Muscle Tension Biofeedback

You probably know from experience that stress tends to manifest in the body as muscle tightness - literally tension - and that an important aspect of relaxing is letting go of that tension. However, relaxing your muscles can be difficult, because often it isn't easy to be aware of tension, or to feel the results of your efforts to relax. I know from clinical experience that often, trying to relax actually increases tension.

Muscle tension is both a very simple and very powerful biofeedback parameter. Simple because it's usually easy to relate the graph that you see on the computer monitor to your subjective experience. Powerful because it can really reveal the mind-body connection - even stray thoughts on a stressful theme can give rise to involuntary tightening that you wouldn't ordinarily be aware of.

Muslce tension can be detected via its electrical correlate, which is known as EMG (for electromyography). We simply attach sensors to the skin. Stress-related muscle tension tends to appear around the face and shoulders, so the most common placements are on the forehead (this picks up tension around the eyes, jaw and scalp) and on the wrist (this picks up tension held the shoulders, arms and hands).