Conventional wisdom suggests that an anxious person needs to be calmed down.
In addition to traditional psychotherapy and drug therapy, treatments of anxiety disorders include low arousal training methods, such as progressive relaxation, autogenic training, meditation, and biofeedback. Individuals in meditative states exhibited high-amplitude alpha activity and a deeply relaxed psychological and physiological state. Based on these observations, biofeedback training focused on increasing alpha activity for patients with anxiety disorders. It was found that some people with high alpha amplitude also reported high levels of anxiety. In view of this inconsistency, EEG biofeedback in the treatment of anxiety disorders was largely given up by clinicians in favor of EMG biofeedback.