I Shocked Myself for Five Days to Break My Internet Addiction

​Optimize your life, get rid of your bad habits, strengthen your will—in only five days!

The inventors of "Pavlok" hope to cash in on a grandiose quick fix with a simple, yet effective armband. It's a wearable that ​electrically shocks your arm with 340 volts each time you falter or sin, which supposedly primitively trains you away from your bad habits.

The five-person American development team christened their concept with the slogan, "Wear Your Willpower." The self-castigation and conditioning armband is ultimately automated through a corresponding smartphone app. And, as an additional bonus for self-optimization, you can have your data sent to friends with the "peer pressure" function, who then track your betterment. All you need is a USB cable to charge Pavlok and about $185 for the entry-level version.

Many seem to be fascinated by the concept. The developers raised almost $275,000 through the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo last year and the first 3,000 armbands of Pavlok's beta version will be sent out starting in May.

Delegating my self-improvement to a machine sounds all too appealing. So, full of anticipation, I had a test version of Pavlok sent to me, ready to subject my everyday life to electroshock therapy. For five days, the high-tech friendship bracelet will become my ego's closest companion, accompanying me as both my sense of self-esteem and of self-loathing gradually rise.

Could 340 volts actually be the fast track to me becoming a better person? Or at least a short cut to effectively penalize bad habits with the hope of getting rid of them all together?

The first step of the Pavlok program is to make a shameless list of all the things I want to train myself not to do.

Pavlok's suggestions reads like a list of all our civilization's quintessential sicknesses in the 21st century. Instead of biting nails, smoking, cursing, or eating junk food, we're supposed to wake up quickly, meditate, be more athletic and also productive.

As I read through the instruction manual, I'm reminded of the education system in Brave New World, where little kids are forced to crawl on electrified flooring to learn to instinctively loathe books and flowers.

My list:

–No unnecessary chatting and finally writing more pages of my dissertation. Having umpteen conversations with acquaintances across all the channels online is only distracting me from my true scientific research.

–Reducing my digital consumption of junk food. That means less gif blogs, but also no more clicking on similarly entertaining websites like Buzzfeed, Twitter and Facebook.

–To finally wake up on time and save myself the torture of the continuous snooze-sleep-snooze-sleep procedure.

–Less coffee. I probably consume about a pound of ground espresso beans a day.

The principle is simple: Every time when I for example feel like I want to drink coffee, I press a button on the armband instead, which then delivers the disciplinary shock. Glancing at a blog, shock! Chatting up friends or tweeting, shock!

In five days everything will be all good, says my Pavlok packaging.

Today it all begins. I'm excited up until the point when I activate my Pavlok for the first time, feel the shock and recoil. Not because I'm scared, but because the thing really does provoke a response. My hand twitches; the tingling shoots out to my fingertips. I thought it would be more innocuous and there isn't even a recommendation for the maximum amount of shocks. Maybe I'm just a weakling and I still have to get used to the little punishments.

The version of Pavlok they sent me to test out is a prototype, and thus respectively less glamorous. The battery, which you charge with a mini-USB, sits in the black armband. There's a copper foil on the inside of the band which rests on your skin. On top there's a button marked with a lightning bolt, which lights up and makes the thing seem like it could be Harry Potter merchandise.

My prototype is the most rudimentary of all the versions up to now—no app, no friends, I have to track and punish myself all by myself. I push the button, the lightning bolt flashes and shortly thereafter comes the electroshock. 340 volts—that's more power than what streams out of the power sockets in Germany—for about a half a second. It ain't pleasant.

I'm going to be spending most of this Monday on a train so I decide to get some work done.

There's a printed out chapter of my dissertation in front of me. I stare at the paper. I'm holding my smartphone in my hand; the screen is still locked.

It doesn't even take twenty minutes for me to have to shock myself. Every time I swipe the phone's screen, I press the Pavlok button and twitch. An older lady, who is on the train to Amsterdam too, gives me a puzzled look.

