Getting stress-related disorders under control: The unique opportunity of neurofeedback-based therapy

Stress-related mental health issues are not only highly prevalent world-wide, but are also associated with a very high disease burden. Moreover, efforts to reduce their prevalence through standard therapy have remained largely unsuccessful, making stress-related disorders a fast-progressing global societal problem that needs urgent attention and new solutions to mitigate it. One potential solution might come from recent advances in neuroscience which have opened the door for new innovative approaches that embrace new insights about the underlying neural working mechanisms of stress and combine them with non-invasive neuro-technology. One particularly promising approach in this field is that of neurofeedback. In this article, we argue that neurofeedback has a unique set of properties which can give a neurofeedback-based therapy approach an advantage over other (standard) treatment approaches, and might make it especially suited for mitigating stress-related mental health issues.