ADHD: Can You Experience Time Better with EEG Neurofeedback?

Can Neurofeedback help people experience time differently, and thus to control their impulsivity, cravings, restlessness, and even distractibility?

Image by Kohji Asakawa from Pixabay

Several people I heard from said that they experienced time percep­tion changes or an “evening out in their sense of urgency” when they underwent EEG Neurofeedback training, which feeds back to people their own brainwaves in a way that proponents say will help people learn to control their attentional states.

In Dr. Nina Tassi’s book Urgency Addiction, she talks about how many people in modern society experience a distorted sense of time. This is a characteristic I’ve heard repeated from virtually every ADHD person I’ve interviewed and brought up the subject with. Time, for them, is either going too fast (“on the hunt”) or too slow (“bored”).

In Dr. Tassi’s book, she suggests that what she calls “time-distorted people” can be trained, by techniques that include budgeting rest time, meditation, and other systems, to experience a more even sense of time. This allows them to overcome their urgency addiction, she says.

If this is true, and EEG Neurofeedback turns out to be a high-tech form of accelerated meditation, then it may well be a way of helping people experience time differently, and thus to control their impulsivity, cravings, restlessness, and even distractibility.

Shirley in Houston tells the story of how this technology helped her child:

I was living many parent’s greatest nightmare. I had a beautiful daughter of fifteen who was on a downhill spiral of self-destruction. We had been to two doctors.

The first, a psychiatrist, told me my daughter had a severe personality disorder that would cause her to either commit suicide at an early age or else burn out by the time she was forty. There was, he said, nothing he could do for my daughter, but he could teach me and my husband coping mechanisms to make our lives as normal as possible.

The other doctor, a psychologist, spent six months with my daughter, in private sessions, and I saw no improvement at all.

My daughter had become suicidal, was active sexually, constantly ran away from home, had failed ninth grade twice, and was even kicked out of summer school. She wore black constantly, no makeup, and her hair was always in her face. She slept or locked herself in her room all day, and wouldn’t talk with her family.

I came to some very hard decisions. Some call it “tough love”; I call it the only option left if I were to save my daughter from self-destruction. I presented her with three options (she was at the point where she would no longer go to counseling of any kind). They were:

1. Volunteer for a one-year program in East Texas for troubled youth.

2. Be assigned a ward of the state.

3.    Attend EEG Neurofeedback training sessions, which I had heard might be useful for her.

I gave her thirty days to make up her mind, and those were the longest thirty days I’ve ever spent. Fortunately for me and her, she opted to go with the EEG Neurofeedback.

During our consultation with Dr. Nancy White, Dr. White informed me that my daughter had Attention Deficit Disorder, and explained what it was to both of us.

I remember seeing tears stream down my daughter’s face. She was relieved and sad to know, after all this time and all that she’d been through, that there was help and hope for her future. Because of this diagnosis, Dr. White decided that Beta training would be the best therapy, and my daughter would need to attend sessions three or four times a week for a total of about ten weeks.

It was a one-hour trip to Dr. White’s office. My daughter would sleep to and from the office, four days a week. At first she was angry about everything. However, after the 11th or 12th session, she began talking to and from the sessions.

One day she told me she would like to go shopping. We went to her favorite country western store. I, from habit, started looking over the clothes, picking out her favorite colors: dark browns and blacks. However, to my surprise, she started picking out bright, colorful clothing-the brighter and more colorful the better.

As the sessions went on, my daughter’s personality seemed to change significantly. She started joking around. She would stay out of her room and talk for long periods. Her grades even started improving. By the time she finished thirty-five sessions she was a new and beautiful young woman.

Two years have passed since the sessions have concluded. My daughter has completed enough summer school sessions and corre­spondence courses to graduate on time with her classmates.

Because of her past, she’s had to struggle academically during the past two years. It’s taken great courage and persistence. But every time she came across an obstacle (and there have been many), she’s found the inner strength to pick herself up and charge through it with great discipline and courage.

Even when she felt like giving up, she would pull from the resources inside her and win.

She fully intends to complete college and become a veterinarian or psychologist. She continues to set new goals and sees new possibilities that, before, were unachievable dreams. I now have a new, wonderful, loving daughter with a life full of new beginnings.

Similarly, psychologist Thomas Brownback reports about one of his EEG Neurofeedback patients:

She’d tried to reduce her chronic tardiness by setting her clock ten to fifteen minutes ahead. This strategy was mostly ineffective for her, however, because when she looked at her watch, she’d tell herself that her watch was set fast.

After neurotherapy, however, she found that she was rarely late for things, and had better control of her sense of time.