by Mike Gannon

Created on: June 28, 2009

In this day and age with everything being so fast paced, it's easy to see how everyday stress can bear down on us. It's no wonder that more and more people are seeking better practices to help them relax and biofeedback is a great way to mellow out.

Invented in the 1960's, it has seen a great comeback in recent times, with more complex variations of machines that achieve the same goal: getting you into a clear mind and deep state of relaxation. Biofeedback is essentially a way to teach yourself self-hypnosis by giving you sensory feedback as to whether or not your relaxation techniques are working.

As mentioned in the last paragraph, there are different variations of biofeedback machines, but most rely on the original and simple concept that we warm up as we relax. The machine will read your temperature from one of your fingers and sense slight increases or decreases to gauge your state of relaxation. The looser your muscles become, the more blood flows unimpeded, and this will let the machine know you're becoming more relaxed. The way the machine lets you know you're doing things right is with a beep. Generally, if you're tense and not able to relax yourself, you will hear a fast paced and higher pitched beeping. As you relax the beeping will slow down and decrease in tone until hits far lower frequencies.

That covers the feedback part, but you must wonder how you actually cause yourself to relax. Everybody is different and will have different routines to sink themselves lower into self-hypnosis. My father uses the word "down" a lot in his biofeedback work, and he visualizes himself on a long, almost never ending escalator. When he the escalator ends he gets on another one that goes the same distance. This doesn't work for me, but imagining that I'm in warm sunshine and that my body is a piece of wax that is melting off the bones certainly does the trick. Visualization is a big part of biofeedback and the more you use the machine, the easier it will become.

Unfortunately, you can't use the same visualization over and over (in a sense). During each session, you will hit plateaus and will no longer be able to relax past a certain point. At this time you'll need to change your thinking and visualize something else. Usually when this happens I start thinking that I've melted completely and that I'm now vaporizing and floating away. The beeps will tell you when you've started to relax again and will continue to get lower and slower until the

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