There are many things that could relate to anxiety and irritability, including high fastwave coherence in the front and central areas, excessive beta and/or high beta on the right hemisphere, reversals of beta left/right or front/back, a hot cingulate, or alpha problems.  Training SMR will nearly always have a fairly immediate symptom-relief effect, but it won’t have a longer-term result with other problems that underlie the symptoms.

I’ve been playing around with anxiety problems for quite a while.   There are a variety of brain patterns (right/left beta reversals, front/back beta reversals, hot temporal lobes and even alpha issues.  The question for me is whether there is a distinction between what we might call physical vs. emotional anxiety.  It appears to me that much of what I see is the emotional version.  These are folks who can’t stop thinking, hold a generally negative view of the world (or at least themselves), and/or tend to be highly sympathetic (fight or flight).  However, in looking back at clients who have baffled me, I find another possible category.  These are people who don’t necessarily show the more common issues of emotional anxiety (or may) but have a primarily physical presentation, such as panic attacks or migraines.  These seem to be a different way of expressing the same energy, but many of these people are more parasympathetic with a tendency to freeze in stressful states.

Panic attacks

I see panic attacks as rebounds of the sympathetic nervous system, usually related to long periods of experienced stress.  Breathing (especially RSA breathing, slowing the rate to about 6/minute) and the potential use of heart-rate variability training can both be helpful in terms of re-establishing some strength in the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. It’s also likely that there are activation patterns in the cortex (e.g. hot temporal lobes, reversals, etc.) which represent brain strategies for dealing with this sub-cortical drive, and EEG training should be oriented toward melting away these patterns. I would always suggest doing an assessment and seeing what is there before just grabbing a training recipe. There may be excessive posterior beta, excessive right-side beta, high levels of beta and high-beta all over, high levels of alpha, alpha that does not block when eyes are opened or poor alpha posteriorly (or others, I’m sure). Training the thing that is there which fits with the symptom pattern is, at least in my experience, the surest and quickest way to get a response.  Don’t, however, just do relaxation training, as you’ll discover quite quickly that relaxation usually triggers panic attacks rather than avoiding them.