The name of the high-tech friendship bracelet is obviously an homage to the Russian scientist, Ivan Pavlov. At first glance, the armband seems to be a better-designed version of the classic conditioning neckband used by the Russian behavioral scientists in the famous Pavlovian dog experiments. This physiological concept of learning, in which people are continuously trained through reward and pain, cannot be overlooked when considering this armband.

And Pavlov also fits perfectly into the ubiquitous desire for self-optimization, which has fostered its own category of things, including quantified self, wearable fitness, and smartwatches. In his later work in the early-80s, philosopher Michel Foucault selected the "The Care of the Self" as the highest of all critical human virtues, which the emancipatory society builds itself upon. In times where we all lug around highly efficient mini computers with us everywhere, it sounds all too appealing to delegate self-betterment to a machine instead of putting in the cumbersome work yourself.

The coffee guy with his lovely-smelling cart keeps passing by me on the train. The first time he pushes the warm drinks down the aisle, I prophylactically shock myself to defend against any evil thoughts. The wrinkles on my neighbor's forehead deepen.

So from then on, I try to use the thing more discretely. I order a coffee the third time the cart passes. If I'm going to be shocking myself anyways, I don't really care. At the end of the day, I'm conscious of my weak will power. As a reward, the skin on my wrist is itchy and glows red.

Shocks: 35

Physical reactions: Red, itchy skin on the wrist.

Fails: Drank one espresso, procrastinated online 34 times.

Successes: Seven fewer espressos than usual.

Willpower strength: A little bit more focused on the essentials, a little less distracted.

This morning I got up 45 minutes late after indulging in the snooze function on my alarm clock. Is it a bad habit, a symptom of my exhaustion or the first sign that I've relinquished my free will to an armband?

Nothing was helping me get up. Not my phone, which I'd hidden behind my wardrobe; not my alarm, which I have to hunt down to prevent it from setting off the most penetrating sounds at top volume.

It would be nice if Pavlok could actually help me get better at waking up. Leaving the thing next to my bed so that I can shock myself first thing in the morning doesn't make any sense. But wearing Pavlok to sleep simply leads to me waking up three times in the middle of the night suddenly because, while turning over in my sleep, I activated it.

The retail version of Pavlok comes with an app, which includes an incremental alarm function. It vibrates, then makes a noise and, if you still can't get up, you'll be catapulted into your day with a shock. "Optimize morning ritual" is a nice name for the function, which Chris Schelzi from the development team came up with. He explains to me how he shaped his morning routine according to his wishes with the armband.

His routine recalls the perfect version of an overambitious everyday drill: Get up, take a sip of water, stretch, mediate. If he misses one of these steps, then he gets a shock and in doing so internalizes his perfect morning routine.

The armband doesn't come without some pitfalls while being around other people. I first notice this in a little electronics shop where I'm trying to get the mini-USB cable you use to charge Pavlok. The shopkeeper takes the band out of my hand without asking and, before I can say anything, he's shocked himself.

He drops it, curses and listens to my explanation while frowning. "You taser yourself," he says, without smiling.

Pavlok proves its social incompatibility another time while I'm sitting in a roller derby shop in Amsterdam. I'm trying on roller-skates and the fucking thing goes off again. The bolt lights up, and I can't get it off my wrist in time. At least this shopkeeper laughs at my explanation, it reminds her "of when people wear a rubber band to punish themselves for bad thoughts."

Another thing that I missed I guess. A psychologist tells me that the rubber band technique isn't only used in the spirit of punishing yourself, it's also used therapeutically with borderline patients. Auto-aggression can be channeled into other, controlled tracks.

"Pavlok is a 21st century version of the rubber band," developer Chris explains. "I've spoken to a psychiatrist who is interested in using Pavlok for patients that injure themselves. Pavlok would make it possible for them to receive a controlled shock instead of taking more brutal measures to feel alive."

