She didn't know exactly what was wrong with her, only that something was — and that whatever it was seemed to involve the brain. So she did what she always does when she needs to understand something. She read.

The brain consumes 20% of the body's oxygen — despite making up only 2% of its weight. It's the first organ to feel the difference when supply runs short. Researchers have been looking at hyperbaric oxygen and the brain for decades.

The logic she arrived at was simple. Her problem seemed brain-related. The brain depends on oxygen more than almost any other organ. So she wanted to try a chamber.

The first problem was dose. The standard 1.3 ATA pressure that most home chambers run at didn't agree with her — she'd tried it more than once. She decided to find the lowest dose her body could tolerate, and start there. The trouble was, nobody she asked seemed to know whether running a chamber at lower pressure was even possible.

She asked everywhere — forums, Facebook groups, sellers, practitioners. Mostly silence; sometimes vague answers. She kept asking.

Then, in passing, a stranger online mentioned that you don't have to fully close the manual relief valve on a chamber. Leave it open a little, and pressure stabilises lower. That was it. That was the entire piece of information she had been searching for.

Then came the second problem: actually buying a chamber.

In Europe there were almost no options. The two brands she could find were priced between €17,000 and €50,000, and even getting a number out of them required a long email chain. Nobody published the cost. Nobody explained how the system actually worked, or what the parts were. The technology was framed as something complicated and high-tech, when in fact the basic principles are not complicated at all.

She ended up buying a used chamber from the United States. Wiring money overseas. Hoping the seller would ship it, hoping it would arrive, hoping it would work. And hoping that customs wouldn't add thousands in import duties nobody could quote in advance. What came was a tiny tube she could barely sit up in, with three locks so stiff that operating them took real force every single time. She eventually had to give up on it. No warranty. No support. No plan for what to do if anything broke.

Slowly, she developed her own protocol. What she learned along the way — about dose, about how individual the answer really is — became part of how Brain Spa thinks today.

That experience — a market that made buying nearly impossible, and a technology that nobody had ever explained — is the founding reason Brain Spa exists.