Inna Khazan, Ph.D.
Licensed Clinical Psychologist Certified Biofeedback Specialist
Ten Post Office Sq., Suite 800 South
Boston, MA
Biofeedback and Mindfulness
Train your body and your brain for optimal regulation and resilience
With biofeedback and mindfulness training, your body learns to power up to just the right level and your brain learns to focus on what’s most important in that moment. Equally importantly, you learn how to power down and recover, so that you may be ready for the next challenge that comes your way.
Biofeedback and mindfulness are scientifically proven to enhance multiple areas of performance, including self-regulation, focus, endurance, reaction speed, ability to make decisions and solve problems, regulate emotions, and respond to stress in healthy and helpful ways. These powerful tools combined into our unique Performance Excellence training help individuals move up to next level of performance, with greater flexibility, resilience, and ability to meet challenges.
Biofeedback
Biofeedback is a powerful mind-body tool that teaches people to develop greater awareness and ability to influence their physiological and mental functions by using signals from their own bodies. Biofeedback trains self-regulation and resilience for your mind and body.
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Physiological processes such as heart rate, heart rate variability, breathing, temperature, muscle tension, and skin conductance are non-invasively measured by sensors placed on your skin, and are then displayed on the computer screen. With my guidance you can learn to modify your physiological responses in ways beneficial to your performance and general well-being.
Biofeedback is best done in person, utilizing our state-of-the art technology and enabling us to conduct the most comprehensive assessment and training. However, hybrid and entirely-remote options are also available as part of long-distance corporate training options. We may begin our work in-person, completing the most important assessments and initial stages of training, followed by remote training using the OptimalHRV app, which I designed specifically to meet the needs of remote training.
Biofeedback is scientifically proven to be an excellent training tool for optimizing performance. Research shows that biofeedback training improves your reaction speed, endurance, situational awareness, ability to direct your actions towards specific goals, emotion regulation, decisions making and problem solving under pressure, as well as respond flexibly to changes in your environment. Biofeedback helps improve and maintain brain health, optimizes recovery, and inoculates us against the effects of stress. In the sports arena, biofeedback has been shown to enhance performance in basketball, baseball, golf, soccer, tennis, gymnastics, swimming, running, speed skating, and others.
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Following biofeedback training, many people retain their skills for life and require only occasional refresher sessions.
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Is biofeedback the right choice for you? It can help you:
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Take charge of fine-tuning and training your mind and body.
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Strengthen self-regulation and resilience
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Enhance professional, athletic, or artistic performance
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Use a data driven-approach to your training with concrete metrics to track progress
Mindfulness
Have you ever tried not to think or feel something? Have you ever tried to banish worry about the outcome of an important meeting or performance, fight off pre-performance anxiety, or will yourself into letting go of a mistake you just made? If your answer is yes, as it is for most people, take a moment to think about how well that worked. Did this strategy help you perform better in the moment, and was it effective long term? My guess is that it was not.
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I can offer you an easier and more effective solution. By allowing yourself to stop struggling with what you cannot control, you will be able to devote time, energy, and resources to what is under your control – the way you respond to your thoughts and feelings and the actions you take as part of a healthy response to challenges. With mindfulness training, you will learn to focus on what is in your best interest in challenging situations, such as the most important elements of your performance, rather than on struggling with the thoughts and feelings you want or don’t want to have.
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Mindfulness meditation and mindfulness-based skills are scientifically proven to be effective in optimizing professional, athletic, and artistic performance. Brain imaging studies have shown that mindfulness meditation produces helpful changes in the function and structure of the brain, in areas responsible for attention, learning, memory, problem solving, decision making, and emotion regulation. Through the use of mindfulness-based skills, my clients train their brains to respond more effectively to challenging professional situations, to become more resilient in the face of challenges, and respond to moment-to-moment changes in their environment with greater flexibility and agility. I teach my clients easy-to-use practical skills they can implement in any difficult situation at the moment it happens. As a result, my clients perform better in their jobs and other performance situations, and, equally importantly, feel more confident in their ability to do well.
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Mindfulness training by itself does not offer you much information about its efficacy or the progress you are making. In the next section, I describe the unique combination of mindfulness and biofeedback that brings real-time data to your training sessions and gives you the vital information you need to continue shaping and fine-tuning your performance training, making the best use of the valuable time and effort you are putting in.
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I have recorded a number of meditations for my clients to use. Please click here to listen and download as many as you’d like.
Mindfulness-based Biofeedback
Mindfulness and biofeedback on their own are effective interventions that help people improve their lives. When we bring mindfulness and biofeedback together, the result is even more powerful.
Mindfulness and biofeedback together provide us with a balance between letting go (mindfulness) and goal-directed action (biofeedback). This approach allows us to disengage from a futile struggle to control what is not under our control, and let those aspects of our experience to just be as they are, while giving ourselves the skills we need to move forward and achieve our goals.
Mindfulness enhances biofeedback by allowing the skills and changes we are implementing to happen without a struggle, thereby preventing us from getting stuck and allowing progress to take place. Mindfulness also enhances our ability to become aware of our physiological states and recognize when our biofeedback skills are happening in the most optimal way.
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Biofeedback, in turn, enhances mindfulness by reducing the intensity of difficult emotions and physiological sensations, such as anxiety and pain, helping us to become more willing to be mindful. Biofeedback also provides real-time information regarding the changes that happen during mindfulness meditation practices.
