When your brain doesn't want to work, it doesn't want to work. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. First off, we've had several days in a row of brain-draining high heat. And then with brain injury, doing too much has a habit of catching up to you. Just because my brain shows welcome levels of plasticity doesn't mean things will forever improve or that I'll never have fatigue setbacks. It sucks, but there it is.
I did though get my heart rate down to 100 during today's brain biofeedback, get my HRV (heart rate variability) up to 2.5 on the LF (low frequency) bar, the highest I've achieved so far, and had my HRV beginning to look the way it's supposed to, in sync with my breathing. I've never seen that before! Usually my heart ignores my breathing and does its own wonky thing.
Another up side: my trainer set each of the first three screens (from HRV with eyes closed to the first neurofeedback screen) to run for four minutes. That is a lot more than I've done so far.
I also did feel my brain working hard in the first neurofeedback screen (bowling). I paid attention to the pins not just the bowling ball this time, to see if it would increase my gamma brainwave power.
It did.
I got the highest ratio ever too.
But I paid for it with a headache under the CZ electrode, a touch of nausea, and faintness. The latter two are familiar feelings to anyone with a brain injury, especially when improving and during the initial months of cascading injury.
Today, for the first time since I began gamma brainwave biofeedback, I rested before biofeedback and after. It was like my original days of brain biofeedback back in 2005 – 2007. But like when training the body, eventually you need to rest so that improvement can happen.
| Date | Baseline | HRV EC | HRV | Fdbk 1 | Fdbk 2 | Fdbk 3 | Fdbk 4 | Fdbk 5 | HRV EC |
| 27 Jun | 0.83 | 0.88 | 0.90 | 0.90 | 0.91 | ||||
| 4 Jul | 0.85 | 0.90 | 0.91 | 0.94 | 0.898 | 0.90 | 0.84 | ||
| 10 Jul | 0.85 | 0.92 | 0.89 | 0.86 | 0.84 | 0.86 | 0.83 | 0.86 | 0.90 |
| 11 Jul | 0.95 | 0.94 | 0.86 | 0.88 | 0.93 | 0.95 | HRVEC 0.98 |
0.94 | |
| 17 Jul | 0.91 | 0.97 | 1.05 | 1 | 0.94 | 0.96 | 0.97 | ||
| 18 Jul | 0.97 | 0.99 | 0.97 | 1.05 | 0.93 | 0.94 |