In terms of my personal undertaking, I'm a bit more successful than the day before. I didn't communicate with anyone digitally today, because to replace each sent message with an electric shock would kind of be like continuously being electrocuted. Instead, I spent the day hanging out on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, but I just read everything in the feeds; I didn't click on any links. So my information level has sunken to that of headlines, which probably indirectly has a positive effect on my small talk.

I didn't drink any coffee, which I realized was a catastrophe that night when I noticed that I hadn't written a single usable paragraph for my dissertation. The printed out chapter is adorned with a few hand-drawn illustrations though now. I take off the band before going to bed. I'll save myself another night of that.

Shocks: 25

Physical reactions: My wrist still itches, eyes burn, headache, fatigue.

Fails: Pavlok didn't help me at all with getting up on time. I've disturbed other people with the armband.

Successes: Spent less time sending emoticons to friends.

Willpower strength: My will is aimed at not falling asleep on the keyboard.

I head off to my office at the University of Twente to finally find out how Pavlok will help me finish my dissertation with complete concentration and top speed. The armband has been working wonders against me chatting online. My online chattiness is doing much better and my digital friend group, which otherwise serves to help me procrastinate, is starting to worry about me. I did take a few more calls than usual though (I don't know whether or not that's better than chatting) and I wrote more personal emails. I'm cheating my way through my penal system: I only shock myself once for each phone call and email.

The catch is that procrastinating doesn't necessarily have to do with your behavior. Now I'm just sitting here staring at the rain. I'm surfing through my thoughts and instead of chatting, I'm having internal dialogue—and I'm really not getting anywhere with the chapter I'm supposed to be writing about our relation to the internet of things.

I recently tried Writ​e or Die for the first time, a practice that promised to turn me into a highly productive writing machine by either punishing me or not, depending on the number of words I write. However it only punished me with sounds (cacophony, alarm, or "horrible") or pictures of spiders, grumpy cats or "office horror." It didn't do anything for me.

Pavlok can easily be charged on a laptop and so it's ideal for the modern desk job worker of today: "You can even charge your PAVLOK while wearing it on your wrist and typing on your computer!" the brochure exclaims.

Sounds promising to the ears of someone who actually thought they would be done with a first draft of their dissertation this year. After three days though, my head is mostly just filled with how much I miss coffee and how tired I am. I'm staring at my computer screen just letting time go by.

Shocks: 15

Physical reactions: My wrist has gotten more red. Little pustules are forming.

Fails: Only wrote five paragraphs, far from a good day.

Successes: None.

Willpower strength: Some people would say I communicated better because I used the phone.

"A few years ago I hired a woman who was supposed to hit me in the face as soon as I opened Facebook," Maneesh Sethi, a cofounder of Pavlok, tells me. He says he increased his productivity fourfold when describing his motivation for developing the Pavlok armband.

My experiment and the way I'm behaving are getting a bit weird. I'm sitting in a coffee house, in a bad mood because I don't know what to order besides coffee. The tables are close together; there's a couple at the next table, happily sipping coffee. Pavlok has yet to enact and changes in behavior for me.

I continue to twitch like a tasered hamster. For some reason I don't feel like sharing my shocks with other people anymore, so I slip into the bathroom, zap myself, and return satisfied and order a coffee.

I'm somehow more irritable than usual, but I haven't really changed my behavior at all. Except for chatting: I'm still shocking myself for each message that I send. What's more of a change is that I keep switching who I'm mad at, sometimes at Pavlok and sometimes at myself for doing the experiment. I have to delegate my electroshock therapy to someone else—it's getting too confusing for me.

In the version of Pavlok that's coming out in May, you can develop a sophisticated punishment system, where your friends can even initiate the castigation signal, if you activate this function for them. Even if my prototype lacks this bandwidth of functions, I can still outsource the responsibility for triggering the shocks to my circle of friends. The friend I ask to push the lightning bolt button is irritated. "What are you doing? Is this some Fifty Shades of Grey trend?"

