Concussion Rates Rising in the U.S., Especially Among Adolescents

concussionThe number of Americans diagnosed with concussions is growing, most significantly in adolescents, according to researchers at UC San Francisco. The findings appear online August 16, 2016, in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine.

The article explains that “concussions are a form of mild traumatic brain injury resulting in transient functional and biochemical changes in the brain. They can lead to time lost from sports, work and school, as well as significant medical costs”. But the way that the medical world addresses concussions is often not effective from what my clients have told me. They often feel like they are walking around wounded and having to find coping mechanisms at best, rather than healing the core trauma.

This study looked at a large cross-section of the population in the U.S. and they were amazed to see an increase in concussion rates over the past years, mainly in adolescents between 10 and 19.

Link to article in Science Daily

If you know anyone who have had a head injury and they are suffering with symptoms that have not been resolved, please have them contact me.  I have been working in the trauma resolution field since 1985 and am using NeurOptimal® Neurofeedback with amazing success with this population.  We never push the brain as other forms of neurofeedback do, but are able to show the brain its dysfunctional activity and our brains are able to renormalize themselves for improve functionality.  Neuroplasticity folks!

I have had countless individuals over the last decade who have come to me in despair because they could not function in their life, and after sessions are so relieved that their abilities return.  Our brains are capable to renormalizing themselves if we know how to communicate with them.  And NeurOptimal does know how!  Please pass it on to someone who is suffering.  We will explain it all to them.

Neurofeedback Discussion

My journey started 16 years ago when I began to research the neurofeedback (NF) field. Given my training and experience, I felt that NF could possibly be a modality that could non-invasively help get under protective mechanisms that slow or prevent trauma resolution.  What I discovered over the past decade of using NF with my clients is that it improves overall resilience, no matter the symptom.   Surprisingly, resilience improves even with the more intense cases and generally stabilizes folks more rapidly than I could have anticipated.  This led me into deeper study of the science behind these results.

Dr. Barry Sterman’s work with monkeys and cats for NASA in the 1960’s is most impressive.  He was essentially able to reduce or stop seizure activity with neurofeedback. From here, the field went in many different directions.  I recommend you read Jim Robbins “Wired for Miracles” article for more good overview information on the traditional neurofeedback field. “Wired for Miracles” article link 

Almost 6 decades forward, the NF field has matured, having developed around the allopathic or medical model, a protocol driven process, based on QEEG (brain mapping) for the most part, and what is called the migrate and entrainment approach. A practitioner using traditional NF with years of experience can be of great assistance to their client with problems such as PTSD, anxiety, sleep disorders, ADHD, and many others. There are a number of good clinicians in Boulder and surrounding area that I have referred to when clients request the brain mapping approach, as they often call it.  I refer to it as the traditional NF approach, which depends on side effects as part of the protocol process.

I was never attracted to this approach personally or professionally. Having worked with trauma clients since the mid-1980s, I knew first hand that there is a good percentage of those clients who will disimprove with any protocol that pushes change toward the ‘norm’. This is well known now in the field of seasoned clinicians.

When I met Drs. Valdeane and Susan Cheshire-Brown, both neuropsychologists with a long history in neurofeedback and biofeedback, I discovered that there was another way to provide feedback to the CNS.   This choice was non-invasive, didn’t depend on side effects or protocols nor require years of experience for the practitioner and used another physics paradigm. I myself have trained in non-linear, biologically-based trauma resolution approaches since 1979. My training demonstrated to me that the CNS was capable of healing or advancing itself. This required knowing how to communicate and reflect back to it, in its own language. My experience and preference tells me we don’t have to tell it what we think it needs. Especially if that notion is based on a picture in the past.

Dr. Valdeane Brown has owned, operated, was certified and taught virtually every piece of NF equipment available today. Additionally, his work has added another dimension to the NF field. From what I have found, he is the most math driven professional in this field, and neurofeedback is all about the math.

