The demands of daily life can often be overwhelming, allowing vices to take over. A few cigarettes. A hit or two of the snooze button. That drawer full of candy. Momentary comforts make us yearn for more self-control.
Meet Pavlok, a rubberized wristband containing a built-in mild electric shock system that’s guaranteed to help you break your bad habit within five days. Its name stems from Pavlov, the legendary Russian physiologist known for his experimentation with the digestive patterns of dogs—training them to salivate before food had yet to materialize, proving that they learned to associate food with the people who fed them.
“Our idea behind that is basically associating the shock with a bad habit—whether it’s smoking cigarettes or biting your nails,” says Boston’s Chris Schelzi, the WeWork South Station-based startup’s director of strategy and marketing. “So then all it takes is you thinking about the bad habit, or your craving for it, and you immediately [press] shock and no longer want to smoke the cigarette because you don’t see it as a pleasurable action. You see it as negative and something that you want to avoid.”
How painful does the shock actually feel?
“It’s like if you touch a metal doorknob if you’re walking with socks on a carpet, and you get the little bit of a spark,” says Schelzi. “It’s nothing too intense.”
That shock can be scaled up or down, and the intensity also fluctuates depending on where you’re wearing the device—you can pop the module out of the wristband and into an adhesive patch to wear anywhere on your body.
“The shock is just one of the tools in our toolkit,” says Schelzi. “It’s not the only thing we offer.”
Over the past couple months, the company has been testing out coaching calls with prototype Pavlok-wearers, as a way of providing human interaction and support.
“That’s one of our differentiating factors,” Schelzi explains. “With something like Fitbit, you don’t have anybody holding you accountable. You don’t have anybody to talk to, to answer any questions, to come up with the game plan for how you want to tackle the habits or behaviors that you either want to form or get out of your life.”
Schelzi stresses the importance of “getting people over the idea that you need to be tough, and you just need to grit your teeth” because “willpower is a very finite resource” that tends to dwindle throughout the day.
Around mid-June, Pavlok will be shipping out the 2,000 to 3,000 bracelets from their Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. After that, the team plans to open up sale through their website and talk to different retail partners. Schelzi estimates that a wristband will cost between $149 and $199.
Schelzi says he’s continually amazed by the countless ways a person can incorporate Pavlok into their life.
“Someone just wrote to me today and asked ‘Can Pavlok help me not sleep on my stomach and instead sleep on my back?’ You can for sure do that,” says Schelzi. “Having the masses come up with new use cases for us—that’s a lot of fun.”