Have you ever experienced a sudden panic attack? Or maybe you do your best to cope with chronic, generalized anxiety that never seems to go away. If so, you're not alone - more than 6 million adults in the US go through panic disorder, while 6.8 million live with generalized anxiety. You'll know firsthand that these conditions can be devastating, greatly reducing quality of life. But how do they develop? Well, they find their roots in a nervous system that's been exposed to way too much stress.

We all experience stressors in life, both big ones as well as minor annoyances, that agitate our nervous system. We often take the wrong approaches to deal with this stress, either. To understand how an anxiety disorder develops, visualize a glass of water. This glass of water represents your nervous system. Each stressor adds a bit more water to the cup. Tough time at work? More water's added. Constant muscle tension and poor breathing patterns? Add more water. Poor sleep and eating habits? More water. You can see where this is going. Eventually, only a minor stressor is required to make the cup overflow - when it does, nervous system has become overly stimulated, and you're suddenly experiencing panic attacks, generalized anxiety, or even both. We need to bring that water level down. While it's impossible to live a life without stress, we can change our responses to stress.

One way to do this is through proper breathing. Your first thought might be, "That sounds too simple, and my problem is complex!" But remember: your body doesn't necessarily understand what's causing you stress - it's not thinking on a complex level like you are. It doesn't "understand" you're having difficulties at work, but only the physiological responses to stress - for example, rapid, shallow breathing and uptight muscles. To illustrate, try slowly breathing from your diaphragm. Loosen your shoulders, let go of tension. You may instantly notice a wave of relaxation, however small. it is. We're now speaking to your body in a language it understands. For more in-depth breathing techniques, check out this page "Try These Two Natural Ways to Control Anxiety."

How Sleep Affects Your Brain

Sleep doesn't always get the appreciation it deserves, but it's incredibly important for your overall health and wellbeing. A regular good night's sleep not only helps you concentrate and get things done but can also keep your immune system operating at peak efficiency and guard against illness.

Poor sleep, on the other hand, is linked to brain fog, difficulty focusing, depression and more. One study (Mann et al., 2021) even found that ADHD has a strong link with poor sleep. The link with ADHD makes sense because proper, reparative sleep is vital in solidifying memories and helping you retain the information you learned during the daytime. If we can improve sleeping habits, then, we can help alleviate the symptoms of depression, ADHD, and other conditions, too.

This is one reason why we put so much emphasis on sleep here at Elite Physiology. The other is that our favored approaches of bio- and neurofeedback are based on teaching your mind and body to behave a different way -as stated, sleep is vital when it comes to the ability to learn. The first step for almost every client who comes through our doors is improving sleep, which helps build that foundation for learning.

These days, it may seem like everyone has ADHD. That's actually not far from the truth, as numbers have been steadily rising over the past 20 years or so. In fact, an old measurement used to diagnosed ADHD is no longer valid since so much of the population fits that criteria (Arns et al., 2013)! We don't know exactly why there's been such a large increase in ADHD and ADHD-type symptoms. We can narrow down the potential causes, however, by looking at how people's lives have changed over the past 20-30 years. More screen time is the first thing to come to mind. As a result of constant phone or computer use, the brain needs more and more stimulation to keep it focused. Blue light can interfere with sleep, too, and poor sleep is another factor that worsens ADHD. Diet is most likely another culprit behind rising ADHD rates.

Addressing all of these things can help, but the brain of a person with ADHD or ADHD-type symptoms has gotten "stuck" in these kind of patterns. We need to help it shift gears, and a more permanent way of doing that is through the techniques neurofeedback.

Through state of the art technology, neurofeedback can monitor a person's brain activity and see what is causing those symptoms on a neurological level. For instance, ADHD is often associated with slow, daydreamy-type brain waves that move over the area of the brain used for problem solving. This is why people with the condition may often seem tired or "in another place." Medication can help address these brainwaves, but that's only a temporary solution - once the person stops taking it, the problem will just return. Furthermore, many people simply don't want to take medication!

Let's Talk About Headaches

Headaches can really ruin your day, and the various types seem do that in different ways: tension headaches, for instance, add stress to stress, making you feel even more worn out than you already were. Migraines, on the other hand, create a pulsating pain in one or more regions of your head and may have you feeling dizzy or even nauseous. The causes of each type may be different for each person. All you know for sure is that you want them to go away. Making headaches go away is exactly what we're going to focus on in this post. Below, we'll focus on the most common types of headaches, which are tension headaches and migraines.

