I received an email from someone:
“My husband suffers from sleep apnea. Can you help?”
Yes, neurofeedback can help with sleep apnea. Sleep is central to the natural repair and restoration process that maintains each part of our mind and body. Neurofeedback helps the Central Nervous System (CNS) to release old and unhelpful patterns. This allows sleep to renormalize. When sleep renormalizes, your memory will work better, energy increases, and overall functioning improves. You will have better attention, focus, and concentration.
What can Neurofeedback do for sleep?
Neurofeedback returns irregular sleep patterns to normal, improving both sleep quality and quantity. Getting a good night’s sleep on a regular basis provides many benefits.
Problems with Sleep:
Sleep can become disrupted and unproductive in many ways. The occasional interrupted sleep, does not have lasting effects. Problems occur when the disruptions are repeated or chronic.
Repeated difficulties with sleep will compromise your physical health, immune system, and brain functioning. Using caffeine, sugar, and other chemicals to help you stay awake night after night will make the situation worse.
People are often awake against their will. Such problems include insomnia, chronic pain, restless leg syndrome, periodic limb movement, myoclonic twitches, acute injury, bereavement, stress, and certain psychological disorders, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Panic, apnea, and other breathing-related disorders will also interfere with sleep.
Functions of Sleep:
Learning, declarative/factual memory, and emotional processing happen during REM sleep (which happens at the end of each sleep cycle).
Maintain cognitive vigilance – the ability to notice and gather new information.
Maintain the ability to learn – to integrate new information into the old.
Immune system restoration and surveillance. This happens during the earlier parts of each sleep cycle.
Body growth and maintenance. Your metabolic (energy system) and your somatic (physical body parts) are repaired and developed during the nonREM parts of your sleep cycles.
Sleep is primarily a physiologic process that restores both somatic (overall body) and neuronal (nerves, brain) integrity. You are essentially getting a “tune-up” when you get your required number of sleep cycles.
As sleepiness rises, awareness of poor performance declines. There is a decrease in prefrontal cortex activity, which is where our executive functions occur.
These include:
Working memory
Inhibiting responses to distracting stimuli
Connections with hippocampus to help create longer term memory
Interactions with other parts of the brain to produce cognition (thinking)
Attention
Mood regulation
Help understand social situations
Strategic planning
Seeing the big picture while noticing the details
Being aware of one’s situation
If you have any further questions about the benefits of neurofeedback, please contact me at 954-217-2444 x17.
Amanda Levison, MS, LMHC 