His organization, Zengar Institute, developed the NF system called NeurOptimal®. It utilizes a distinct physics paradigm.  This paradigm is based on these concepts:

  • Encouraging healthy chaos
  • Evoking the inherent biological survival capabilities of the CNS
  • The CNS is primarily an energy conserving system
  • The CNS’s ability to learn and adapt (re-normalize in non-linear physics terms) is inherent and instinctive, and needs no cognitive participation.
  • Mirroring back to the brain when it is generating *perturbation

(*non-linear physics term; an energetic event that signals that the CNS is about to generate a phase shift, or also called state change in non-linear physics)

  • Evoking the Orienting Response returns the CNS to the present moment and encourages Hippocampal dominance (peripheral awareness or relaxation)
  • The CNS is holographic (see Dr. Karl Pribrams work on the Holonomic Brain and thus a unified, distributed system. “Working locally” from the non-linear POV is not possible (called site specific or hyper-localized treatment)

Frankly, to compare traditional NF to NeurOptimal® is a little like comparing binary computing to quantum computing.

NeurOptimal is training, not treatment. It is brain training and grandfathered in by the FDA as relaxation training.  So traditional neurofeedback and NeurOptimal each have their unique functions and characteristics, but are two different scientific paradigms and entirely different in their goals and method.  NeurOptimal monitors the entire brainwave spectrum simultaneously, moment to moment. Conventional NF targets specific frequencies within the spectrum and often throws out 96% of the signal (the difference between Shannon and Gabor processing).

Each approach is unique unto itself and each can be very effective, but are particular in their way of working.  The Traditional NF demands a clinician with years of experience because they have to use the side effects to discover the thresholds or parameters within which to work for each client.

NeurOptimal requires no such experience on the part of the clinician, because the genius is in the software which simply mirrors back to the brain its own energy expenditure in micro-volts; no more and no less. It reflects back to the brain what is just did. It is the perturbation event that evokes the Orienting Response, which then returns the CNS back to the present. It takes lots of energy to sustain suffering and the CNS is an energy conserving system and can learn from itself.  Our brain has evolved to be jealous of energy expenditures.

In Traditional NF, the clinician is the operator. In Zengar’s NeurOptimal, the modern computer, with its incredible capability, does that function. In my personal and professional experience, my NeurOptimal unit is a much more precise and responsive operator than I could be. I used to be the operator until auto-navigation was introduced a few years ago.   This is why I can confidently use it in my private practice.

My knowledge of the CNS required that non-aggressivity or non-interference in the organism’s insitinctual biological process was to be my first criteria, from the very beginning of my research. Furthermore, NeurOptimal does not arouse side effects.

This is why so many therapists are drawn to NeurOptimal. It is effective, affordable, the Zengar Institute offers wonderful customer service and support and the work can be done by non-licensed trainers. It does not require one to be an expert to help those who are suffering and never pushes their process. It simply provides information which the CNS uses or not, based on its inherent intelligence. Better said, its instinct to adapt makes the choices.

I am happy to speak with anyone and share what I know. I am passionate about reducing suffering non-invasively and dong it in a training, non-medical way.

David Delaney, MA, CAR, LPC has been working in private practice since 1985 in the area of trauma resolution and is an international Representative for Zengar Institute, Inc. and NeurOptimal® Neurofeedback Brain Training Systems. 

Dalai Lama and neurofeedback brain training

Dalai Lamaown-2

Here is an interesting article about the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism.  He is a very progressive individual and has always been interested in the intersection between physics and spirituality.  He changed my point of view many years ago when he was asked if operating on an individual was beneficial.  His answer had a big impact on my thinking.  He said that anything that helped an individual live longer so that they could improve their spiritual development, was beneficial.

He continues to demonstrate his open mindedness by embracing neurofeedback, a method for helping the human brain find calm and relaxation in the presence of our intense, technological culture.

Valdeane Brown, Ph.D.,  meditator and martial artist, developed NeurOptimal® Neurofeedback on the Buddhist principles of emptiness and returning to the present moment, and modern non-linear physics.  The other reason I was attracted to using this with my clients who were suffering is that it is completely non-aggressive in how it works with the brain, never manipulating, but simply mirroring back to it its own activity, and the brain renormalizes itself based on instinct. The results are  improved resilience in life, optimal performance, being in the flow without having to try hard to do it and an ability to return to the present when upset, anxious, or depressed.

