Biofeedback: From Curiosity to Mastery
Daniëlle Matto, BSc, BCIA BCB-HRV
2-day workshop
Date: to be confirmed
Workshop Title
Biofeedback: From Curiosity to Mastery
Workshop Description
Busy lives, lack of exercise, bad posture and a reduced capacity to recover can cause a wide range of physical and mental symptoms, like headache, stress, insomnia, IBS and anxiety. One of the key components in treating these clients is to retrain body awareness, to strengthen the parasympathetic (rest & digest) nervous system and to teach self-regulation skills.
A learning process starts with curiosity. While most clients complain about their body, you could say that the body is actually complaining about the client. The use of biofeedback as part of the treatment offers an excellent method to show how every thought, emotion or activity creates a bodily reaction. The next step is to invite the client to sense these body reactions, to look for ways to influence them and to create the right level of tension or relaxation, depending on the situation.
This practical workshop offers valuable insights about mind-body interaction and practical techniques to teach body awareness and self-regulation skills, based on measuring muscle tension, respiration, heart rate, blood volume amplitude, skin conductance, and hand temperature. For each body signal you will learn powerful awareness and training exercises, which can be performed in the clinic with a multimodal device or by the client with wearables and home devices. Mastery of these exercises allows the client to change the complaining body into a resilient body with a healthy stress-recovery balance.
Learning Objectives
1) Present a psychophysiological approach to symptoms, caused by the client’s dysfunctional use of the body.
2) Provide the participants with an understanding of the modalities of biofeedback, including surface electromyography (sEMG), Respiration, Blood volume (heart rate and amplitude), Skin Conductance, and Temperature.
3) Demonstrate how to use these sensors, stand-alone or combined, to create body awareness and to teach self-regulation skills.
About Daniëlle Matto
Danielle Matto works as a holistic oriented psychologist and BCIA certified biofeedback therapist (BCB-HRV) in mental healthcare. In her private practice she offers short-term treatment, combining general biofeedback, HRV biofeedback and audiovisual entrainment with psychological techniques (ACT, solution focused therapy, stress management). For the last couple of years, she added lifestyle and motivational interviewing to the mix. She treats patients with depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, stress, burnout, IBS and hypertension. From the beginning of her career, she is fascinated by biofeedback: “the power of showing your client the effect on the body of changes in thoughts, feelings and behaviour is enormous. It is the best way to create awareness of your autonomic state and to learn internal self-regulation skills: the ability to adjust your psychophysiological state to the demands of the situation and to be able to recover from autonomic imbalance”. In addition to her clinical work she is a teacher and BCIA accredited mentor. She has been actively involved in the Biofeedback Federation of Europe from its founding in 1995 till 2012. She remains a member of the BFE advisory board.
