This Is How To Better Your Brain With DIY Biofeedback

You know that your brain controls your body, but did you also know that your body controls your brain?

It’s a feedback loop that works both ways.

The activity in your brain changes every second based on what your body is doing – a process called biofeedback. You may have heard of it and thought that biofeedback required specific equipment, like a finger heart rate monitor or a software application. While technology can make measuring sometimes small bodily changes easier, it’s not necessary. You can alter your brain’s function with conscious biofeedback simply by paying attention. Doing this can have a positive impact on your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and stress levels.

Your brain is perfectly capable of noticing and managing what’s going on with your body — heart rate, breathing, muscle tension, sweating — and in fact, it does all the time anyway subconsciously. You just don’t usually pay attention to it. To practice conscious biofeedback, you just have to become aware of it.

How Biofeedback Works

Your brain is constantly receiving signals from the rest of your body informing it of your environment and instructing it how to think and feel. Information coming from your senses first gets interpreted by your brain as emotion, and then your brain adds its own subjective “special sauce” to produce feelings.

In his book, The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time, Alex Korb, Ph.D. and neuroscientist, explains it this way:

These types of signals are like your car’s check engine light — alerting you that something is happening, but not being very helpful in telling you what. Calmly doing a self assessment of your feelings can help distinguish the signals.”

The neural signals for your heart rate, breathing, digestion and other bodily functions are carried by the vagus nerve which runs through the entirety of your upper body ending in your brain where the signals are given meaning. Many physical sensations, like a queasy stomach, tight muscles, or miscellaneous aches and pains, have an emotional component which your brain may be correctly or incorrectly adding on. It’s up to you to interpret and influence the physical sensations coming into your brain. For example, a gnawing feeling in your stomach could mean that you’re hungry or it could mean you’re feeling anxious about a meeting later that day.

Unknowingly, people tend to automatically generate many types of negative biofeedback, especially in the case of depression. For example, frowning or scowling expressions and timid or withdrawn postures in your body increase negative feelings in your brain. Studies have shown that people with depression have greater muscle tension which increases anxiety and lowers heart rate variability reinforcing the depressive state.

Heart-Rate Variability

Heart rate variability (HRV) is the change in the time interval between heartbeats and is directly correlated to a person’s health. HRV is regulated by the autonomic nervous system which is made up of your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), the calming brakes of your nervous system, and the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), the gas pedal of your nervous system. Every time you exhale, information travels along your vagus nerve causing your heart rate to slow down, increasing your HRV. SNS activity increases your heart rate which decreases HRV.

When a person is depressed, they have less activity in their vagus nerve, which means their heart doesn’t change speeds as much, instead remaining steady. Studies have even shown that people with reduced HRV, indicating low vagal tone, are more susceptible to depression. This is such a significant effect that one treatment for stubborn depression is electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve.

HRV is affected by many factors including aerobic fitness, age, genetics, body position, time of day, and health status. During exercise, HRV decreases as heart rate increases. Generally, increased HRV with longer intervals is found in a well-conditioned heart at rest. Your heart rate and vagus nerve are intimately tied to the your bodily functions and emotional and mental states. I’m sure you can think of times when your heart raced with excitement or “missed a beat” in surprise.

HRV Patterns Matter

However, HRV patterns are much more significant than simply their rates. In states of stress, anxiety, anger, and sadness the pattern variation tends to be disordered and chaotic. In positive emotional states such as love and gratitude, the variation tends to be ordered and rhythmic. This state of rhythmic variation is known as coherence and is highly beneficial and healthy for your mind and body.

On the HeartMath Institute’s website, the “Article Explains Importance of Heart Rate Variability for Your Health,” says:

‘An optimal level of HRV within an organism reflects healthy function and an inherent self-regulatory capacity, adaptability, or resilience,’ McCraty and Shaffer write.

Although generally the greater the HRV, the better, they note that too much variability, or instability ‘such as arrhythmias or nervous system chaos is detrimental to efficient physiological functioning and energy utilization… ‘Too little variation indicates age-related system depletion, chronic stress, pathology, or inadequate functioning in various levels of self-regulatory control systems.’

Many studies have correlated learning to regulate HRV or achieving greater HRV coherence with physical and emotional health benefits including: enhanced cognitive function and memory, reduced cortisol levels, anxiety, and blood pressure, and increased mood and physical stability.

Biofeedback DIY

In HRV biofeedback training using equipment, a computer would analyze your heart rate and respiration, usually via a finger monitor to measure coherence. This information is fed back to the person training in real-time, so that they can learn how to alter coherence. Nowadays, most phones and watches will monitor these for you in real time. There are systems available for you to learn how to do this on your own, and with practice, most people can easily learn to engage in slow, effortless diaphragmatic breathing at a rate that will synchronize breathing with their natural heart rhythms to put them into a state of heart coherence.

When healing from a brain injury, I learned how to do this in neurofeedback therapy and even bought a home device for my son to learn how to calm himself. But you don’t need equipment. You can use your body to alter your brain or to stimulate your vagus nerve. You just have to become aware of and influence your body through your own intentional actions. Some ways to do this are:

Splash cold water on your face

Rinsing your face with cold water stimulates your vagus nerve. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or anxious try filling a sink with cool water and splashing your face.

Use the power of music

Music has been shown to increase HRV.  While just listening to music works, making music has been shown to have an even greater positive effect. Music engages most of your limbic system which largely governs emotions.

Smile

It’s a simple thing to do and really can improve your mood. Even a fake smile causes your brain to release dopamine. Think of a fun time, a silly situation, or your favorite joke. There’s not much difference in your brain between provoked and spontaneous smiling.

Stand up straight

Studies have shown that standing up straight in a more confident posture makes you feel more decisive and confident in your own thoughts and beliefs. A confident posture also proved to be correlated with being more optimistic. Posture is an important source of feedback not only for your brain but for those around you. A confident posture makes others more confident in you. One study even showed that standing up straighter increases energy while slouching decreases energy levels. Sitting up straight has similar effects.

Calm your face

There’s a muscle in the middle of your forehead in between your eyebrows. In the same way your brain thinks you’re happy when you smile, if your brow is furrowed and this muscle is tense, your brain interprets it as you being worried or upset. On bright days, wearing sunglasses will reduce squinting and relax this muscle, making your brain feel calmer.

Relax your jaw and tongue

When stressed, you tend to clench your teeth and tense your tongue. Consciously loosen your jaw, wiggle it around, and open your mouth. Make it a point to relax your tongue which also calms your mind.

Change your breathing

Taking long, deep breaths into your tummy, slows your heart rate and activates the calming, parasympathetic nervous system. Place your hand on your diaphragm, the center of your stomach a couple of inches below your lungs, and take slow, full breaths counting to six making your hand move in and out with each inhale and exhale. Even better – Get a device and learn how to consciously alter your HRV. After you get the hang of it, you can practice diaphragmatic breathing anywhere without using anything. Conversely, you can breathe faster to generate more energy.

Clench and relax

Sometimes it’s actually helpful to clench your muscles and relax them to fully know the difference. Take a deep breath and intentionally flex a tense muscle for a few seconds. After holding it, exhale and relax the muscle. The most important muscles to relax are in your face, but don’t forget your hands, neck, butt, back, and stomach.

Third image source of smiling woman: Photo by Kim Carpenter on Unsplash