Inna Khazan

Inna Khazan, PhD, BCB, BCB-HRV

2-day workshop
Date: TBD

Workshop Title

Integrating Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback, Mindfulness, and Compassion into Practice

Workshop Description

Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback (HRVB) is a powerful treatment modality shown to be effective at alleviating numerous psychophysiological conditions and enhancing multiple areas of performance. HRVB provides a way to work with challenging conditions in cases for which other interventions have been unsuccessful, such as chronic pain, anxiety, depression, headaches, and trauma. HRVB is also effective in improving emotion regulation, resilience, adaptability, and ability to make decisions and problem solve under pressure.

At the same time, HRV biofeedback treatment itself can stall, leaving the client and the therapist feeling frustrated and unsure of how to proceed. These challenges include situations when the client is highly anxious about his/her physiological symptoms, feels pressure to “do things right,” becomes easily overwhelmed with emotional stimuli, or is simply too distracted to attend to the computer screen for more than a few minutes at a time. Oftentimes, these challenges are due to the clients’ unhelpful efforts to control the fundamentally uncontrollable aspects of their internal experience, and harsh judgments of their ability to perform.

Mindfulness and compassion-based approach to HRV biofeedback can help people experience change through mindful, non-judgmental awareness and compassion, providing the therapist and the client a way to work with what gets in the way of biofeedback success. In this workshop, participants will learn how to integrate heart rate variability, mindfulness and compassion-based skills into their clinical or performance practice in order to help their clients reap the benefits of biofeedback without getting stuck in unproductive attempts to control their internal experience.

Furthermore, recent research points to the close connection between heart rate variability and compassion, with higher HRV associated with greater ability to experience and express compassion, and greater compassion associated with better ability to self-regulate and respond to challenges in helpful ways. Integrating mindfulness and compassion interventions into HRV biofeedback provides an opportunity to approach the same goal from two directions.

In this workshop, participants will learn how to use, assess, and train HRV, how to use HRV measurements to evaluate effectiveness of interventions, and ways to integrate mindfulness and compassion skills into biofeedback practice. Powerpoint presentations will be supplemented with plentiful demonstrations, experiential exercises, and questions and answer periods.

Learning Objectives

1) Describe the concept of heart rate variability and ways to utilize HRV tracking and training in practice.

2) Discuss the concepts of mindfulness and compassion.

3) Introduce skills necessary for integrating mindfulness and compassion into biofeedback.

4) Apply mindfulness and compassion skills in optimizing health and performance

About Inna Khazan

Inna Khazan, Ph.D., BCB is a clinical psychologist, and faculty at Harvard Medical School. She maintains a private practice in Boston, working with clients on optimizing their health and performance. Dr. Khazan is recognized as a pioneer in the area of mindfulness and acceptance based biofeedback, and is the author of Clinical Handbook of Biofeedback: A Step-by-Step Guide to Training and Practice with Mindfulness.