Neurofeedback has gone main stream because of results that clients experience.

This Newsweek article (see link below) reminds me how much the neurofeedback field is growing as people seek relief from conditions that cause them real suffering and interfere in living a good life.  It is growing because it is effective!

Man receiving NeurOptimal Brain Training session at Bulletproof conference in California (see article link)

Man receiving NeurOptimal Brain Training session at Bulletproof conference in California (see article link)

After using NeurOptimal® Neurofeedback in my clinical practice as a psychotherapist for nearly a decade, I can say that I have seen results that seem impossible to believe.  I have seen, for example, dramatic change in  Russian and Chinese adoptees, children who were raised in orphanages and lacked the constant love and bonding that only a parent or committed caregiver can provide. They are unable to regulate their behavior, reduce their anxiety, or bond well and this cause much pain an suffering the their adopted families.  These children showed miraculous change in that they can actually make eye contact, seek love, and self-regulate when upset- whereas prior to the training could not.  And many had been to lots of therapists previously with only minor results, if at all.

The amazing thing with NeurOptimal neurofeedback, a paradigm shift in technology in the field of neurofeedback, is that no matter what suffering you come in seeking help with (be it anxiety or depression or poor focus or hyperactivity) most people are relieved to discover that they have not spent their hard earned dollars in vain.  Because the brain is an energy conserving, self-organizing system, it is capable of re-normalizing itself  without any decision making on the part of the trainer By monitoring and mirroring back to the brain (Central Nervous System) its own energy expenditure, the brain improves its own resilience because it has evolved to do so.  Resilience is the key to living well or not in this technological, fast paced society.

Re-normalizing is a physics term that relates to the field of neuroplasticity, that the brain can advance its own agenda which is always toward survival: meeting challenges and solving problems.  It is actually more that just survival, but thriving well and adaptably in a very complex world.  This is what we see in hundreds of clients, whether they come into the office or rent a machine for home use or purchase their own.  To give you a sense of the effectiveness of NeurOptimal, see the 2014 NeurOptimal Survey across more than 3 millions hours of training time.

Let us know if we can answer your questions or concerns.  That is our job as Representatives for NeurOptimal® Systems.

 

Newsweek article on Neurofeedback LINK

NeurOptimal Video Testimonials from Clients

Link to videoNew Logo

Being able to challenge our brain in a completely non-aggressive, non-invasive manner is the key to improving its resiliency. This is our new Quantum Reality.  Stress is not going away, but we can train our brain to recognize its own dysfunctional habits that cause us suffering. We know that it can recalibrate itself, called neuro-adaptability. Our brain wants to function efficiently and in the most energy conserving way possible moment to moment. But when it is carrying unresolved traumatic stress from the past, it becomes overwhelmed and loses its capacity to self-regulate to a degree, while driving behaviors that we do not control.  Showing it what it just did, the state change it is about to produce, is enough for it to return to the present moment and drop the suffering event it is about to generate.  This state change is called a perturbation event in non-linear physics; the root is perturb; you are about to become perturbed.

See what these clients have to say about their personal experience with NeurOptimal Neurofeedback brain training.  Put your skepticism aside for a moment, and listen to what these folks have to tell us.  No side effects, no telling the brain what we thinks it needs, not diagnosing; just sit back, hook yourself up with the sensors that read 96% of the electrical changes throughout the entire nervous system, and let your brain do what it has inherently evolved to do.  You can improve its capability of solving problems and meeting challenges in a calm and tranquil manner versus our fight/flight approach to life.  Listen to what they have to say!

Chemo Brain: there is help.

chemo brain

 

Jean Alvarez, E.D., is a colleague and a fellow Master NeurOptimal® Neurofeedback Trainer who sees clients in Cincinnati, Ohio.  She herself is a survivor of cancer and here she shares her struggles with the negative after-effects of Chemical treatments for cancer, called chemo brain, and how she overcame it with NeurOptimal brain training. 

 

Chemo Brain

Chemo brain is a common term used by cancer survivors to describe thinking and memory problems that can occur after cancer treatment. Chemo brain can also be called chemo fog, chemotherapy-related cognitive impairment or cognitive dysfunction.

