Biofeedback describes a wide range of services used to treat an even wider range of conditions. Biofeedback approaches involve the sharing of information with a patient about what is going on inside of them so they can learn to have greater influence and control over aspects of their physical, emotional and mental functioning. Sensitive instruments are used to gather this information. Although biofeedback emerged as a professional discipline in the 1950s, it has long been known that in order for people to learn they have to receive “feedback” about their performance. For example, while it is possible to learn how to shoot a free throw in basketball with your eyes closed, people learn much more easily and quickly by being able to see the flight of the ball toward the basket, and feel the muscles involved in the throwing of the ball. This enables them to make adjustments to muscle patterns and nerve networks, sometimes consciously but even more so at levels that are outside of day-to-day awareness. This “unconscious learning” eventually leads people to develop greater skill in their ability to make a free throw. In a similar way, clinical biofeedback or applied psychophysiology, as it is also known, activates new learning patterns needed to develop the abilities to manage different health problems.

“Biofeedback” provides a person with information about their physical and emotional functioning using sensitive instruments that pick up tiny changes in the body that are detectable at the surface of the skin. These signals communicate how the body is functioning or responding at any given moment. Much of biofeedback training involves learning how to influence the body's autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS is the major part of the body's nervous system that is involved in regulation of the body's stress response and the nerves of the ANS influence every major organ system in the body. Therefore, the ANS is strongly involved in regulating the way a person responds to any activity or situation that activates the body's stress response. Over time, changes in the body's normal ability to balance the demands for energy conservation vs. energy use (called homeostasis) can lead to the development of a number of disorders through a loss of the body's natural self-regulation abilities.

By receiving feedback about how the body is functioning (i.e. the psychophysiology of the body) a person is able to learn (or re-learn) to make significant changes in blood flow patterns and skin temperature in the body, breathing rates and breathing patterns, muscle tension levels, heart rate activity, and even brainwave patterns (neurofeedback or EEG biofeedback). By learning to influence these physiological functions, clients develop the ability to make significant and noticeable changes in the conditions described below.

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