What Is Sleep Recovery?
The dictionary definition of the term disorder is: “to derange the physical or mental health or functions of”. And given that most people usually hear the term disorder while sitting in front of a medical or psychological professional, it carries a subtle yet powerful message along with it that you, the patient, are somehow broken and, or out-of-control and in need of “treatment“. The current treatment approaches now in vogue for insomnia are sedative hypnotics like Ambien and Lunesta and an anti-psychotic called Seroquel. All of which seem to work for a short period of time or carry a multitude of side effects.
But are we really broken and in need of all these sleeping pills?
It’s been brought to our attention time and time again when working with Sleep Recovery clients that not only are they not “deranged or broken”, but in fact the exact opposite is usually the case. They just needed for someone to listen closely for a change and show them a different way. This other way is called neurofeedback. How it works is simple; Allow the brain to meet itself in the mirror, then give it the right environment to choose intelligently to reorganize and re-balance itself …and viola! Sleep is recovered. Many of these clients needed no more than a simple, bio-electrical tune-up on their brain and central nervous system to do the trick. Their off the sedative hypnotics and sleeping just fine. In a nutshell, this is what Sleep Recovery Training is all about.
So how does it work?
As opposed to overnight sleep studies, Sleep Recovery Training is done during the day or early evening. Sessions last about 40 minutes with the results carrying over in the clients nightly sleep cycle. The sessions are painless, non-invasive and carry little to no side effects. Two sensors are placed on the scalp, much like very sensitive microphones that listen in on the faint electrical signals inside the brain. (No electricity ever enters the brain). The software then analyzes this brainwave data and does a Google-like search of the entire brain, in real-time. The software algorithm searches for misalignment’s or “wobble” in the EEG data that may be responsible for the clients sleep problems. The search data is then fed back to the brain itself, (again in real-time) through headphone music with little skips and scratches embedded, teaching the brain where it needs to re-align itself. The human brain is so self intelligent, it catches on very quickly that this mirror can be used to optimize it’s own performance. And it starts doing so usually in 3 sessions or less. This is a difference between the terms disorder and recovery. The brain is choosing the necessary corrections to recover its own restorative sleep cycles. “Treatment” with sleeping pills or talk therapy are not part of this process.
A controlled study conducted in 2004 at the Norwalk Hospital Sleep Disorder Center in Connecticut showed significant improvement in sleep quality (using this exact method) in chronic insomnia sufferers, compared to a control group receiving placebo. The National Institute of Mental Health in Washington D.C. is doing a similar study on neurofeedback due to be released in the summer of 2010.
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