NeurOptimal brain training helps the individual’s brain recover from the overwhelming effect of medicines  in the person’s body.  Hear what Jean has to say about her own experience.  She presented research on this at the 2014 NeurOptimal Research Conference in Palm Springs and it is important work that she is offering as well as personal insight into the devastating experience of not being able to function well after cancer treatment.

Negative effects on your brain with bedtime smartphone viewing.

Dr. Dan Segal discusses (below) the negative consequences of checking your phone for messages before bedtime. This seemingly innocuous activity actually signals to your brain all the things that communicate that it is not time to sleep, when it is.

With an epidemic of sleep problems in our culture due to too much unresolved stress, this seemingly harmless activity actually impairs our Central Nervous System’s ability to produce melatonin needed in order to move from a conscious to an unconscious state for sleep and the process of detoxification.

BTW, NeurOptimal® neurofeedback brain training help thousands of individual renormalize their sleep patterns by mirroring back to the brain its dysfunctional patterns and the brain’s own inherent intelligence does the rest to improve sleep and overall relaxation and resilience in life.

If you are one of the millions of individuals with sleep issues, you are the perfect candidate for NeurOptimal®.

 

 

 

Neurofeedback for extreme trauma.

A quote from Bessel several years ago describes neurofeedback’s effects on people with extreme trauma who they treat at The Trauma Center in Massachusetts:

“Once neurofeedback is introduced, many experience their extraordinarily traumatic histories to become mere data points in their lives, freed of many of the life destroying elements we commonly see. ”  

Bessel Van der Kolk, M.D.

I have seen amazing results with neurofeedback in many client’s lives over the past 9 years.  People who had done many types of therapies, medications and interventions came in for NeurOptimal Neurofeedback with me, only to experience relief within a few sessions.  It became clear that overload, or unresolved trauma was generally what was driving their suffering, causing them to act out in ways that they could just say no to.

As an extreme example, I had an adolescent girl who had been adapted from China with little ability to self-regulate.  She was forever upset and nearly impossible to manage, a bit wild.  She would pull the sensors off her head when I had her hooked up and could hardly sit still, having to get up constantly and move around, as though she was being threatened.  I can only imagine what might have happened at the orphanage she was raised in.

I saw her for perhaps 40 sessions and I cannot impress upon you the changes that I observed in her. She had been to many therapists to no avail.  One day, she was upset that the therapist across the hall popped her head out of her office to ask her to speak a little more quietly.  This young girl had poor social awareness and was quite unaware of others and social nuance.  This made her extremely upset and it took quite a bit of coaxing to get her to sit for her session.  But after the session, she came to her Mom and me, and apologized for being so upset at the beginning of the session.  I had never seen this capability it her and her Mom was quite amazed as well.  To see such a dramatic shift in her level of maturity and her ability to observe and reflect on her own process speaks volumes for the benefits of neurofeedback.  No talk therapy could have ever produced this dramatic shift in such as short period, speaking as someone who has been a therapist for 33 years.

But I also have to say that I have never been attracted to the traditional forms of neurofeedback that do what is called migrate and entrain, what I like to call push and pull.  I never wanted it to be done to me since I have oriented intuitively toward the non-invasive or non-aggressive model of therapy of many years.  Anyway, I finally found Dr. Val Brown who had owned, been certified and taught virtually every neurofeedback approach out today and he had developed a neurofeedback approach based on non-linear physics and math rather than the linear, reductionistic approach still in use. So this approach mirrors to the brain comprehensively with what the brain is about to do, and by evoking of the Orienting Response, the brain must return to the present and make innate course corrections in how it utilizes available biological energy to accomplish survival tasks.  Or in other words, we are aiding the brain to orient toward relaxation versus arousal.

Out brains are energy conserving systems and are inherently capable to learning through the lifespan, so that life should be improving.  But when we are overloaded, as most people are,  our brains have to work double and triple time, managing the past (which doesn’t exist) and the future (which does not exist) and the present which is all there really is.  With NeurOptimal neurofeedback training, we can help the brain to intuitively and biologically recognize that it is generating its own suffering event, called perturbation in non-linear physics. It is perturbed, and quite often for no survival benefit.  Since true emotions only happens in total calm, everything else is a degree of panic- and I can demonstrate this scientifically BTW.

