Our bodies are complex biological systems with responses backed by millions of years of evolutionary training. Often these responses are not only unnecessary, but directly impact your ability to live healthily and happily. Biofeedback, or actively monitoring and changing your biological reactions, is an effective tool to help reverse some of this training and to take control of your stress levels.

One big challenge for some involves becoming aware of how your body reacts as it does so that you know what to change. It is in this area that biofeedback devices can help. Here are some reactions which these devices can help you to both monitor and control.

As your stress levels increase, so does your heart rate and breathing. Your body is attempting to provide more nutrients and oxygen in preparation for fight or flight. While this reaction may have been crucial for evading predators or pursuing prey, it is in fact a detriment in most modern challenges.

Biofeedback devices such as heart rate and respiration monitors can help you to visualize changes in these crucial metrics to how your body is reacting to the events around it.

When stressed, our muscles tense in preparation for action. Also, tense muscles are more difficult to penetrate, making it more difficult for predators to injure us. This, too, is vastly useless in most modern situations. Even so, muscle tension is an integral aspect of the body language we use to determine how stressed someone may be, and for good reason.

It can be difficult to be aware of all the tension we carry. It may be more obvious in large muscle groups such as those of the shoulders and back, but the tension we carry in less obvious places can make the difference between low-stress living and daily aches and pains. It is for this reason that many biofeedback practitioners use devices to measure muscle tension. These can help you to immediately see the effects of various actions and techniques upon all the muscles of the body.

Electricity flows through the skin and other organs of the body. In cases of increased stress, the moisture on the skin's surface increases due to perspiration, and the current strength increases noticeably. Known as the galvanic response, this property is used by lie detectors to note the increased stress typically associated with persons who lie (of course, sociopaths are not bothered by lying, so it may not work as well as it does with "normal" people).

In fact, lie detectors double as biofeedback devices. By measuring the tone produced when your finger is placed upon the measuring surface, it becomes possible to measure your own levels of stress. As the tone's pitch lowers, you are gaining control over your biology and causing your body to perspire less, lowering the current strength of the electricity on the skin's surface.

A less externally obvious way that stress affects us is by activating centers of the brain responsible for fight or flight. While we can perceive the effects of such activations in increased heart rate and respiration, the activations themselves can also be perceived thanks to relatively recent technological advances.

By detecting increased activity in the sympathetic nervous system, brainwave biofeedback devices can notice stress before anyone else can. In doing so, you are granted an unprecedented level of awareness and, eventually, control over the way in which your body responds to the trials and tribulations of daily life. This is truly natural stress relief.