Consider - there are at least two things that every highly-successful person has in common. First, they're motivated to succeed. Second, they have the ability to concentrate on the task at hand. Makes sense, right? Without motivation the person would never get started on doing what they want to do, and without the ability to hyper-focus on it they'd never get it done.

This simple fact probably has you asking, "How can I boost my motivation and concentration levels?" Well, we usually think of things like "motivation" or "concentration" as mysterious intangibles, something some people just while others don't. That's wrong. Neither motivation nor concentration are intangibles - they each have a biological basis in the brain in the form of physical, electrical pulses. Additionally, not everyone who is highly motivated and can hyper-focus on projects has always been that way. We know, because we've seen for ourselves the transformation that can take place when someone works on the biological source of these attributes - the brain.

At the Center of it All Lies the Brain

Let's talk about the brain for a second. It doesn't get enough credit! Our society often blames a person for their inability to concentrate, or their lethargy, or their difficulty in moving from one task to the next. These things are talked about like they're some kind of character flaw. Really, though they're all based in the brain. Would you say the way a person's brain behaves is that person's fault? Certainly not. If the brain is the source of these issues, can we somehow change the way the brain works, coaxing it in the desired direction? Thanks to modern imaging technology, the answer is yes. The Trifecta: Neurofeedback, Biofeedback, and Neurostimulation….

Mental and psychological problems are very difficult for those who experience them - that much is obvious.

What causes them to occur, however, isn't always obvious.

We know, at least, that they come from the brain and the mind. This is why those who want to help sufferers live better lives ask:

"How can we understand a person's mind?"

Traditional psychology answers this question with "written tests and assessments". They offer personality and behavior evaluations, clinical interviews, IQ tests, and even career or work planning tests.

Each test is useless on its own - the idea is that they all come together to provide a complete picture of a person's mental situation, which is why they have to take all of them.

The stumbling block is that each of these tests along with the interview can take 1-2 hours a piece. This means a person is sitting there in the office for something like 8 hours, not to mention they need to spend thousands of dollars for this service.

For all that time and money, there seems to be one very important thing these psychological evaluations are missing: the brain!

It's so obvious.

Kids are very crafty. They may struggle with one area of their brain, but they figure out ways to work around it. For example, if a child has too much slow day dreamy waves around the front of the head, this can present as tuning out. It is a drowsy state that the child will use movement to re alert them. This keeps their brain more awake and actually easier for them to take in information. We see this as fidgeting and being distracted, when actually they are trying to stay on task the best way they know how. A company created the fidget for this reason. It is a great tool for kids, or adults, to play with while staying on task. A more long term approach could be doing neurofeedback training to help the child rewire their neurons to be able to be more alert on their own, without having to use external methods. This particular presentation is often diagnosed as ADHD as you have likely already guessed.

At Elite Physiology we aren’t in the business of diagnosing or treating people, but seeing what patterns are going on in the brain and helping that person more permanently change those patterns to ones that work for them.

How Anxiety Affects Your Life

All of us are capable of living the life that we have always wanted. We have our own strengths and superpowers and it is up to us to discover and use them in order to be the best version of ourselves.

However, some of us are prevented because of anxiety. Anxiety can be uncomfortable and can sneak into anyone's life in a variety of forms. When it is only once in a while, we can handle it. But sometimes, it becomes too much, resulting in feelings of discomfort, uneasiness, or stress.

Even if being anxious is a natural feeling or state, it can impact your life greatly if it worsens. When you feel anxiety over something, it becomes difficult for you to relax, you become stressed out, and you feel as if you cannot do or achieve whatever it is that you desire.

So, if your anxiety has been affecting your life, you have to know how to control it so that you can live a happy and meaningful life.

Neurofeedback is a relatively new technique in the world of mental health that's been making waves - in fact, we wouldn't be surprised if you've come across the term once or twice before.

But why is it such a big deal? Well, for one, neurofeedback works: it can help the brain recover from problematic conditions and behaviors. Yes, we're here to reassure you that there is hope, even for the most recalcitrant of disorders. Never give up!

Secondly, neurofeedback does this without any prescription drug use whatsoever. This is something parents worried about the effects medications such as Ritalin could have on their children are happy to hear.

It goes without saying that the human brain is an incredible organ - after all, it's at the center of what makes us human! The amazing human brain allows us to reason, learn, tell jokes, create stories and music, and communicate and receive complex information through speech or the written word.

The brain also filters our experience of the world around us. Think about that for a minute: everything you see around you, every reaction to every experience you go through, is regulated and communicated by the brain.