Imagine if your watch could shock you every
time you indulged in a bad habit.
Well now it can.
Everyone has bad habits they want to break:
drinking, smoking, shoplifting expensive underwear
from department stores. A new product promises
a supposedly quick solution, not unlike attaching
a car battery clamp to yourself. “Pavlok”
is a $199 device you wear on your wrist that
shocks you with between 50 and 450 volts to
create negative associations with “bad habits.”
According to the New York Times’ Jennifer
Jolly, at its worst Pavlok “feels like getting
stung by a bee with a stinger the size of
an ice pick.” Just download the app, choose
your bad habit and get-a-zapping! The company
that produces Pavlok says it takes at least
5 days to blast the bad habit out of you.
Its creator, an entrepreneur named Maneesh
Sethi, raised Pavlok funding on IndieGoGo
and from angel investors. He’s only now
planning clinical trials of the device, despite
the fact that 10,000 people have already used
it. So, by my math, that’s $2 million he’s
made without any regulation or review. Let’s
be clear: this isn’t electroconvulsive therapy,
like they did to that poor lady in “Requiem
For A Dream.” No, Pavlok purports to be
based on the research of Ivan Pavlov. Get
it? Pavlov? Pavlok? Anyway, this kind of training
is called “classical conditioning,” and
led to psychological theories about how it
might work in us humans. But hold up, while
some conditioning relies on punishment instead
of rewards, Pavlok is more like aversion therapy,
where a patient learns to associate discomfort
with an undesirable behavior. Kind of like
in “Clockwork Orange” when Alex is electrocuted
and given nauseating drugs so he’ll associate
his violent urges with sickening feelings.
It’s been used in real-life to treat alcoholism,
smoking addiction, and even… homosexuality…
back when it was considered a “sexual deviation”.
Yeah that doesn’t work. But what about drinking
or smoking? Would Pavlok work on that? Some
hospitals have reported success with aversion
therapy and one’s even interested in using
this new device. But the long-term success
of aversion therapy is questionable and its
use in abusing patients is still criticized.
So until Pavlok’s been further studied,
we don’t know if it’s any better than
just snapping a rubber band on your wrist.
Doctors recommend other, long-term therapeutic
options for dealing with your bad habits.
What do you think? Would you buy one? Let
us know on social media. And if you want to
learn more about the latest in torture, wearable
devices and psychology, make sure to visit
us every day at now.howstuffworks.com.
