In order to help students reduce stress, MU has been offering a biofeedback program called “enBalance” since 2010.
“This program allows you to watch on a computer, in real time, how thoughts and emotions affect your heart and nervous system,” said Kirstin Steitz, a Student Health Center office support staff member, in an email.
Simply by seeing what is happening in the body, patients can learn how to modify themselves in order to better deal with stress.
MU’s licensed psychologist Jeff Tarrant said the biofeedback program could help students to deal with test anxiety and sleep problems, as well as to improve their academic performance, attention and concentration.
“Biofeedback is a generic term for anything that we use to get information about our physiology,” he said. “It is usually to measure things that we don’t normally think of under our control, or things that are automatically adjusted in our system.”
Those, for example, include blood pressure, brain wave and skin temperature.
Terry Wilson, the director of health promotion and wellness of the Student Health Center, brought the biofeedback program for stress management and Tarrant to MU last year.
“Biofeedback is very concrete,” Wilson said. “It motivates (students) to continue to do the skills that actually help to reduce stress.”
The skills include breathing techniques and meditation, she said.
Tarrant also said watching biofeedback can increase the awareness of how a person handles different thoughts, breathing and feelings that affect one’s physiology.
What is new in this semester are that those biofeedback skills are also taught in learning strategy classes and students can take the classes for credit.
“We are exploring some of those ideas in the future,” Tarrant said. “We also want to offer it in the residence halls, or maybe in some of the Freshman Interest Groups.”
Tarrant said he and a team of his students had made a presentation on the biofeedback program for a grant on campus Oct 6.
“If we would be able to get the fund to expand the program further, we want to involve more students in becoming trainers in the program,” he said. “So they can train other students as well as involving students in the research.”
The “enBalance” program is open to all MU students who want to learn skills to manage their stress.
“I don’t know any students that are not stressed,” he said. “They are all stressed.”