- Pavlok 2 wearable claims to help reduce cravings and break bad habits.
- It releases a mild electric stimulus and uses aversion therapy to train your brain.
- Business Insider's Abby Tang tested it out for two weeks to see if it could break her nail-biting habit.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Following is a transcript of the video.
Abby Tang: There it goes! This thing is a tiny, unpredictable monster.
I'm Abby, and I have bitten my nails for my entire life. I've tried sitting on my hands, wearing that gross bitter nail polish, fake nails, dating a boy who cared about what my nails looked like, that didn't work. I've tried everything. So, I'm gonna try wearing this Pavlok 2 bracelet to shock myself into giving up nail-biting. I'm hoping that this will at least decrease the rate in which I bite my nails, if not stop it completely.
Let's check it out! Right off the bat, it looks like a Fitbit. Add a habit. We wanna stop nail-biting. And so, I can set it to vibrate every time I lift my hand to my mouth, or beep or zap me. We should probably make it zap me, right? 'Cause that's why we're doing this. There it goes! Yup, when my finger goes to my mouth, it's gonna zap me. I don't like that at all. I'm gonna do this for the next two weeks. It's day one of wearing the Pavlok 2. There it goes. It's very excited to see me. I really, really wanna bite my nails right now. But I also don't wanna be electrocuted. So, I guess this is a pretty good deterrent.
Bad. Unfair. But I haven't bitten my nails, which is actually very impressive. I just don't know how much credit I would give the bracelet. I never got used to it. It was an electric shock. Every time I was doing something, I got shocked probably 10 times as many times for things that weren't biting my nails than were, because it just can't tell a difference between when I'm touching my mouth and when I'm just having my hands at a vertical angle.
So, there's a digital manual for this thing, but I might be old, I guess. I need my paper manual so that I can flip through it, really touch it, feel it, learn it. So, I haven't accessed that. So I have no idea how to troubleshoot some of the glitches that I'm seeing, and I especially don't know what the safety concerns for this guy are. I really wanna get the friend remote working because one of the things I was excited about with this wearable was other people holding me accountable. I had a few coworkers try this on.
Oh! Oh, I didn't care for that at all! Ow!
The shock count is automatic, but the times-you-bite- your-nails count and the times-you-feel-like-you're- going-to-bite-your-nails count you have to manually input yourself. And I don't wanna do that. I'm a little lazy. I don't have time. And then, the automatic one is also counting all the times that it shocks me for no reason. So, it's a little inaccurate. I don't really have a need for that part of the app. After we started this experiment, I saw an ad on Facebook saying that this thing will break a habit in one week. I'm still pretty focused on my fingers. I am very aware that I want to bite them. So, I don't think my habit's broken yet. Honestly, this thing is just reminding me that you don't wanna bite your nails, you shouldn't do that, you're trying to break this habit, and so every time I feel it on my wrist, electrocuted or not, I am aware that I shouldn't do this. So, I don't think we need to shock ourselves.
No! More! Electricity! In my body! We're done. I don't think I used it right, but I used it successfully because I have fingernails. But I don't think my brain was rewired, as the product promises. I think it was probably user error. There's meditation involved, there's, like, accountability activities, which are just, like, writing down the negatives and positives of doing your habit. I don't need to do that; it should just be easier. I don't think I would buy this. I don't think it's worth a purchase. It did work, but I don't know how much credit I can give to the actual device as much as I can give to just having a reminder at all. So, I would just go to Michaels and buy a string.