should do to prepare:
- Speak with your doctor – Consult your primary care doctor to see if these treatment options are appropriate for you.
- Locate a qualified therapist – Training and certification requirements to practice Biofeedback therapy vary by state. Ensure the practitioner has experience and can provide references and additional insight into each process.
- Consider the cost – You may have to pay out of pocket for these therapies. It’s helpful to understand the cost before beginning treatment. At Integrated Mind and Body Services, we offer scholarships and grants to help cover the cost for those who qualify.
Ready for science-backed migraine treatment? If you’d like to learn more, schedule a completely free consultation.
Start Your Journey to Optimal Health
Ready to take the first step? Book your FREE consultation today and discover how Neurofeedback and Biofeedback Therapy can transform your life.
Fill out the form to be contacted by a member of our staff.