Optimal Functioning Training

Optimal functioning occurs when one has good nervous system regulation and flexibility. Creating and maintaining this flexibility is the challenge. Advanced training techniques in applied psychophysiology and neuroscience can provide an avenue for long-term changes in the patterns of the autonomic nervous system and in EEG, or brainwave, patterns. These changes directly influence your central and autonomic nervous systems. By creating more flexibility within your system, you free yourself to reach your potential! Optimal Function Training can assist with attention, focus, sleep and mood issues; it can help with decreased stress tolerance, feeling ‘hijacked’ by your emotions and life circumstances, pain, high blood pressure and other metabolic problems.

Cognitive Performance

Your cognitive performance, including your ability to focus/attend, retain, and recall information, requires your brain to engage in a complex series of tasks. These tasks range from processing incoming information in multiple sensory forms to interpreting, integrating, and relating the information in order to formulate appropriate responses. While all of this happens in milliseconds, the process requires accuracy in neuro communication and timing.  Assessments and brain mapping allow for detection of deficits in cognitive processing and identification of areas that may fall outside of  what is desirable for optimal functioning. Neurofeedback is effective at facilitating this process of events and the integration of information into a more cohesive and clear evolution of events.

Optimal cognitive performance includes being able to retrieve information and experiences when needed. This is good memory function and requires the brain to downwshift, in a sense, or shift to specific EEG frequencies. This process facilitates large aggregates of neurons to oscillate in synchrony — a shift associated with memory encoding. Neurofeedback, Biofeedback, and Audio Visual Entrainment can reinforce and enhance attentional states, information retrieval, and overall memory function.

 Optimal Functioning is enhanced by flexibility within your system! 

State Changes & Bioregulation

The ability to function well, to respond to the demands of your daily life in a healthy way, necessitates a person readily shift between states — attentional and arousal states. For instance, the ability to focus or concentrate on a task is essential for learning and requires a certain brain state. However, many of us alternate between extreme states of inattention and hyperfocus (e.g. ADD/ADHD), a less flexible and inefficient state, which often precludes information integration, clarity in problem solving, or appropriate emotional responses. Neurofeedback training promotes mental flexibility and creates an avenue for shifting attention and focus when needed.

Chronic stress is estimated to cause 90% of all diseases. Stress dysregulates the body and often results in a body and brain that have difficulty maintaining balance or homeostasis. A host of arousal/activation issues arise from this imbalance, i.e. sleep, mood, energy/fatigue issues, decreased immune system function and illness prone, headaches, pain, digestive problems, and others. As a result, people often feel hijacked by their emotions and thoughts, forming unhealthy coping habits, e.g. caffeine or alcohol for under and overactivated systems, respectively. This coping is analogous to Sisyphus –-and, the ball that is your unbalanced nervous system will continue to squash you on its way back down the hill of your efforts! Learning to balance arousal states and activate the nervous system appropriately is possible through various training modalities, including Heart Rate Variability Training, Audio Visual Entrainment, and others.  The goal is to create more flexibility within your system to respond appropriately while avoiding negative consequences of overactivation or reliance on unhealthy coping.

Finding calm and a sense of peace is a state quite a challenging to access for most. Still, these are invaluable skills that can be trained at the physiological and neurobiological levels, allowing a person to access a general sense of well-being and calm at any time. Mastering BioRegulation is quite possible through various Biofeedback techniques, especially Heart Rate Variability Training. Neurofeedback and Audio Visual Entrainment are also highly effective with skill acquisition and maintenance of a calm, peaceful sense of well being and outlook.