FAQ

If these do not answer your questions or you want to ask about your specific situation, schedule a free consult with Nina!

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What happens during a Neurofeedback session? Small wires are connected to a silver diode, and connected to your scalp and ears. Calming music flows, during this time, you just relax, or focus or don’t be present in the session and fall asleep. Since your brain is always listening, it doesn’t matter what you necessarily do in a session. If you are  exhausted, many people go into a deep REM. Neurofeedback, is a fully automated system, where you hear the music and you don’t have to pay attention. I invite you to be mindful of your breath and notice what’s happening. You will have better communication to feel or experience your body. You will notice comfort and joy. Our goal is to nudge the central nervous system out of certain brain wave patterns and into new brainwave patterns. Whatever is maladaptive the brain will create a new pattern for. Hyper- arousal we call anxiety. If we have a long-term freeze response we call that depression, and we can bounce back-and-forth between anxiety and depression, the brain will recognize and shift out of these maladaptive patterns. We are shifting our nervous system to a different stimulation to “down regulate”. It is not possible to predict what the central nervous system will do with the information it is offered and consequently there can be no guarantee as to the results of brain training. NeurOptimal® is purely a source of information and does not direct the response of the central nervous system.

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Our lifestyle is always being bombarded with “ input”.  Communication between what the brain is asking for, and our conscious awareness becomes much clearer, this is a great tool of support, encouraging us to live in the now, and present moment.  When you see your gift in every moment, every moment becomes your gift.

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Neurotherapy is not a miracle cure

However, it does work and requires repeated sessions just like someone who was overweight with a poor diet and unfit, suffering from a range of chronic symptoms due to their condition. If they dieted and ate healthily, maintained a fitness program they will slowly but surely get better. Their symptoms would reduce and finally disappear.It’s a natural process that the body goes through but it takes time and constant sessions from 6 months to 2 years. Neurofeedback is exactly the same it needs constant ongoing sessions for these difficult problems but you get better and better because the brain is moving closer and closer to a more normal, healthy self-regulation profile.

This is why supervised home neurofeedback therapy is so effective because adults and children can train at home when it is convenient. They can train more times per week than 1 or 2 appointments in a clinic and train as long as they need to get the maximum benefit. It is cheaper than clinical sessions and doesn’t involve the inconvenience, cost and time of appointments and travel, usually the mother and most often with siblings tagging along. This makes it very hard.

Neurofeedback therapy is easy to do

If you are a child or an adult and you can watch a DVD or play a simple computer game you can do neuro therapy. Because it works at a sub-cortical level there is no skill to learn so there is no failure at this level. It’s like exercising your body and the muscles just get bigger and stronger because it’s a natural process. Neurofeedback helps the brain to exercise or re-regulate itself. It is merely a technological mirror that allows the brain to watch itself in real-time, which gives the brain an edge to re-regulate. It does this with a small EEG device with 1 or 2 tiny sensors on the head that pick up brainwaves processed by the software that run a game or make the DVD screen in the software expand and contract, based on the real-time brainwave activity. It doesn’t matter what the feedback is as long as the person is engaged. This takes care of the conscious mind while the brain is decoding the feedback at a sub-cortical level (out of conscious awareness) and uses it to make tiny changes in its functioning. It is these tiny changes that build a momentum towards remediation of symptoms.

A common theme with my clients both parents of children and adults is they are grateful to have found neurotherapy but are also often angry no one had told them about it before finding out themselves.Many of the parents are frustrated they can get funding for therapies that help a little but not for neurotherapy that has had a profound effect on their child. The ones who can’t afford feel deeply disadvantaged. Funding for home neurofeedback would be a very positive step forward for this promising process.

Discuss how you can beat the issues you and/or your child are struggling with using the most powerful and precise form of brain training known as neurotherapy. It’s fun, easy, non-invasive, safe, natural, holistic and the most powerful of all autism treatments with no adverse side effects.

Neurofeedback therapy is a powerful and effective way to change you and/or your child’s life for the better.

