Personal story and the impact of neurofeedback on peak performance
“I'm going to tell you my personal story and how I came about being a neurofeedback provider,” - Angela Martinucci, Founder of Mind Balance and Co-founder of Bay Area Brain Spa, started - “I get that when I was 33 years old, I had two small children at home and I was a personal chef and nutrition consultant for people with special dietary needs. At the time, I was working with kids with autism making special dietary measures for them.”
One day Angela took a shower and felt a lump under her arm that wasn't there before, so she went to the doctor to get it checked out, and they said it was probably just a cyst, and Angela needed to cut out caffeine.
“I was 33 years old, and I had no family history of cancer. I had done all the right things -- I had a healthy cooking blog, I had felt like I was a biohacker before I knew what biohacking actually was or before the term was there. I would tweak recipes to make them healthier and just really always interested in health and wellness, I tried lots of biohacking products and biohacking supplements” Angela continued.
Fast forward, Angela went back because the cyst or the lump didn't go away. She went back and was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer that was already in her lymph nodes and was very aggressive. Angela then ended up on a course of six months of chemotherapy radiation, five surgeries, and shutting down her hormones.
“To being done with treatments, I fell into a black hole. I could not function my brain. I had chemo brain, which is like just thick brain fog that you can’t operate through. I would forget things and trying to manage to have two kids at home. I ended up with depression and anxiety and having panic attacks. At the time, my oncologist prescribed me antidepressants, but I've always been against those things.
“My aunt had a brain tumor removed many years ago and had found something called neurofeedback. She ended up giving me a home system to use. I didn't think anything was happening. I just didn't notice the changes that were happening with me,” Angela highlighted.
One day playing golf Angela realized that she is focused on the game, not on her head and her cloudy thoughts. She was just likable to play golf with more ease.
The founder of the neurofeedback company started golf when he was 50 and became a scratch golfer. So Angela had a thought that maybe that neurofeedback's doing something. She still subtly and seamlessly the changes was occurring, and Angela wasn't aware of what was happening.
“I was serving on the board of directors for a young survivor group in the Bay Area. We were on an overnight retreat, and other young women that were with me diagnosed with breast cancer in their 30s were saying, ‘oh, I gotta go take my Xanax and Ativan and this and that before I go to sleep,’” Angela said.
This statement just hit Angela with the thought of looking in the mirror at what she was like a few months prior. It was this big ‘aha’ moment of maybe this is something that she needs to bring to this community because the answers that we have for this community are not okay: “You just made it through cancer treatments here's a bunch of drugs for the rest of your life.” Angela decided to get trained in the neurofeedback program.
“I got started with NeurOptimal®, and I went to see my oncologist, who is an integrative oncologist in San Francisco. He has a dietitian, an acupuncturist, and a massage therapist working with him, and he goes, ‘wait, what is this that you're doing? You're not doing the antidepressants! Would you like an office here?’
“I ended up just starting working with him right away. I did spend a few years working with cancer survivors and administering neurofeedback while people were on their chemo drip and working with them one-on-one that way,” Angela said.
NeurOptimal® neurofeedback is non-linear dynamical neurofeedback for biohacking your body and biohacking your brain. It works directly with your central nervous system outside of your awareness to optimize the brain. It's passive. There’s nothing that you have to do during the training sessions. You do the training sessions, and cumulatively, the central nervous system builds resilience and flexibility, creating changes over time.
As you've got peak performance on one end and dysregulation on the other, the central nervous system is dysregulated. You can have symptoms like trouble sleeping, anxiety, and brain fog. Your central nervous system is dysregulated, so when you train the brain, you bring this balance and resilience back in, and all these symptoms can sometimes just go away very seamlessly.
I got to a better place along that journey, but then I realized that my social anxiety was with me since my school years going away. I'm able to speak in front of people without absolute panic. NEUROFEEDBACK is an incredible personal growth tool.
“I worked in the integrative oncology office, my business was getting busier, and then I ended up opening Bay Area Brain Spa just seeing clients one-on-one in the Bay Area.
“I did that for a while, and I got involved into the biohacker scene because I got trained as a Bulletproof Human Performance Coach and worked with Upgrade Labs to help prepare them to put this into Upgrade Labs in Santa Monica.
“In one of the studies that we did in the workplace, we bring neurofeedback into the company for stress reduction, and it's effortless to implement The most significant improvement among the people who took part in the survey was in sleep and stress resilience. People start to see stress resilience pretty quickly, which takes a thousand hours of meditation to build stress resilience. neurofeedback doesn't replace meditation, we still want people to meditate, but it can help people even start a meditation practice and experience what that feels like.
“The neurofeedback has been amazing and just incredible for my kids and me. My son was in second grade when he started doing neurofeedback. He had a lot of trouble with focus and hypersensitivity. He was just wholly overstimulated; he couldn't have his hair cut or go into loud movie theaters.
“Neurofeedback just completely changed his life. He's a sophomore in high school right now, but he went from being this dysregulated kid who couldn't focus to a straight student who's super driven on his own. My daughter is a competitive Irish dancer, and so she will do the neurofeedback before her competitions. It helps her feel calmer and just get out there and do her thing on stage,” Angela said.
BiohackingCongress's Team is very grateful to Angela Martinucci for joining the biohacking conference and giving an incredible lecture.
If you want to improve sleep, reduce performance anxiety, feel calmer, and improve focus, please check the biohacking technology NeurOptimal® neurofeedback and get discounts on the section TopBiohacks.
Watch full Angela's lecture on A personal story and the impact of neurofeedback on peak performance, as well as 50+ lectures, panel discussions, and performances from renowned biohackers with a BiohackingCongress year-long subscription. Get your access to a healthy future now! Follow this link.
Based on the lecture by Angela Martinucci.
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