Biofeedback?

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I am “socially” diagnosed with Aspergers (my psychologist, as well as parents and close friends/brother have all determined this, as well as myself, since I exhibit every symptom just about) and self-diagnosed with inattentive add, and while my symptoms can be debilitating at times, I want to treat the inattentive add without medication if possible. This view has led me to biofeedback. Has anyone here tried using biofeedback for a reasonable amount of time? How well did it work out for you? Did it help concentration, or in other unexpected ways? Thank you.

I've never had it done but it always seemed like pseudoscience to me. I think it possibly might help someone with epilepsy but I can't see how it would help social skills in someone with autism. For autism, I think that any help for someone with autism is just a placebo.

I believe that I have practiced a different kind of biofeedback; to control physical pain. I never was able to use it to cure or treat any emotional/mental nor physical illnesses, though.

To try to explain; I can "decide" that something painful doesn't hurt. And then it actually won't hurt. Probably the first time I did that was when I was 18 or 19, and I smashed my finger so badly that a bone splinter was sticking out through my kunckle . I was embarrassed, and among strangers, and I just somehow decided that it wouldn't kill me, and that I'd think about my other body parts that weren't hurt. I won't say that I stopped feeling the pain from the wind blowing on that bone splinter, but it went from crippling to tolerable, and after a few minutes, it actually came under control, and I finished what I was doing and then drove myself back to Los Angeles to a familiar hospital to get it worked on. And now that I was diagnosed with a hormone problem, I need to give myself injections every other day, and a big one in the buttocks every week with a huge needle. I don't even feel them, and I know that some people reading this might say I'm "just used to it", but the truth is I don't feel it. I guess I programmed my brain to bypass the pain sensations from the needles, or something like that.

In other cases, some of my friends have called me "Rambo" because I've given myself stitches for bad cuts, and I've had to "operate" on my own toe when I got an abscess under the nail after clobbering it. I've also had minor abdominal surgery in the hospital withOUT general anesthesia, and that was the only time my doctor did that, out of 15 years in practice, he said. I was fine with it. They did give me about 50 shots of local anesthetic before making the incisions, but honestly the whole thing didn't bother me, with or without the local. It only numbed part of the operation.

So that's my take on biofeedback.

Charles

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt165333.html

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I've not had biofeedback, but I'm a meditator. Same thing, but without the gadgets to tell you what's going on. You have to be your own biofeedback monitor.

Biofeedback can be useful, but it's not a magic bullet. It may be marginally helpful for ADHD, but I don't think that it's ideal for ADHD treatment.

What it probably works better for is things like anxiety disorders. In the case of an anxiety disorder, if you can learn to relax your muscles, slow your breathing and perhaps your heart rate, then you can get rid of some of the constant physical fight-or-flight that's so characteristic of these disorders.

ADHD... well, you may be able to learn to concentrate better, somewhat, through biofeedback; but that won't stop it from being a heck of a lot of work, and the question is how long you can keep it up. If you have ADHD-I, you know that keeping your focus on one thing is a very difficult thing to do unless that thing is very engaging, in which case it's near impossible to get your focus away from it.

I think the better strategy for ADHD-I is to learn useful skills, to put supports in place in your daily life that will allow you to keep yourself better organized. For example, you could get lessons on how to use a planner, or how to break a task down into its component parts so that it's no longer overwhelming. You could change your environment to remove distractions. If you're in school, you could make arrangements to record lectures, copy someone else's notes after class, or take your tests in a quiet room with no distractions.

All of these things can be used with or without medication. Personally, I thought for a long time that medication would not be helpful; I eventually learned that I needed a lower dose and extended-release to avoid the problems associated with taking the dose all at once. It's not something that should automatically be rejected as a possible help. If you take medication, though, it won't magically teach you all those skills you've been too distracted to learn thus far. You will still need to learn them, though it will probably be easier.

As far as non-prescription options go, caffeine is generally helpful to many people with ADHD, and I used it to self-medicate before I started on Concerta. The trick is to drink your coffee slowly, over time, rather than to gulp it all down at once, and to stop drinking caffeine for weekends so you don't build up a tolerance (if you do, you start to get less of an effect for the same amount of caffeine). Caffeine is quite safe. If you don't like coffee, you can take caffeine pills; they have the same effect, though I find them much less tasty! For me, Concerta feels a lot like coffee, only without the physical jitteriness--it lets me focus better and put out a little more effort. But without all the external support, the environments and all the organizational strategies, Concerta wouldn't help me that much. What it does is just kind of give me an edge that lets me use what I know more effectively.

Biofeedback is a method to help people deal with stress by training them to recognize it. Biofeedback isn't intended for ADHD or ADD. It can help deal with stress associated with the symptoms by not the symptoms themselves.

I am going to a biofeedback program this upcoming fall. I cannot recognize when I am stressed so it builds up until I cannot control it, and I break down. Biofeedback, I heard, helps people a lot with stress.

This sounds like something I did for myself and it made me a better person and it's like it re wired my brain.