The Clinical Handbook of Biofeedback: A Step-by-Step Guide for Training and Practice with Mindfulness

This book describes how to apply mindfulness principles to the practice of biofeedback. As a general system for improving mental awareness and self-control, mindfulness can probably help one do anything better, including playing video games or starting a business. Biofeedback, however, is especially well-suited to this assistance, because it depends on learning to influence normally automatic or semiautomatic biological processes, which are themselves reactive to one’s moment-to-moment feelings about success and failure. Introducing elements of mindfulness, as the author explains in detail, makes the process smoother by teaching the client/trainee to avoid effortful striving for control, which generally is contrary to the goals of biofeedback. Mindfulness is a general approach to addressing problems that arise from having a modern human mind built on the foundations of a primate-mammalian-reptilian brain. The disjunctions and errors of reasoning, the deficits in self-control, the self-chastising, and the impulsive and compulsive actions that bring us trouble are all addressable by increasing access to our best judgment. A large part of biofeedback goals involves self-mastery, influencing the physiology to act more appropriately to the current situation, instead of being pulled into time warps of the past or future. Conditioning, catastrophic expectations, and biased emotions activate bodily alarm systems, over and over, for no good reason. In a mindful state, we are more likely to realize this and turn off or modify the alarm along with the needless striving, defenses, or whatever takes over the body for primitive reasons. Reading this book, I sometimes thought that it could be meant to teach biofeedback as an adjunct to mindfulness, rather than the reverse. By re-titling the book and shifting emphasis in the text, it could serve well as a beginner’s instruction guide for mindfulness, with biofeedback included as a way to validate and speed the learning. But the book is primarily a guide to doing biofeedback, with suggestions woven in for integrating the mindfulness approach when appropriate. The Clinical Handbook of Biofeedback is 338 pages long, paperback, and of reasonable size and weight. The price is $60 for the paperback and $43–$49 for an e-book, depending on the source. The book assumes a basic familiarity with biofeedback and psychophysiology, but it does not assume too much: The author states that the book is meant for those who have had at least introductory training in biofeedback. This book would be a fine next step after completing a BCIA 48-hour certification course but also would repay study by seasoned practitioners. The content on mindfulness is not intrusive because the basic principles are very applicable to the process of doing biofeedback. Many of these techniques are already used by biofeedback therapists without even knowing that they’re part of a larger approach to life. Biofeedback aims to expand Inna Z: Khazan