Biohacking Emotional Regulation
| By Jonathan Roseland |
I'm not a doctor, medical professional, or trained therapist. I'm a researcher and pragmatic biohacking practitioner exercising free speech to share evidence as I find it. I make no claims. Please practice skepticism and rational critical thinking. You should consult a professional about any serious decisions that you might make about your health. Affiliate links in this article support Limitless Mindset - spend over $150 and you'll be eligible to join the Limitless Mindset Secret Society.
My first session with the EmWave2 was a little awkward, at first, the Coherence indicator was a major distractor, so it added to the consummate compartmentalization challenge that is Dual N-Back training.
I used EQPro, a version of the leading Dual N-Back software from IQ Mindware and my friend Dr. Mark Ashton Smith, which trains emotional regulation simultaneously. EQPro is the Dual N-Back task with emotional data that you have to either ignore or remember.
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| HeartMath emWave2 | EQPro |
What these two technologies have in common is that they both train Emotional Regulation, according to Wikipedia:
the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with the range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed.
Training the Emotional Brain: Improving Affective Control through Emotional Working Memory Training
Here we show, using behavioral and fMRI measures, that 20 day of training on a novel emotional WM protocol successfully enhanced the efficiency of this frontoparietal demand network. Critically, compared with placebo training, emotional WM training also accrued transfer benefits to a “gold standard” measure of affective cognitive control–emotion regulation.
To quote a 2014 study of 14 personnel of the San Diego (California) Police Department:
Participant responses were also uniformly positive and enthusiastic. Individual participants praised the program and related improvements in both on-the-job performance and personal and familial situations. The results support the efficacy of the program to achieve its goal of building stress resilience and improving officer wellness by providing practical self-regulation skills for better management of emotional energy.
I'd love to say that EmWave2 and EQPro are synergistic, complementary tools, but making that kind of claim would take running an actual double-blind study that would take the kind of resources I don't have. My experience has been that they are highly complementary tools. I make it a habit to brain train daily and to emWave at least twice daily, so it just makes sense for me to do them simultaneously.
I'm going to continue cross-training with the EmWave2 and brain training software apps and will report results as they develop.
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