Self-regulation training to help you learn to calm your body and mind before bed, for children from age 5, teenagers and adults, in Brétigny-sur-Orge, near Paris.
Sleeping badly is not just about how long your nights are. Insomnia shows up as difficulty falling asleep, night-time waking or waking too early, with fatigue, irritability and reduced concentration during the day. Often, it is a state of hyperarousal that makes it hard to let go: racing thoughts, a pounding heart, tense muscles.
In children, the difficulties take other forms: bedtimes that drag on, fears at bedtime, night waking, nightmares, restless sleep. They are common in children with ADHD, anxiety or autism, and affect attention and mood the next day. Evening screens and irregular schedules keep them going.
Sleeping well depends on being able to “wind down”. Biofeedback makes the body’s tension-related signals visible in real time: heart rate, breathing, muscle tension, electrodermal activity (skin conductance) and skin temperature. You learn to slow your breathing, achieve cardiac coherence (heart coherence breathing), relax your muscles and warm your hands, a sign of relaxation. Neurofeedback complements this non-invasive, drug-free training: immediate visual or audio feedback helps the brain adjust its level of arousal, by reinforcing the rhythms associated with calm that were identified during the assessment. You can then use these self-regulation skills in the evening, at bedtime.
Step 1
An in-depth initial interview focused on sleep (schedules, routines, screens, naps, night waking), questionnaires (sleep with the SDSC for children, anxiety with the BAI, attention with the SNAP-IV) and a quantitative EEG (qEEG) compared with a normative database. A sleep diary kept for one to two weeks before the assessment is very helpful. Find out more about the programme or how the qEEG assessment works.
Step 2
A protocol in which biofeedback plays a major part (cardiac coherence, breathing, muscle tension, electrodermal activity, temperature), combined with personalised swLORETA Z-score neurofeedback (19-channel) or two-channel neurofeedback. The one-hour sessions take place once or twice a week.
Step 3
Halfway through, a mid-point qEEG assessment is compared with the first. Together with the repeated questionnaires and the sleep diary, it helps track how quickly you fall asleep, night-time waking and how you feel during the day, and then adjust the protocol.
In France, the 2006 guidelines on insomnia in adults from the French National Authority for Health (HAS) and the SFTG (a French GP training society) list biofeedback among the methods that have shown evidence of effectiveness in chronic insomnia, alongside muscle relaxation, stimulus control and sleep restriction; the last two are considered the most effective. Biofeedback-assisted relaxation aims to reduce hypervigilance and may make it easier to fall asleep, particularly when insomnia has an anxiety component.
For neurofeedback, the results are more mixed. A double-blind trial published in Brain (Schabus et al., 2017) compared 12 sessions of sensorimotor rhythm (SMR) neurofeedback with 12 sham sessions in 25 adults with insomnia: perceived sleep improved equally in both conditions, with no objective change in sleep. A meta-analysis of seven randomised trials (Recio-Rodriguez et al., Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2024) likewise finds no additional benefit of neurofeedback on perceived sleep quality: the comparison conditions, which included cognitive behavioural therapy and other forms of biofeedback, did at least as well.
Sleep may, however, be a useful focus when attention is involved. In a study of adults with ADHD with no placebo group, published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Arns et al. (2014) observed that sensorimotor rhythm neurofeedback reduced the time taken to fall asleep and sleep complaints, and that these improvements went hand in hand with improvements in attention.
Training works better when daily life supports it: regular schedules, daylight in the morning, physical activity during the day, screens switched off well before bedtime, no stimulants in the evening and a soothing bedtime routine. For children, parent coaching helps put a reassuring structure in place. We work alongside your GP (family doctor) and, if needed, with sleep professionals. Our “Attention and sleep” guide (in French), offered free with The Élan Neuro Letter, our monthly newsletter, brings together practical pointers for parents. Soon, the Élan Minds app will help you stay on track between sessions.
Sleep is often linked to other difficulties: see also our pages on anxiety and stress, neurofeedback and ADHD and neurofeedback and autism.
Children from age 5, teenagers or adults who struggle to fall asleep, wake during the night or get up tired, with or without a diagnosis, particularly when stress, anxiety or ADHD are part of the picture. Some signs call for medical advice first: snoring with pauses in breathing, marked daytime sleepiness, restless legs. In that case, we refer you to your doctor or a sleep specialist.
No. Biofeedback and neurofeedback complement medical follow-up without replacing it. A sleeping pill or any other medication should only be stopped or changed with your doctor’s agreement.
Allow around thirty one-hour sessions on average, once or twice a week: qEEG assessment, about fifteen sessions, mid-point assessment, then about fifteen more sessions.
Yes, and we encourage it. The slow breathing you learn in sessions, at around six breaths per minute, can be practised for a few minutes every day and at bedtime. In sessions, we use measurements to check that you are doing the exercise correctly.