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RELAX! Enhance Rest, Optimize Recovery, and Improve Sleep for Peak Performance in Athletes, Professionals, and Clinical Populations

About

Brendan Parsons, MSc, PhD, BCN

1-day workshop
Date: April 13, 2024

Workshop Title

RELAX! Enhance Rest, Optimize Recovery, and Improve Sleep for Peak Performance in Athletes, Professionals, and Clinical Populations

Workshop Description

Optimizing performance is a multi-faceted domain that requires not only improving cognitive, behavioural, emotional, and physiological mechanisms during a performance, but also demands optimized rest, recovery, and sleep.

Some of the most efficient approaches to optimizing performance begin with ensuring the availability of all possible resources, and this necessitates proper rest, recovery, and sleep. The energetic requirements for optimized performance are well known; in the context of fatigue, it is essential to consider the brain’s disproportionate consumption and the consequences of depleted resources.

These same mechanisms are also relevant during training and performance; the level of arousal required to achieve and maintain peak efficiency is a dynamic equilibrium between stress and self-regulation. Enhancing these abilities is beneficial across an athlete’s entire daily routine, season, and career.

What about clinicians? Athletes are far from the only population seeking optimal performance, and these individuals often forget about the “down” side of peak performance: rest, recovery, and sleep. Athletes are not immune to dysfunction and comorbidities; this workshop will also benefit clinicians and give new perspectives on client/patient management.

Many modalities will be discussed during this workshop, with a particular focus on qEEG and portable biofeedback systems (for example: heart rate variability and electrodermal).

Learning Objectives

1) Become familiar with the fundamentals of rest, recovery, and sleep

2) Learn the physiological and neurophysiological correlates and mechanisms of stress
and fatigue

3) Review the scientific literature on rest, recovery, and sleep enhancement

4) Acquire appropriate assessment and training methods using biofeedback and
neurofeedback

About Brendan Parsons

Brendan Parsons, M.Sc., Ph.D., BCN, has a doctorate in psychology – neuropsychology and cognitive science from the University of Montreal. Certified “BCN” since 2009, he has a decade and a half’s worth of experience in the fields of biofeedback and neurofeedback. Extremely lucky to have been a part of the BFE early in his career, he had the lucky opportunity to be trained by world-recognized experts such as Dr. Robert Thatcher, Drs Lynda and Michael Thompson, Dr. Paul Swingle, Dr. Johanne Levesque and Dr. Mario Beauregard.

His experience in biofeedback and neurofeedback applications extend to athletic domains (with the Vancouver Canucks of the National Hockey League, Olympic and Paralympic athletes from Canada, the United States and Sweden), to that of business and leadership performance (for example with the International Consortium of Master of Business Administration; CIMBA).

His preferred practice and specialty remain clinical applications. He works with children, adolescents and adults; AD/HD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder), ASD (autism spectrum disorder), learning disabilities, emotional and behavioural regulation problems (anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder – PTSD, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder – OCD), chronic pain, sleep disorders, tinnitus…

For years, Brendan worked at Neurodezign, a leading clinical practice in Quebec, Canada. There, he became an expert in neurofeedback and in qEEG interpretation, helping design and implement the methods utilized in this practice and in a number peer-reviewed research studies demonstrating the efficacy of neurofeedback and other related neuroscientific techniques.

He is a proud member of the BCIA since 2009. He is also proud to have contributed to the development of the Biofeedback Foundation of Europe in his early days in the field. Since 2010, he has taught various levels and methods of biofeedback and neurofeedback to professionals around the world.

Concerned with the growth of the field and the need for robust empirical support for applied techniques, he has contributed to several clinical research studies and continues to be involved in ongoing works in collaboration with a number of Canadian universities.

Co-founder of the first company to offer a French-language BCIA-certified neurofeedback course in France, he is currently invested in the development of NeuroLogic, his latest co-founded project. His mission remains helping professionals in various fields integrate evidence-based neurofeedback techniques into their practice.