|
|
Addiction
Addiction
The sad truth is that most addiction treatment programs fail. They have a “revolving door” as people relapse and come in and out of treatment. Many people leave before completing the programs. Using neurofeedback, combined with other addiction treatment, dramatically increases the success rate of treatment.
Addiction is a seriously debilitating mental health disorder. If left unchecked, addiction strips people of their self-respect, their ability to function optimally, their relationships, their reputation, careers and their soul. It is a disease that affects thinking – and causes a person to engage in a behavior that is self-destructive and painful. It’s often accompanied by anxiety, depression, bi-polar, and other mental health disorders. Loved ones often believe erroneously that addicts are weak, and that curing addiction is a matter of self-discipline. Addicts report feelings of shame, guilt, remorse, anger, and frustration. But for many, it’s a dysfunctional brain that is very hard to change.
What is addiction in terms of brain function?
Because addiction is a brain disorder, not a moral issue or just a lack of discipline, we work directly with the brain to retrain patterns of dysfunction. We teach the brain to remain calm, relaxed and focused. Training helps support more clear thinking. This builds a strong foundation for recovery and relapse prevention. Medications can help temporarily, and short-term that may be a good thing. The problem is medications don’t teach you how to cope. They may help with accompanying disorders but do not correct them. Addicts learn to rely on substances to help them feel calm, or to pay attention or to manage mood. Medications are really just another substance.
How Neurofeedback works:
Neurofeedback training helps teach you how to calm down. It helps you connect to the reasonable, rational regions of the brain during stressful times. When a person gains control of his own emotions, he can start choosing the option to remain clean and sober.
There have been several research studies that show those who use neurofeedback as part of an addiction treatment program in fact show much higher success rates and much lower relapse rates than the same program without neurofeedback. This appears to be true for every age group.
We offer addicts the options to actively and physically gain control in a way that directly impacts their disease.
We advocate support groups, talk therapy, and behavioral interventions. But adding neurofeedback trains people to be more calm, to better manage moods and emotions, and to sleep better. This tremendously reduces the problem of “white knuckling” the recovery. Without addressing these problems effectively, traditional programs produce higher relapse rates.
Neurofeedback is a new approach that can help you to learn to gain self-control by decreasing stress, increasing reasoning and override irrational thoughts that make abuse so compelling. Neurofeedback helps overcome the problem. Although the complications with addiction can make training more complex, dealing with the regions of the brain that are malfunctioning and restoring them to more normal neurological patterns helps to correct the underlying physiological manifestation of addiction.
We know that people suffering with addiction don’t choose this disease. They want to learn new ways of dealing with their disease. With the help of a brain map (a representation of the brain that maps out areas of over/under arousal and connectivity or lack of if throughout the brain) we can map out areas of concern to target for correction.
We know that the brain learns, after all it teaches us everything we know and directs our behavior. Addicts have learned maladaptive behaviors driven by faulty physiological determinants. With brain-training new healthful patterns can be learned and strengthened. Brain-training provides new options including the ability to recognize triggers that lead to destructive numbing behaviors.
|
