What's a Biofeedback Monitor
and how does it help beat stress?

The humble personal biofeedback monitor has on new status as a high powered weapon in the war on deadly stress.

Biofeedback is simply a word for real-time biological feedback using some type of monitoring that provides information from the body that helps our mind work in partnership with our bodies. It is a well respected branch of health management that is highly recommended as first line stress management skill.

Here is how world class eduction and research institute, Princeton University, defines Biofeedback:

"Biofeedback is a training program in which a person is given information about physiological processes (heart rate or blood pressure) that is not normally available. with the intended goal of gaining conscious control of them"

America's giant health care insurance company Blue Cross Blue Shield, defines Biofeedback this way:

"Biofeedback is a training technique to consciously regulate normal body functions such as heart rate, breathing, brain activity levels and body temperature. This technique helps to change physical responses to stress as well as enhance overall health. Training is guided by simple electronic devices that monitor body functions and provide feedback".

BIOFEEDBACK MONITORING IS NOW AN EVERYDAY PERSONAL TOOL

In actual fact, we use biofeedback every time we take our temperature to monitor a fever, or step on a scale to monitor our weight. The newer kinds of scales even tell us our Body Mass Index (BMI) and our body water content percentage. Even looking in a mirror can be considered receiving some type of feedback using an instrument.

At the local gym you'll often see exercisers with heart-rate monitors that look like wrist watches to tell them when they are in the optimal aerobic training zone. Today all stair climbers, treadmills and cycles have monitors built into their hand grips.

On the street you'll find walkers with pedometers on their belts measuring the number of steps, or distance walked in a certain period of time.

In homes around the world, diabetics monitor their blood glucose levels several times a day, and even healthy people (who want to stay that way) rountinely monitor their blood pressure, cholesterol levels and much more with home biofeedback tools.

Biofeedback monitors are everywhere!

We have become very attached to biofeedback monitoring, and no wonder! It is an extremely practical tool that provides useful physiological information in order to help us improve self-regulation skills for a variety of health benefits.

Most notably it's become today's most indispensable all star player in the stress management game. Here you can see a monitor displaying a comfortabily relaxed 92.4F. This temperature indicates a non-stressed body/mind state.

For learning stress management sensitive biofeedback instruments are used to measure our body's physiological processes such as temperature, skeletal muscle tension, and heart rate, which are often not generally within one's awareness.

Biofeedback self-training with the use of a personal size temperature monitor intended for home use is one of the very easiest and inexpensive ways to acquire highly functioning biofeedback skills for stress management.

In fact biofeedback training is so frequently used to assist in building high level stress management skills that they are now commonly referred to as Stress Monitors.

While the cost of a biofeedback session can cost between $40 to $85 per appointment, a personal Stress Monitor is often a surprisingly effective, inexpensive way to train yourself biofeedback stress management conveniently at home or work.

Professional Biofeedback Trainers themselves often provide an inexpensive thermal biofeedback monitor to clients to take home and practice between sessions, and often times they use them to train during the clinical training session itself.