For this piece, we’ve partnered with Romina Richardson of NeuroRise Health - a Psychotherapist, Coach and Neurofeedback Practitioner.
Romina brings her clinical perspective to the conversation around stress, nervous-system regulation and everyday behaviours, exploring what’s really happening in the body beneath modern pressure.
This collaboration focuses on clarity over noise, science over quick fixes, and making support feel calmer, more human and more accessible.
By Romina Richardson of NeuroRise Health - Psychotherapist, Coach & Neurofeedback Practitioner
Many people come to therapy with a deep and articulate understanding of themselves. They can explain where their patterns began, describe their attachment style, and recognise how past experiences continue to shape present reactions. Yet despite this helpful insight, the same behaviours, emotional responses, and relationship dynamics persist. This often feels confusing and deeply frustrating.
From my experience as a psychotherapist and neurofeedback practitioner, the gap between knowing and changing is not a failure of knowledge or effort. It is more about how the brain learns. Information alone does not change patterns because learning mainly lives in the thinking and reasoning part of our brain, while long-established behaviours are held within the nervous system as a whole – beginning in the brain and extending throughout the body.
Neurofeedback is a form of EEG-based biofeedback that works directly with brain waves and brain activity to support nervous system regulation. By providing real-time feedback, neurofeedback therapy helps the brain learn new patterns of self-regulation that support behavioural change, emotional processing and overall wellbeing.
Why Insight Alone Doesn’t Lead to Change
Talking therapies offer enormous value, supporting people in exploring their depths and making meaning of their experiences. These discoveries are largely processed by the prefrontal cortex (beneath your forehead), the part of the brain responsible for reflection, reasoning, and conscious awareness (Siegel, 2012).
However, many of our most entrenched patterns relating to anxiety, shutdown, people-pleasing, hypervigilance, or emotional withdrawal are held within deeper brain regions that developed long before language. These areas are designed for survival rather than reflection. They learn through lived experience, physiological state, and brain activity – not through explanation alone.
As a result, a person may intellectually understand that they are safe, smart, or valued, while their nervous system continues to respond as though threat is present. This disconnect sits at the heart of the knowing–doing gap.
When Understanding Increases Frustration
One of the most important things to understand is that intellectual insight without nervous system regulation can actually increase self-criticism and frustration. People may begin to believe they are avoidant or need “fixing,” when in reality their nervous system has simply not yet experienced the calm, regulated conditions required for change.
Insight alone does not settle a system that has learned to stay on high alert.
What Is Neurofeedback?
Neurofeedback therapy is a form of brain training that works directly with brain waves and brainwave patterns to support nervous system regulation. Rather than relying on conscious effort, neurofeedback helps the brain learn through direct feedback about its own activity.
This approach focuses on supporting flexibility and regulation in the nervous system, creating the internal conditions required for change rather than trying to force new behaviours through insight alone.
How EEG Neurofeedback Works
EEG neurofeedback uses sensors placed on the scalp to measure electrical activity in the brain in real time. This measuring of brain waves allows the brain to receive immediate feedback – often through images or sound displayed on a computer screen.
By observing this feedback, the brain can recalibrate its own patterns of stress and arousal. This process supports changes across different frequency bands without requiring conscious control, allowing regulation to be learned implicitly rather than intellectually.
Neurofeedback Training and Nervous System Regulation
By supporting the nervous system into states of safety and flexibility, neurofeedback training helps reduce threat activation and supports self-regulation. When the nervous system is calmer, the brain becomes more receptive to new learning and change.
This is particularly important for patterns that developed during periods of fear, unpredictability, or emotional stress. Without regulation, the brain remains in survival mode, making change difficult even when insight is present.
Why Safety Is Essential for Learning New Patterns
Once the “rest and digest” system is activated, state-dependent learning can take place. This refers to the finding that behaviours learned during stress or fear tend to repeat whenever similar states arise, even when we logically want to respond differently.
In moments of perceived threat, the brain prioritises survival. The prefrontal cortex becomes less accessible, leaving older circuits to drive behaviour (Siegel, 2012). When regulation is present, the brain regains mental flexibility, supporting healthier cognitive processing and emotional processing.
Practising new responses while feeling safe allows the brain to update old patterns rather than repeat them.
Neurofeedback, Wellbeing and Lasting Change
Lasting change is not achieved by trying harder or gaining more insight. It happens when the brain is supported enough to experience something different while feeling safe enough to learn.
By working directly with brain activity and nervous system regulation, neurofeedback therapy helps bridge the gap between knowing and doing, allowing insight to integrate and be sustained over time.
References
Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
