toonishwarhead/Getty Images
When I pay too much attention to the litany of wellness data that my watch, phone and mattress topper collect, I get stressed out. And now, I can measure that, too.
Regulating our own stress response, and optimizing against it, is now popular enough to have a name: neurowellness. The practice was even recognized as a top trend of 2026 at the most recent Global Wellness Summit. Upward of 200,000 videos on TikTok carry the hashtag #nervoussystemhealing.
Gen Z prioritizing mental-health care more than other generations, despite the high price tag
More than ever, we are embracing devices that show us how stressed out we are, and apps that tell us what to do about it.
While monitoring my own stress levels sounds about as poor a calmness strategy as to tell my anxious friend to “just relax,” the new field of neurowellness does meet the moment. Self-reported stress levels are at historic highs, doubling globally over the past two decades. And from this comes a massive business opportunity.
A new wave of consumer neurotech is claiming to zap you into equilibrium by stimulating the parasympathetic pathway: the part of your nervous system responsible for resting and digesting, and the counterweight to the sympathetic nervous system, which regulates fight or flight.
There is SONA, an earpiece that delivers nerve stimulating pulses through the ear, based on your heart rate variability and breathing. Nuropod also clips to the ear, stimulating a single nerve branch to summon the whole parasympathetic system. Apollo Neuro, a sleek wristband, sends vibration through the wrist. Pulsetto seems to offer the bluntest approach: gel pads on the throat, delivering mild electrical current into both sides of the neck.
Then, there are the stress trackers. StressFace, which puts a live stress score right on your watch face based on Apple Health data, and notifies you when stress spikes. Welltory and Elite HRV track heart rate variability, and both explicitly frame their output as a stress score.
So, how much promise do these apps and devices hold for helping us chill out?
The vagus nerve stimulators could be useful to some, said Christine Gibson, a family physician and the author of Modern Trauma Toolkit, a book on stress regulation techniques. But a paucity of clinical trials show its effectiveness at the individual level.
Stress fluctuations, or fluctuations between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, are normal. These variations help us perform in intense moments, and in turn help us wind down when it’s time for bed.
But wanting external help to reduce stress levels is not a new thing. Dr. Gibson already uses methods that are less invasive than vagal nerve stimulation in her practice: breathwork; EFT or emotional freedom technique tapping; listening to pink noise and brown noise (variants of white house with different sound frequencies); applying something cold up against the chest or neck; or singing and humming to a playlist.
She particularly likes alphabet shopping as a meditation technique: visualizing a supermarket stroll, and shopping for an item that starts with every letter.
Dr. Gibson is not so bullish on the trackers. Most of these tools interpret one’s stress by measuring heart rate variability: the fluctuation in time between heart beats. A low heart rate variability can result from constantly high stress levels, but it’s not a perfect science, and involves lots of guesswork. For example, she said, you could have a really fit person with a high HRV, a marker of good health indicating a low resting heart rate and ability to achieve a high heart rate during exercise, but it doesn’t mean they are not stressed.
The flipside: if these apps allow you to better track your stressors and calmness strategies, and give you good feedback, that could be helpful, she said.
“But it can’t be the whole thing, because what you want to do is tune into how your body is feeling, and if you’re relying on hardware to do that, you’re not really understanding your own nervous system to the point where you could know what’s shifting.”
Worse, there can be unintended consequences: if something tells you you’re stressed, that can increase your stress level.
Paul Lespérance, a researcher at the University of Montreal, agrees that we are not yet at the point where these devices can be considered universally useful for nervous system regulation. Even the premise that stimulating the vagus nerve reduces stress is not airtight; the relationship is more complicated than that.
Modern life may push us toward sympathetic dominance and higher levels of cortisol, the hormone responsible for stress response, he said. But what the body ultimately needs is not an abundance of parasympathetic activity. It needs normal homeostasis, meaning the ability to regulate itself.
That is not to say the advent of neurowellness, or the devices emerging from it, is a dead end. The field remains intriguing.
“We’re keeping an eye on it,” Dr. Lespérance said. The real appeal of watches and phones, he argues, may be their ability to make tiny, continuous measurements – the promise of what researchers call digital phenotyping.
In a research setting, there are plenty of studies showing that sensitive physiological readings are possible. The harder part is translating those measurements and using them to make routine, meaningful adjustments that improve well-being, something that the wellness industry has raced ahead to do.
The technology may become more useful once it can learn the patterns that are specific to an individual, rather than treating everyone’s nervous system as though it operates the same way. “Maybe in 20 years,” Dr. Lespérance said.