A few months ago I heard Ari Whitten talk about his experience with neurofeedback on a two part podcast series. Here’s part 1 and part 2.
His experience convinced me to start looking back into neurofeedback which I had tried to a limited amount for this blog.
So I decided to investigate and try neurofeedback for you yet again.
My History with Neurofeedback
You may remember that I have some experience with neurofeedback from the past. I wrote about my experiences with neuroptimal on this blog. Search for it and you’ll find a few posts where I share my experiences to try to help you to see what it’s like.
I originally went with neuroptimal for a few different reasons.
1 – The price – while it’s expensive it was and is way cheaper than some of the other options out there. It was less than one thousand dollars while other forms are five to twenty thousand.
2 – Safety – I got the idea that neuroptimal was significantly safer than other forms of neurofeedback. Some other types of neurofeedback can have some very troubling side effects if not done properly.
3 – Accessibility – I was able to rent a neuroptimal unit and have it shipped to me for a month. While higher end neurofeedback was at that time only and in-persion thing that was extremely expensive.
I honestly didn’t seem to have much benefit from Neurofeedback. Nothing major anyway. You can read about that on my other posts.
Looking for Options
I started with looking at Dr. Andrew Hill’s outlet called Peak Brain Institute. He was Ari’s guest expert on neurofeedback in this two part series. I remembered his name because he also has a company that makes nootropics. So I was somewhat familiar with him and his nootropics. But I hadn’t heard much from him on neurofeedback.
It was a great interview and it revealed a lot of the potential benefits of neurofeedback. Ari also gave a ringing endorsement of neurofeedback that it had helped him a lot.
So I started looking into this.
Unfortunately, Peak Brain is very expensive. Maybe I’ll try it someday but I am kind of cheap to be honest so I wanted to look for a good but less expensive option.
I was able to figure out that the system that Peak Brain uses is from https://brain-trainer.com/
So I started looking into a few options
1 – Buy my own system from https://brain-trainer.com/
2 – Find someone trained by them
3 – Non brain-trainer.com options
Option 1 was attractive to me because on a per session basis it’s pretty low cost and then I could use it long term and do more posts about it here for you.
The problem with option 1 is that I’m not trained and I don’t want to mess up my brain. I remember hearing about people getting twitching as a somewhat permanent side effect of this being done improperly.
As I researched further I found a facebook group dedicated to people who have had side effects of neurofeedback. Reading there, I did find some good insights on types of neurofeedback to avoid and other tips.
Here are some safety tips:
1- Go slowly!
2- Talk to your practitioner about any side effects right away and don’t just ‘power through’
3- Use an experienced practitioner
All that being said, Option 1 seemed too risky to me.
As for Option 3 – I looked at a few others but most of them looked too ‘off the shelf’ to be super effective or they were difficult to find practitioners.
I went with Option 2 because BTI has a long history, Peak Brain appears to use them, and I was able to find a practitioner relatively close to me who had 15 years of experience working with neurofeedback.
These reasons really helped me feel more comfortable with the decision I made to go with a local practitioner.
The Trial!
So I found my practitioner who was experienced and uses brain-trainer.com. So I gave her a call. She was very nice and not pushy trying to get me to sign up. I got an appointment and got started.
First step was to get a “Brain Map”
What is a brain map?
Well they hook you up to electrodes using a conductive “glue.” She puts it on different locations on your head to sense the brain waves and has you do different tasks. Sometimes with eyes open or closed. The computer then combines all the different measurements to create a ‘map’ of the waves in your brain at different locations.
All that info goes into the computer and, in addition to the brain map, the computer provides a long report about your brain and a plan/protocol for neurofeedback to help your brain.
After doing the brain map the practitioner offered for me to do my first session. It was shorter than a normal session and here’s what it’s like.
She uses a program that plays a DVD and adjusts the brightness of the screen in response to your brain waves. Basically if your brain does the “wrong” thing then the screen dims. That’s the ‘feedback’ signal. When your brain is in the optimal state then the video plays at full brightness.
So I watched the video for about 10 minutes with the electrodes at two locations. Then did it again in another two locations and finally a third time at a thrid set of locations.
The first didn’t really do much for me. Okay that’s cool, I know it’s not a super fast thing and it’s a long process.
The second I started getting a little tired. Yeah well the lights are dim and I’m watching a movie so it’s probably not doing too much
During the third I became EXTREMELY tired. I was struggling to keep my eyes open to watch the screen.
Wow. Okay maybe it IS doing something!
I was actually a little worried that I would have trouble driving home but I felt better pretty quickly.
So this was definitely enough to get me to do more session.
Side note, they generally say that about 20 sessions are required to make a major changes and about 40 sessions to make that ‘permanent.’
I put permanent in quotes because apparently a lot of people can make the changes permanent but not everyone. Some people need a periodic ‘tune up’ or so they say.
I continued on to do sessions 16 sessions so far.
The thing I decided to focus on improving is motivation. It’s definitely something that I could improve upon and I thought maybe neurofeedback could give me a boost here.
I do feel that the 16 sessions mostly focused on motivation helped improve my motivation. Unfortunately, it’s kind of difficult to tell because the changes are subtle from week to week, session to session so it’s hard to tell from a subjective perspective.
Fortunately, I was able to compare my productivity before and after and I can tell that my productivity improved. This seems like a good proxy for motivation.
The change wasn’t huge. It was noticeable. But not life changing. I could do more sessions to see if maybe it could get even better. However, I’ve taken a break to write this article for you about the process and my progress so far.
I’m thinking of trying a different practitioner or a different system.
While my practitioner had a lot of experience she didn’t seem to have a strong plan. She seemed a bit by the seat of her pants when choosing what to do. Now that might just be my perception. Maybe she is just drawing from experience but I expected it to be a bit more focused on the plan derived from the brain map.
I hope that making myself the ginnea pig for you will help your education on neurofeedback.
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