After almost four years of debilitating, non-stop head pain that covered-by-insurance healthcare has failed to resolve, one of my providers suggested I try out neurofeedback. Desperate, I’ll try anything, including this thing I have never heard about before my doctor suggested it and insurance doesn’t cover.
At the time of writing this, I’m about half-way through a six month neurofeedback program at Brain Training of New England, and my surprising results-to-date have me full of questions.
Before starting the program, I filled out an intake questionnaire which asked questions like rate your anxiety level on a scale of 0-10. I re-took the questionnaire at three months, having forgotten my original answers, and learned that my self-reported anxiety and depression have disappeared.
At first, I thought maybe they caught me on a good day. But, upon reflection, I agreed: my anxiety and depression, albeit previously mild, was gone.
Neurofeedback is a form of biofeedback that uses electrical potentials in the brain to reinforce desired brain states through operant conditioning. This process is non-invasive neurotherapy and typically collects brain activity data using electroencephalography (EEG).
Source: Wikipedia
Anxiety sucks. I’ve spent decades doing therapy and personal growth to overcome my anxiety: positive thinking, brutal introspection, mindfulness, New Age-style affirmations, trying on new behaviors, etc. In short, overcoming habitual anxiety has been hard work, and with modest (read: little to no) result. Even though it was not the goal, a side benefit of all this otherwise impotent introspection and effort has been a deepening of my compassion toward others who are also struggling; but, alas, I was still anxious. So, after two decades of positive thinking yielding no result—for which positive thinkers have told me, with neither evidence nor irony, I just need to do more positive thinking—I turned to pharmacology. While medicine has proven to be a reasonably effective bandage to manage my anxiety, it is no cure, and who knows what subtle downsides pills may present? Now, and quite by accident, I find out there is something that works in months, not years or decades—or, and I hate to say this, never—and is effortless: neurofeedback.
Neurofeedback has me questioning what traits characterize my personality and what traits are symptomatic of brainwave dysregulation.
For instance, one habit of mine is that in an awkward moment I may try to disarm the awkwardness by telling a corny joke. Is that part of my personality, or is it a maladaptation? When, using my post-neurofeeback brain, I regard it as the latter, a coping mechanism, and, when I ask myself if that response still suits me, I’m inclined to say no. Behaviors that used to be compulsions are now choices, and behaviors I might no longer choose. And with that, awkwardness-disarming-jokes begin to fade from my favored traits, or at least this is how it feels as I write this.
Might it be that some of these behaviors I’ve come to think of as my personality aren’t? Instead, are they indicators of a dysregulated brain? Is my inability to regulate my brain on my own, without electrodes, a personality defect? A weakness of will? Surely, no. But, isn’t that a popular position? But I digress. Since my brain is, after all, mine, must everything my brain has me be and do constitute my personality?
And might it be that all of that introspective effort I’ve been putting in to curing my anxiety—while making me more compassionate—been like throwing a basketball at a hoop with no backboard? Is it naïve to expect even the most robust practice of reflection to substantially reduce habitual anxiety? Are affirmations effectively useless against a dysregulated brain?
Neurofeedback now has me questioning what even is personality? If a habitual undesirable behavior can be eliminated via brainwave regulation, was it ever part of my personality? What other behaviors of mine are merely reactivity? With a brain now better regulated by neurofeedback, anxiety dissolving and behaviors changing, will I show up to others as a different person? To the extent that my reactive behaviors mirrored and affirmed those same reactive behaviors in others, will my new, less-reactive self seem like a threat to them? Will they accept the new me, or will they want back the old, reactive me?
My YA fantasy novel Super Human’s main character, Will Freeman, is anxious … a classic example of the literary self-insert. One of my readers asked: why is Will anxious? I didn’t have an answer.
I don’t recall circumstances about my growing up that could have caused my anxiety. My neurofeedback provider mentioned evidence of past TBI in my brain map which could lead to emotional dysregulation. I hit my head as an infant; the dent on my forehead marks the event. Is the answer as simple as a bump on the head? Fears can be inherited biologically1; my mother was anxious. Is my anxiety inherited? Could Will Freeman be anxious because his mother was anxious? Or because he once bumped his head?
FINALIST: NH Literary Awards, Outstanding Work of Young Adult Fiction
At the crossroads of supernatural and human potential, a mystical world exists in each of us. One anxious teen found it.
“A well-paced novel with tension and mystery throughout.” —Reedsy review.
- Fearful Memories Passed Down to Mouse Descendants, Scientific American, December, 2013 [↩]
