Of all the human conditions, sleep and insomnia are perhaps the most mysterious. Scientist’s are guessing as to why we sleep, and for what purposes, but one thing is certain, without out a sufficient amount of it, everyone is more or less heading for trouble.

Sleeping Woman

The human sleep system is quite complicated. We are not wired for perfect sleep night after night. Our circadian sleep clocks will deliberately create small amounts of sleep deprivation to “set up” a better nights sleep for the following cycle.

This ebb and flow can sometimes confuse people in thinking they have an insomnia problem when they actually don’t. Over time, this confusion, mixed with anxiety, can create a kind of phobia about not sleeping and produce an insomnia problem where none would otherwise exist.

Thanks to economic shifts in lower income and fearful spending habits due to the great recession, we American’s now average about 5 hours per night. This is much less than the 6.5 to 8 hours needed to perform optimally during the following day. The anxiety caused by constant worry of finances and the future greatly effect sleep and can create significant imbalances in the brain and body.

For example, the right hemisphere of the brain naturally produces a bio-electrical frequency range of 12-15 hertz, specifically to keep the entire central nervous system is a state of relaxed equilibrium. This worry and stress can diminish the brains ability to produce 12-15 hertz, if left unchecked long enough, will destabilize sleep. After only two nights of short sleep, a person can can be as impaired behind the wheel as a drunk driver.

Sleep medications like Ambien or Lunesta do not address the bio-electrical aspects of insomnia. These meds, known as Z-drugs have a mechanism of action that promotes the production of a neurotransmitter called GABA. Neurontin, the most widely used GABA agonist on the market, has the very worst reputation for withdrawals than nearly any drug available.

What this tells us is that trying to treat insomnia with GABA drugs is a slippery slope to say the least. Put simply, the attempts to treat insomnia and anxiety with GABA promoting medications has been a complete failure.

According to a study sited on Wikipedia, “A survey of patients using nonbenzodiazepine (Z drugs) and benzodiazepine hypnotic users found that there was no difference in reports of adverse effects which were reported in over 41% of users and, in fact, Z drug users were more likely to report that they had tried to quit their hypnotic drug and were more likely to want to stop taking Z drugs than benzodiazepine users.”

There are, however, non-drug approaches to addressing the deficiency of 12-15 hertz in the right hemisphere of the brain. One such treatment approach is called neurofeedback, also know as brainwave biofeedback. The human brain, in and of itself, is a highly intelligent organ. It actually knows when certain brainwaves are amiss.

The problem is that the brain has great difficulty correcting these (and other) brainwave imbalances on it’s own. It needs an outside mirror to “see” itself and the neurofeedback training process provides just that.

Several sensors are placed on the scalp that read the brainwave activity in a particular region. In the case of a 12-15 hertz deficiency, the area most assessable is the center and right hemisphere of the neo-cortex. Neurofeedback for insomnia is unique in that, as opposed to negatively effecting GABA on a neuro-chemical level, it trains the brain to this frequency range, thus balancing GABA naturally without drugs.

As opposed to overnight sleep studies, sessions last about an hour and are performed during the day or early evening. The results then carry over into the nightly sleep cycle.

A number of scientific studies have been produced on the use of neurofeedback for insomnia and anxiety. They can be found here.