Are you a Creative Type?

Would you benefit from increased performance and improved mental, physical and emotional recovery?

Neurofeedback is a respected scientific field with 40 years history of application and research.

Your Brain Training programs will:

 

• improve and consistently maintain high levels of performance

• increase confidence, courage and mental toughness

• improve focus, concentration and mental clarity

• increase motivation and commitment

• brighten mood and eliminate anxiety

• increase creativity and spontaneity

• reduce fatigue and stress and improve recovery

• improve reflexes and reaction time

Using the Brain to Improve Performance

Applied research with high achieving students at a prestigious music college in London demonstrated that Neurofeedback substantially improved students stylistic accuracy, interpretive imagination and incidental error count. Other research has shown improvements in concentration, memory, creativity, emotional stability and hand-eye coordination. Think about it…everything you experience and do is based on your brain!

Neurofeedback is a scientific field with a 40 year history that is redefining management training, coaching and the entire psychology profession. Neurofeedback is also employed to enhance the performance of top-level athletes and managers.

Your head and performance are like musical instruments that are robust yet sensitive on a tuning level. Many things can detune your brain like chemicals in foods, poor diet, bad sleeping habits, stress, trauma, head injuries, bad fevers, medications, stress and pressure. If a musical instrument is out of tune even the best of musicians can’t make any song sound right. Your brain is the same when it is out of tune it can affect you emotionally, mentally, behaviourally and physically…you just can’t perform at your best no matter how hard you try.

Neurofeedback is a safe, natural and non-invasive training process that enables you to re-tune your brain and maintain peak performance under pressure as well as improve the quality of your life.

Neurofeedback can be used to strengthen weaknesses or enhance strengths. We have worked with children and adults with anxiety, learning and concentration problems to professional and Olympic athletes for peak performance. Australian performers Jon Stevens and Deni Hines use our Brain Trainer.

Peak Performance

The basis of peak performance is highly effective recovery. High achievers who work very hard need to recover hard. Without serious recovery sustained peak performance is impossible and over time as residue stress/fatigue build performance decreases creating more stress … thus a vicious cycle.

Neurofeedback for performing arts is the most effective way to manage recovery and stress for high achievers. For performing artists or students neurofeedback will substantially improve your creative pursuits, career or academic achievement, as well as general emotional wellbeing adding up to a significant improvement in quality of life experience.

Creative people often have problems with overcoming performance anxiety, mood disorders and substance abuse, this may be even more relevant for teenagers. Neurofeedback can remediate acute problems as well as act to prevent the development of these problems. To be creative and successful does not mean you have to suffer from emotional issues.

Trauma and the Brain

Dr Bessel van der Kolk an international expert in Developmental Trauma Disorder (DTD) who has used neurofeedback therapy for 20 years explains it simply in his book The Body Keeps the Score, that the parts of the brain that are affected by trauma are the primitive structures that manage emotional arousal, which affects all our physiological and cognitive functions. These structures being sub-cortical are non-verbal, so any form of talk therapy just can’t impact these structures as the verbal parts of the brain are the higher cortices. All forms of trauma whether developmental or not de-tune these structures, which lead to all of the physiological symptoms and destructive behaviours including substance abuse.

It is so much better to change a child and their family’s life when the child is young rather than have them go through their childhood struggling with issue that not only profoundly impact them but also their parents and siblings and for that to continue into adulthood. The personal cost and cost to society is enormous. Neurofeedback can change all that.

I work with adult clients who had abusive childhoods that had the inclination and means to do tens of years therapy work and yet still struggling with issues of:

• hyper vigilance

• stress

• low energy

• poor memory

• anger and/or aggression

• anxiety etc.

All emotional arousal issues controlled by primitive non-verbal brain structures that Neurofeedback targets. All have found a rapid change in their emotional reactivity, awareness of their feelings and behaviour and the capacity to stop it. This is very powerful because it gives a person the self-control they need to function normally which they didn’t have previously despite years and years of therapy. They all are grateful but wished they had found this a long time ago.