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Can an Electronic Shock Bracelet Kill Your Bad Habits?
I turned to aversive conditioning to get my time back. It worked.
In the famously horrifying Milgram experiment, often cited as evidence of the depth of humans’ tendency to obey authority, people were told to administer steadily increasing electric shocks to a test subject, to the point of death. People administered the shocks as instructed, even after the person being shocked begged them to stop.
In the experiment, the shocks were fake, thank goodness. But the bracelet I’m wearing on my wrist administers shocks that are very real.
My Pavlok 2 is initially set at its lowest electricity level, 50 volts. When I shock myself, which you do by pressing down on the top of the device, it’s imperceptible.
I bump the shock setting up to 50%, or around 200 volts. This feels like an insect sting. A brief incision of electricity. Uncomfortable, but tolerable.
I try 70%. This shock goes all the way through my body and bounces me a little bit off my seat. It is less tolerable and more something I don’t ever want to do again.
However, for the sake of research, I have to try 100%. I feel like I’m doing both sides of the Milgram experiment at once, but I grit my teeth and go for it: 450 volts.
My response, verbatim, once I recover: Fucking. No.
The Pavlok 2 is a wearable device that allows you to give yourself a “mild electrical stimulus” every time you engage in a bad habit. In my case, that habit was mindless scrolling on social media.
I spend between 90 minutes and three hours every day on Twitter and other social networking sites, according to the tracking service RescueTime. By some estimates, this puts me right in line with the national average, but — like Pavlok founder Maneesh Sethi — I want to put my mind to better use.
Sethi was inspired to create the aversive conditioning device after discovering he was spending 29 hours a week on social media and — well, in his words, “I posted an ad on Craigslist looking for someone willing to slap me in the face any time I got off task… for $8 an hour.”
