Anxiety and Biofeedback approaches to tackling stress

[AnneElliot]

Just wondering if anyone has any experience of biofeedback approaches, or something else I can try re my anxiety issues.

Anxiety has always been my achilles heel - suffered badly from phobias in my early 20s, and saw a clinical psychologist. CBT worked well for me at this point.

Then a few years ago, after a serious trauma, I developed PTSD. I did see a psychologist at this point, and did talk about desensitiving therapies, but mainly i htink it was the passing of time that made things better.

A residual sympton (didn't have it before the PTSD) has been physcial signs of anxiety when I'm feeling stressed. These are mainly losing feeling/numbness in my face and pains in my chest. Neither are as bad as they were at the height of the PTSD when the chest pains were bad enough to feel like serious pain, but I was very ill gnerally at that point..

Have been very stressy lately, and wondering if I could something positive to takcle it. After all, after all these years, presumably it won't go away on it's own.

I have just heard about biofeedback approaches to tackling stress. The therapist apparently teaches you to control the phsycial symptons of stress in the body, breaking the adrenalin cyle. I am a big CBT fan, so the idea of a cognitive approach to physical symptons appeals.

Has anyone else tried this?

Hi there.

Have you heard of fight or flight? Our ancient means of coping with danger in all forms. Whilst it's great for coping with tigers (and dinosaurs Racquel Welch...) it's not so great at dealing with the stresses of the modern world.

Stress is not just switched off 'normally'. Often you have to actively switch stress off. Some people exercise, some do Yoga, some swim, do darts, kickbox, chess... What ever it takes that person to do to relax. But there's more to it than just the mechanical process of turning the stress process off, it's what lies beneath it that needs to be resolved.

And to do that you need to resolve the underlying triggers that cause the stress in the first place. Once you have resolved these, then what stressed you once, will not trigger your stress episodes again. It could be a past experience, it could be your current life, it could be a host of things that you need to find answers for. CBT has about a 50% success rate. It works on the here and now - but the reality is that for many people the stress isn't in the here and now, it could be unresolved emotional stress, 'logical stress' at circular thoughts for which your subconscious is constantly searching for answers.

Look beyond the modalities of 'fixing' the problem and go back to basics. Ask yourself what are the triggers causing your stress in the first place, what lies beneath. If you can find that, then the process of fixing them becomes just that - a process.