I was planning to write about each individual session to give you as much information as I could. However, I quickly learned that there isn’t much to report from each session. They are pretty uneventful. At least for me they have been.
You go in, get two electrodes glued to your head and a few things clipped to your ears, put in some earbuds for the music and then you sit back and relax for the duration. Which I think is about 40ish minutes. You’re supposed to try to sleep, which I haven’t been able to do thus far. I’ve never been able to sleep with music playing.
The music is a sort of tribal sounding etherial music that doesn’t have any words. I’d probably be able to sleep but every couple minutes it changes the beat and that renews my attention to the sound and wards off the sleep.
While listening to the music, I will hear something like a skip. It almost sounds like the sound a CD would make if it were scratched. These skips usually occur in groups and they are the ‘feedback’ portion of the neurofeedback.
The way I understand it is that when you’re brain reverts to an inefficient pattern then the skip will happen to let your brain know what it’s doing. I’m not exactly sure how your brain understands the skip as a sign of suboptimal function.
They say that only a minority of people feel a difference after the first session or even the first few. My practitioner and the neuroptimal website say that over all the sessions that they’ve done most people report the 6th session as a turning point after which they feel changes in cognitive performance, sleep, attention, etc.
So, I’m halfway there!
Here’s what the official site has to say about getting lasting results:
How much neurofeedback training does it take to get to your “new normal”? As NeurOptimal® has improved and evolved, reaching a new, improved baseline for users has become quicker and quicker. We used to say at least 20 sessions were necessary to help with issues bothering you in the “here and now”; 30 plus sessions for “deeper” problems that originated earlier in life. Now we are now finding significant results occur in much less time. Today, it is possible you could be feeling much better in fewer than 10 neurofeedback training sessions.
It’s refreshing to see a company like this admit that you need less of their product and not more! Often companies are trying to justify getting you to pay them more often, not less!
But then again, they do go on to suggest you should continue to use it more:
In the end, the more brain training you do, the more the positive effects will stay with you. Much like learning a language or a physical skill like rollerblading, “practice makes perfect”. The more sessions you undergo, the better your brain fitness.
The bottom line.
After three sessions, I think I might be feeling ever so slightly less overwhelmed by things I need to do. But that’s about it.
That being said, I’m committed to at least 6 sessions since the changes may not occur until then.
An interesting side note. My practitioner told me that the changes aren’t always noticeable to the subject (but to those around them) and they aren’t always immediately noticeable. Sometimes, she says, it may be weeks before you encounter something stressful and notice that you handled it better than ever before. Well, I will have to ask my wife to be on the look out.