Sara Martineau
Licensed marriage and family therapist. Ten years in tech first.
Ten years in tech. Then this.
I know the pace from the inside.
I spent a decade as an early employee at Pinterest, Greenhouse Software and Algolia. I know what hypergrowth asks of the people inside it, and what it quietly takes.
Now I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. I also teach meditation. Most of the people I see work in tech, and many of them come in for anxiety that stopped being occasional a while ago.
Three things, working together.
The body
Where stress lands first.Somatic work starts with what you can feel: breath, posture, the places you hold tension. It's often the fastest route to what's actually going on.
The nervous system
Grounded in the research.What we do is informed by neuroscience, so you'll understand why your system reacts the way it does, and what helps it settle.
Practice
Attention, trained gently.Plain, secular tools from meditation and mindfulness. A few minutes, not a retreat. Nothing you have to believe in.
Reading the signal
Tension, a racing mind, the 3am inventory. Instead of trying to make them go away, we get curious about what they're pointing to. That's usually where things start to move.
Coming back down
Your body already knows how to settle; it just doesn't get the chance. We build on that with a few simple tools you can use between meetings to shift from wound-up to present.
A steadier baseline
Not feeling good all the time. A steadiness underneath that can hold the good weeks and the bad ones, so how you're doing stops depending on how the sprint went.
The work happens on Tuesday afternoon, not just in session.
Clarity in the room is easy. Keeping it at 4pm with three pings open is the real work. We practice in small moments until it carries over on its own.
The goal is that you need me less over time.
Signal,
not noise
Your body has been trying to tell you something.
The tight chest before a launch review. The jaw you only notice on Sunday night. We treat those as information worth reading, not problems to shut down.
If you are in crisis, call 911.