After doing several Neuroptimal sessions with a somewhat-local practitioner, I decided that the drive to her office and the cost was adding up to too much. She was great and all, but Neuroptimal is set up to be extremely easy to use. While I liked her, once I realized that I could rent a Neuroptimal machine for a lower per session cost, the 2 hours of driving and the cost just wasn’t worth it any more.
I decided to rent a professional machine. It worked out to be nearly $1,000 due to the price and the shipping. However, with that I did about 30 session which works out to about $33/session. My sessions with the practitioner were $70/session.
Here’s my experience with renting the machine.
There are two versions of Neuroptimal. Professional and Personal. The differences seem to be set up to make sure the Neuroptimal people make a lot of money rather than anything that meaningful. My understanding is that they work the same on your brain.
The Personal System: The main differences are that the Personal system is cheaper but more limited.
The Personal system comes with a limited number of sessions loaded on to it. This is true whether you buy it or rent it. The places that rent these generally give you 20 sessions/month. That might be enough for some people, but many people might want to do more sessions than that and they may have family and friends they might want to try it as well.
While I haven’t used the personal system, my understanding is that you don’t get any graphs or charts or analysis with it.
The Professional System: It is about twice the price but has no limitations in terms of the number of sessions when you buy or rent it.
I went with this because I really didn’t know how many sessions I wanted to do so I wanted to be able to have that flexibility. I also wanted the graphs and charts and analysis tools.
Unfortunately, I found out later that these tools are basically useless. But I’m still glad I went with the pro system so that I could do more sessions and at least see what the analysis said.
Charts and graphs don’t mean much, apparently.
After seeing large changes in the analysis and graphs I reached out to the company that rented me the machine. The woman there said that really we shouldn’t look at these. That the creator of neuroptimal was going to remove those features in a future version. And that they really just cause confusion and you should just focus on how you’re feeling.
Well, for my analytical brain, I didn’t like hearing that.
I want to see progress!
I want to be able to know somethings working and this really took some confidence away for me. Nonetheless, I tried to give it a shot and have a positive attitude about just listening to how I felt.
An interesting aside, the factor that made me see changes in the graphs was that I had been taking ginseng for a cold that I got right about the time the neuroptimal arrived. So, I did about a weeks worth of sessions while on ginseng. When the cold cleared up I stopped taking ginseng and the analysis and graphs showed that my brain was much worse! This prompted me to reach out to the woman who rented me the machine.
A big reason I rented the professional machine was so that I could take screenshots for this blog and share the progress graphically here. But after being told they were basically useless, I thought that might just make things confusing for everyone.
On to how I actually felt…
Most of the time doing the sessions made me feel mentally tired.
The fact that feeling mentally tired was one of the symptoms I’m trying to improve was very disconcerting.
You might think at this point that this neuroptimal thing was a bust of an experiment. However, please read on…
I began to think about the fact that it was making it tired and realized that they do call this “Brain Training.” I realized that I had been doing the sessions in the morning. What if, I thought, my brain WAS getting a benefit but I wasn’t seeing it because doing it in the morning was bringing my energy down due to working my brain really hard.
So, what did I do?
I switched to doing sessions before bed.
That made a big difference!
Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this until the end of my rental period and was only able to do it for a few sessions. Maybe about a week’s worth or less.
The difference it made was that I felt much more mentally well rested during the day. It seemed to be helping me sleep better which then was really improving my mental function the rest of the next day.
Mental energy is something that I think is really important for me. It helps me be more motivated and intentional. When I’m mentally tired it seems like I don’t have as much self control. This results it procrastination etc.
So, what’s the verdict?
For me, Neuroptimal definitely helped. It has given me a boost in mental energy and improved my sleep.
These are definitely subjective and by no means statistically significant, but they are significant for me.
Here’s to hoping that these benefits will persist long term!
As a side note, I’m thinking of starting a neuroptimal rental service since there aren’t a lot of them and I think I could help more people get access to this technology. Comment if you’d be interested!