I realized a long time ago that to ask a client to talk about their traumatic memories could either drive it deeper or desensitize them to everything else in their life.  I always felt that I had to find an approach that could get underneath the defenses that are developed as a consequence of traumatic experiences. We are only now acknowledging how delicate children are and the degree to which we are all carrying trauma.

NeurOptimal® is quite amazing, as I said, and a paradigm shift in the evolution of neurofeedback!

Chronic Stress Can Change Your Brain: function and structure…

 

stock-illustration-37003064-highway-signpost-burnout

New Research shows serious neurological consequences of burnout.

The more stressed you are, the harder it is to deal with stressors in the future.  Once we get into an exhaustion phase, our brain finds it less and less able to cope with ongoing stressors.  And this is whether we are aware of this process, or not!

This biological stress model was originally developed by Dr. Hans Selye, endorcinologist.  He demonstrated that we can resist stress only for so long before our body/brain go into an exhaustion phase that depletes us of our reserves.

Then we add further compensatory mechanisms like caffeine, sugar, pushing longer hours at work, concerns over employment, finances, and economy, and nutrition-lacking comfort foods to help us ‘cope’ with our predicament and we find ourselves in what Selye termed decompensation, leading to burnout, or burning our core energy reserves. This can only lead to lower energy, poorer focus, further feelings of ineffectiveness, and eventually illness.  Once our brain is overwhelmed, we have a real problem. And it is ever more difficult to face and deal with the future.

Recent research results showed that burnout subjects had a harder time suppressing their reactions to a loud sound. In other words, the people who were stressed to begin with, had a harder time dealing with new stressor.

Researchers also scanned participants’ brains while they were sitting quietly and found that the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with fear and aggression, was bigger among participants in the burnout group. More stressed participants also had stronger connections between the amygdala and brain areas linked to emotional distress.

According to the study, led by Armita Golkar, Ph.D., at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and cited by the Association for Psychological Science, burnout changes neural circuits in the brain hurts people’s ability to cope with stressful situations.

As for why the burned-out participants had trouble regulating their emotions, the brain scans revealed that they had weaker connections between the amygdala (the trauma reactor in the brain) and the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain area associated with executive function. I other words, they could not tell the manage stressful situations by saying to themselves, ‘this is just a momentary situation and you will be OK”.

These findings have significant implications for burned-out workers well-being. The researchers say that difficulty suppressing negative emotions would make them more vulnerable to symptoms of depression as well.  Makes sense!

My work since 1985 has focused on helping people cope better in life by removing the unresolved stress that we carry as a consequence of living in a highly pressured world.  Since we are all obviously susceptible to burnout, we all seek our own ways to help us deal with it.  Competent exercise and a balanced diet are certainly primary here.  But what else have I seen that can help?

Since we know that our brain (Central Nervous System) is capable of learning/evolving, and since it is responsible for all problem solving in our constantly changing reality, if it is overwhelmed in any way, then it will find it obgoingly more difficult to function day to day.  By providing the brain with ongoing, real time feedback about how it is functioning, our brain is capable of improving its own function, called neuroplasticity.  It can learn from itself if we are able to mirror back to it, its own electro-chemical activity.  This is what NeurOptimal® can do in a completely non-invasive, no-side effects manner.

We get calls daily from people who have heard about NeurOptimal from someone else who is having good results from our neurofeedback brain training process.  The people who contact us get sessions, they rent a system for a month of two to three, they purchase a Personal or Professional system, and some even get certified, and train others. People only tell others about something when it works.  That is how our business works. Lots of word of mouth.

Let us know if we can answer your questions or send you some resources to better understand how NeurOptimal is changing people’s lives in an upward direction.  Why cope when you can thrive?

Get the BoulderNeuroFeedback.com Neuroplasticity Report here and see the Independent Study of NeurOptimal’s benefits.

 

Link to study:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00127-005-0011-5