Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

I was recently reading an article in Bottom Line / Health about a unique form of biofeedback that can help relieve high blood pressure, ringing in the ears, headaches and more. All you need is a mirror!!!

Scientists have long known that many physical symptoms can be worsened by anxiety. For example, blood pressure can rise as a result of worry or stress. Reducing your anxiety by relaxing your muscles and slowing rapid breathing often lowers blood pressure.

Biofeedback is a technique that is based on the principle that anxiety reduction confers certain health benefits. With biofeedback, electronic instruments typically are used to guide a person’s breathing patterns, usually for 10 to 15 minutes daily. After a period of about four weeks, the relaxation that results from frequent biofeedback sessions offers benefits throughout the day.

A biofeedback loop starts with monitoring a signal coming from your body. You can monitor muscle tension, hand temperature or brainwave turbulence. Constant updates are fed back to you in a multimedia display. You look and learn. Using this information to get a certain feeling, you then change the signal in a particular direction.

You gain the power to flex and expand your body’s functioning. These physiological stretching lessons then go into automatic pilot and are used as needed.

Using more sophisticated instruments you are able to connect biofeedback with brain signals which is called Neurobiofeedback. Neurofeedback is more efficient and powerful than peripheral biofeedback. Neurofeedback can abort migraines. The success rates for resolving migraine are now over 90%. When it works, results seem to endure.

Biofeedback has proven effective in relieving about 150 varied conditions. The only explanation for such broad effectiveness is the power of applied consciousness to self-heal.

The single most popular application for neurofeedback is for ADD. The efficacy is quite high with 85% obtaining 100% remission of symptoms. Complete remission means the disorder is no longer detectable by any means, including brain maps.

Neurofeedback results seem to last forever. There is no homework. As your brain finds a better way to operate, it accepts and adopts the improvements without further effort. As the core problem is cleared, related problems tend to dissolve. Medications can be stopped.

Biofeedback is a mind-body mirror. Specific self-awareness, nourished by intention, becomes self-control. Next comes enhanced homeostasis without further effort. Once you have cleared the trail, the body follows.

Though few people are aware of this, you can use your mirror instead of a biofeedback machine to achieve many of the same results. Sound hard to believe?

Research scientists have placed sensors on muscles that tense up when a person is suffering from anxiety. Among the most important is the frontalis muscle, on the forehead, just above the eyebrows. If you’re worried or anxious when you look in your mirror, you’ll see how your forehead wrinkles. That’s your frontalis muscle contracting. If you have hypertension, tinnitus, asthma, headaches or an aching jaw, try the following mirror exercise for 10 minutes daily.

What to do: In a room with good lighting, stand or sit in front of a mirror that is large enough to show your entire face and shoulders. Examine your face and look for signs of anxiety, such as a tight mouth, raised shoulders and/or a wrinkled forehead.

While looking in the mirror, alter your breathing pattern by making your exhalation longer than your inhalation inhale for a count of four, and exhale for a count of six. Each time you exhale, relax your jaw, shoulders and forehead.

Why does this technique work? When you inhale, your respiratory muscles contract in order to expand your chest. At the same time, your shoulders, diaphragm and many accessory muscles of the upper body also contract. When you exhale, these same muscles relax, which sends nerve signals that also cause relaxation in your legs, arms and abdomen.

Hypertension. How does this technique help lower blood pressure? Muscle relaxation has been proven to reduce it.

Important: If you are taking hypertension medication, check your blood pressure daily with an at-home monitor.

Tinnitus. Instead of taking medication, such as sedatives, to reduce noise in the ear, people with tinnitus can practice the mirror technique and reduce the anxiety that compounds the ringing, buzzing and other sounds they may hear.

Asthma. There are several theories to explain why anxiety worsens asthma. One of the most plausible suggests that anxiety creates constriction of the bronchi (airways of the lungs).

Headaches. Most headaches are caused by muscle tension. Even migraines and menstrual headaches are worsened by muscle tension and anxiety.

Aching jaw. If you have an aching jaw, chances are that it opens far to the right or left instead of evenly. When combined with clicking or locking of the joints in the jaw, headaches and/or dizziness, this condition is known as temporomandibular joint disorder, or TMJD.

If you suffer from TMJD, use a ruler and an erasable pen to draw a vertical line down the middle of the mirror. By looking at the mirror while you perform the relaxation breathing, you can adjust your temporomandibular joint, which connects the skull and the lower jawbone; so that you open your mouth evenly along the vertical line you’ve drawn on the mirror. This corrects the imbalanced muscles and strained ligaments that cause jaw pain.

What kind of job would you do if you did not have a mirror to shave or to put on your makeup? Could you do it? If so, what kind of job would you do? How would you know if you did a good job?