3: Optimizing Health and Performance with Mindfulness, Compassion, and Biofeedback | Inna Khazan, Ph.D. | 2019 Conference Recording

Biofeedback is a powerful treatment modality shown to be effective in improving clients’ health and performance. Biofeedback provides a way to work with challenging conditions in cases for which other interventions have been unsuccessful, such as chronic pain, anxiety, headaches, and trauma. Biofeedback helps improve performance for athletes and professionals when they feel hopeless in making progress. At the same time, biofeedback treatment itself can stall, leaving the client and the therapist feeling frustrated and unsure of how to proceed. These challenges include situations when the client is highly anxious about his/her physiological symptoms, feels pressure to “do things right,” becomes easily overwhelmed with emotional stimuli, or is simply too distracted to attend to the computer screen for more than a few minutes at a time. Oftentimes, these challenges are due to the clients’ unhelpful efforts to control the fundamentally uncontrollable aspects of their internal experience.

Mindfulness and compassion based approach to biofeedback can help people experience change through mindful, non-judgmental awareness and compassion, providing the therapist and the client a way to work with what gets in the way of biofeedback success. In this talk, participants will learn how to apply mindfulness and compassion-based skills to their biofeedback practice in order to help their clients reap the benefits of biofeedback without getting stuck in unproductive attempts to control their internal experience.

Learning Objectives – Intermediate; participants will be able to;

• Discuss two concepts of mindfulness and compassion
• Describe 3 skills necessary for integrating mindfulness and compassion into biofeedback
• Apply mindfulness and compassion skills in optimizing health and performance