We are frequently asked about ways to make training sessions better or what tools can be used to improve and extend the results of neurofeedback training. The following is our commentary. It is not meant to be comprehensive.

Trainer Improvement Tips

Neurofeedback is good Zen practice (at least with brain-trainer designs) for the trainer. The main job is to be aware and NOT ACT any more than necessary. In the early sessions, after letting the client try to find the state himself, you might coach some during the breaks, suggest things to try or watch. After a few sessions, your main job is occasionally to ask a question. It doesn’t take long before I’m just there watching. Of course by interfering a lot in the training, you can stretch out or even block that process.

Bored Clients

This is one of my favorite training issues. I guess it must be related to the cultural changes that have made news into entertainment, homework assignments now being done by finding internet sites, etc. As astonishing as it may seem to many people, not ALL of experience is meant to be entertainment.

If this client can’t simply relax enough to enjoy interesting and colorful patterns unfolding when he’s supposed to be calm and relaxed, that’s probably exactly WHY he needs training. Imagine sitting where I do, watching the ocean, wave after wave, all pretty much the same color, hour after hour, day after day. BOOORRRINNG. And how about being married to the same person or having the same friends or working in the same job for years or decades. Unbearable.

Of course, people with short attention spans get bored quickly with even the most expensive “games” available for NF training–and even with regular video games eventually.

I would explore with your client why he finds it depressing to watch something pointless, like a flower garden or a sunset or a child sleeping. That’s kind of interesting.

Training Oneself

It can be daunting to be both trainer and client at the same time. Especially when you are just starting off as a trainer, you can easily spend a lot of energy fiddling with the electrodes or the software or ANYTHING to keep from just paying attention to the feedback, without judging or evaluating, without thinking or trying. It’s hard to do that–at least for very long. So new trainers (and, I must confess, guys who’ve been training themselves for a couple decades as well) focus a lot on all the technical issues and hope to see “changes” in the EEG readings.

In almost 30 years, I’ve never had a client come to me and say, “I want to get rid of this pesky fast wave coherence in my frontal lobes.” When I do a training plan, if I see that pattern in a client with obsessive thinking or compulsive behaviors or anxiety or generally being tired and burned out, then I’ll put it on the plan to try out. Training it just because it’s there may be helpful, but how will you know?

You know by asking the client–even if the client is yourself–what am I feeling? I do this in the breaks between training segments. I notice and feedback changes I see in the client, posture, level of tension or fidgetiness, facial expression, ability to communicate with me. And I ask him (and ideally an observant friend, partner or family member) to let me know any little changes they noticed in the 24 hours after a session. I get them LOOKING for changes and reporting them (usually be email). I just finished with a man who trained with me for a week. We tried a number of different approaches based on his assessment, but though he loved the trainings, he didn’t notice anything different. In a break during the 10th session, when I asked him what had happened, he began explaining to me how he had been able to become the observer in his own mind for the first time he could ever remember, seeing thoughts as if they were encased in bubbles, and just letting them go by. That told us how to continue, what to train, and he made remarkable progress.

As far as what results a client “should” experience from a training, I don’t answer that question. The question I’m interested in is “what DID the client experience. If I tell a client, “this will make you feel X”; then, when I ask in a training break, some portion of them will tell me they noticed X because they think they should have. Another group looks so hard for X that they miss it when A, B and C appear.

If you are getting clean signals and have done an assessment and decided what to train based on that, then focus for a while on being the client instead of the trainer. Most of the brain-trainer designs are pretty automatic, setting thresholds for you, so once you feel the feedback level is comfortable, just forget the screen. Set it to pause every 3 or 5 minutes, depending on what you are training, and look inside yourself. Jot down notes. Don’t need to write an essay. Then do it again. When you find something you like that you think is related to positive things happening for you, stay with it until you cannot train it for a week or two, and the positive effect remains. Then you know the brain has established a “new normal” state for itself.

Client Stories

Long ago when I had my offices in Atlanta, we used equipment that had a tendency from time to time to go south. One day a young man and his mother came for his session, and, despite our best efforts, the trainer and I could NOT get the machine to work at all. I was about to send them home after explaining to the mother what had happened, but when we went into the training room the client was sitting quietly in front of a blank screen (monitor was turned off), leads on his head, both he and the trainer staring intently at it. We went back into the waiting room and hung around for about half an hour until they came out. The kid was very pleased with himself. The trainer had told him that he thought the boy might be ready to try invisible neurofeedback. He had done a number of sessions. He had an experience of what he felt like when he was scoring. So, the trainer told him, just look at the screen and make the computer (which was turned off) beep. The kid did. They took their usual breaks and discussed how many points the kid had gotten in each training segment, etc. All the usual stuff.

Pete’s Story

I can tell you my own story briefly. I was 45 when I stumbled into neurofeedback. I was fairly successful in my life, though I had already been through a number of different careers (not just jobs) ranging from carpenter and professional photographer to hospital administrator and consultant. I was very good at certain types of thought, but if I had to do anything like a budget or a plan, or keep track (in years past) of homework assignments and (more importantly) get them done on schedule, I had a great deal of difficulty. I started working on my own head simply because I wanted to learn how to do neurofeedback to help a client I was working with in starting his own neurofeedback practice, and I couldn’t find anyone else foolish enough to let me hook them up and train them. The process is, as suggested in another response, a lot like standing at the bottom of a mountain and looking up. Fortunately, I came at it rather like I came at raising children: with total ignorance and no sense of everything that was involved. I just took it a step at a time: how do I put on the electrodes? then how do I turn on the software? etc. With a little help, I actually got the software going and started off with a simple basic training which fortunately worked okay for me. I kept doing it, partly because I began within about 8-10 tries to notice that some things about the way I thought and made it through the day were changing. I stopped after 35 or 40 sessions because I had gone on vacation with my family for a couple weeks and been unable to train, and I noticed that the changes (which were also noticed by others we were visiting who had known me for years) were stable even without the training sessions.

Of course, that was a long time ago, and I’ve done thousands of sessions since then, trying all kinds of protocols to see how they work and feel. My wife was grinding her teeth at night, biting her nails, having almost constant panic attacks, etc. I worked with her for about 25 sessions, and those problems were gone.