She is supposed to manage the armband this evening. She will be the one triggering the shocks. But she isn't satisfied. She thinks that the shock should immediately follow pressing the button, when I scratch my face for example, "otherwise you'll never change."

I realize that we're enjoying thinking about the gadget game without ethical limitations as we further discuss Pavlok. For it to really work, the band should be permanently attached to me and should only be taken off after I've been truly conditioned. At least that's what my lovely friend thinks. I shudder at the thought of a future version of Pavlok that's implantable.

After a few drinks the her tone gets a bit gentler and I can even detect a bit of concern in her words. "It's violent, you shouldn't do it. It somehow doesn't suit you. You should change your habits on your own, you're such a reflective person otherwise." Over the course of the evening, the Pavlok turns into more of a joke. Once and a while there will be a shock and then everyone laughs.

Shocks: 25

Physical reactions: Itchy wrist.

Fails: I shock myself and do what I wasn't supposed to anyway.

Successes: Delegating my conditioning to a friend.

Willpower strength: It's good to have friends you can rely on.

Great, today, the final day, I completely procrastinated away—I even procrastinated my Pavlok experiment. This morning, I pushed off the idea of putting on the armband and shocking myself. My wrist has been itching for days and at this point I've had enough.

Instead, I head to the supermarket and buy a chicken leg. I fasten the armband to the dead animal and trigger a few shocks to see how Pavlok effects chicken skin. It isn't enough for a barbecue. Not a productive use of time, but at least I put off wearing the thing myself for an hour. Is it training me to distract myself with more absurd activities than coffee or Twitter?

By the evening, I have a bad conscience. I feel like I just rejected the Pavlok and my willpower too. I make a list of all the offenses and mistakes of the day. I guess about 24, but in light of how weak I am, that's probably a conservative number. I like treating life like an equation. I sit down and work through the day in peace. I shock myself as I cross the offenses off the list. Grouping them makes me realize that there is a certain adaptation effect happening. It reminds me of the hiccups. I still twitch, but I'm no longer surprised. When I take the band off, there's a blue strip on my skin where the battery was touching it.

I'm done. My wrist feels horrible. My skin is burning, it's itchy and my arm has a blue-green coloration where the thing was. Apparently the version they're going to ship will be totally different—because there will be no direct contact between the metal and the skin. The 340 volts caused my problems over the five days, Chris Schelzi explains afterwards. "You need to find your sweet spot," he says. I had to use the maximum charge; in the future the shock strength will be individually regulated.

Shocks: 24

Physical reactions: Discolored, itchy hand.

Fails: Watched world championship roller derby videos instead of writing.

Successes: No coffee and no social media.

Willpower strength: Procrastinate using it.

The first thing I do when I finish the experiment is make myself a coffee. Then I sit down and write. The Pavlok is sitting on the desk next to me. Were the last five days voluntary torture? When trying to optimize yourself in this way, you're not evoking your internal hero, but rather turning yourself into your own bookkeeper. All you need for it, like the American journalist Virginia Heffernan says, is a computer or a certain immunit​y to boredom.

I also have to say that I really can't believe that a person can be reduced to a technically-regulated pain center. Even if teachers have long ago moved past the idea of using violence to raise children, some adults today still believe that they should be forced to be more productive, athletic, healthy, and more relaxed.

Pavlok didn't revolutionize my life in the last five days, but all the same I now appreciate the nice things that for some absurd reason I wanted to give up. My life and my work are both more relaxed when I dabble in some online chatting sometimes and structure my days around coffee breaks. And laboriously crawling out of bed isn't the end of the world.

Unlike the strict Pavlok, an armband that would cheer me on instead of giving me a shock if I didn't look at Twitter for five minutes could immediately become my best mechanical friend.

This story was translated from ​Motherboard Germany.