How Vibration Therapy Can Improve Your Cognitive Function
Vibration therapy is on the rise and has been shown to have several body and brain benefits. If you haven’t heard of it, or just aren’t quite sure how it works, this post is for you. Let’s delve in and explore whether vibration therapy could become part of your brain health arsenal.
What is Vibration Therapy?
There are broadly two main types of vibration therapy. These are:
Whole body vibration therapy (WBVT)
As it sounds, this is where vibrations are experienced throughout the entire body. The user will either be sitting, standing, or lying on a vibrating platform or plate with something to hold onto for stability. In certain cases, there will be instructions to maintain a specific posture or perform a type of exercise whilst the treatment is taking place.
Targeted vibration therapy (TVT)
Conversely, targeted vibration therapy is where treatment is focused on a specific area of the body. This could be the head, legs, back, etc. Users will usually be using a wearable or handheld device to control targeted vibrations at a range of specifically tailored frequencies.
How Does Vibration Therapy Affect the Brain?
Alongside a whole host of body benefits including increased bone density and faster muscle recovery, vibration therapy can have a significant impact on your brain. It has been specifically studied concerning improvements in the symptoms of those suffering from:
Parkinson’s Disease
Other Neurological Diseases
Fibromyalgia
Chronic Pain
Depression
Stress
Headaches
Migraines
and many more!
How Does It Work?
You might be wondering how this type of therapy affects the brain.
Let’s take the example of Parkinson’s disease:
Vibrations can lessen the pain experienced as part of the disease by disrupting pain signals that travel between the brain and nerve endings.
Those with Parkinson’s can also see a reduction in the tremors associated with the condition for similar reasons.
Another way in which the vibration can help is by increasing the dopamine levels in the brain. A lack of dopamine in the brain is a primary cause of the disease, and thus a reduction in its overall symptoms can be felt with the increase that occurs from the vibration therapy.
So as you can see, vibration therapy can be useful in treating stress and depression by increasing dopamine levels.
And it can help to tackle chronic pain and associated disorders by disrupting pain signals to nerve endings.
It can also help increase the levels of the hormone Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), lower levels of which are linked to many chronic and neurodegenerative diseases.
What Does the Science Say?
In this case study, vibration therapy was indicated to alleviate the symptoms of neuropathy.
Whole body vibration therapy even showed improvements in the cognitive functioning of young healthy adults in this study.
This study demonstrated improvements in depressive symptoms when participants underwent a regular WBV routine.
There’s still more to be done, but the results of research into vibration therapy for the brain so far has uncovered some very promising findings.