The Best Stress Biohack That Exists, Vagus Nerve Stimulation … — how to reduce stress and tension

Emanuel Silber
3 min readMar 18, 2021

NuCalm promotes itself as neuroscience-backed tension and sleep technology. In practice, though, it just helped me nap. I simply now awakened from a delightful 20-minute nap. Really, it was more of a 10-minute half-nap half-trance, preceded by ideas of what I needed to accomplish today that slowly dissolved into the types of non-sequitur visions that take place in that earliest phase of sleep.

Why I was so fixated upon events of this age throughout my session is a mystery to me, however regardless, I believe I still went to sleep for about 5 minutes. Strangely enough, a FAQ area of the app specifies that memory recollection is a typical characteristic of “theta brainwave variety,” and that remembering memories in this phase permits you to dissociate negative feelings from them.

Overall, NuCalm did allow me to take ideal little afternoon naps in a structured way. I am good at taking a snooze as it is, however I do believe something about NuCalm, whether it be the discs or the sounds or the timer, made those naps more reliable than normal. One glaring issue with NuCalm, nevertheless, is its price.

Magdalene Taylor is a junior staff writer at MEL, where she started working 2 weeks after finishing college. Her work is a blend of cultural analysis and service, covering whatever from reconsiderations of low-brow hits like Joe Dirt and Nickelback to modern special needs concerns, OnlyFans and the types of minor concerns about life like why child carrots are so wet.

According to the business, 30 minutes of NuCalm amounts to two to 3 hours of corrective sleep. The NuCalm site boasts that the de-stressing treatment takes simply 2 minutes to administer and less than 5 minutes to attain its effects, making it the extremely definition of a fast repair.

With its sleek site and claims of modern, borderline-magic outcomes, I half expected my NuCalm experience to happen in the actual future or, at extremely least, a facility that reeked of sci-fi vibes. I think I was imagining an office that appeared like the ship from Passengers and a bulky set-up similar to the memory-implanting tech from Overall Recall or perhaps even a coffin-like pod right out of The 5th Aspect.

Instead, my NuCalm experience began in a (actively) dimly lit waiting space that looked more like the living space of an eccentric, well-traveled college professor than a medical facility. The doctor was fashionably late not with another patient, simply in getting to the workplace. While the tardiness may usually have actually annoyed me, here, it appeared like part of the experience, nearly like a sneak peek of the outcomes of the state-of-the-art treatment that awaited me.

Throughout a short consultation, the medical professional discussed the NuCalm procedure and summed up the science behind it (more on that later). The essence of the system, I discovered, was this: I would chew a tablet of gamma-Aminobutyric acid, or -aminobutyric acid (or GABA, for short), an inhibitory neurotransmitter indicated to reduce activity in my anxious system.

I was resulted in a small examination space (or, perhaps, a big closet), where I was offered a big GABA tablet and informed to chew however not swallow it while the doctor queued up the binaural beats and connected the Biosignal Processing Disc to my wrist. Finally, after what seemed like a much longer time period than it perhaps could have been, I was informed to swallow the GABA vitamin sludge, which had the artificially sweet, fruity taste and distinctly milky taste and texture of Flinstones vitamins that are a few months past their expiration date.

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