Some of Meghan Markle’s neighbors and employees in her luxury Montecito development wouldn’t mind a bit if they lowered their stress and anxiety levels. On the other hand, it is too late for Charles, William, the members of the British royal family and the courtiers who, being under his command, had to put up with mood swings, complaints, discomfort, obsessions and capricious demands in five in the morning (some still refer to it as a “Californian hysterical”).
Without getting into who’s right in the Windsors’ war, the mainstream family or the Santa Barbara exiles, the Duchess of Sussex appears to have acknowledged she has a problem: she’s been photographed wearing an anti-stress and anti-anxiety patch on her left wrist, popular with the actors, athletes and biohackers, the millionaire entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley stubborn to “optimize their bodies” to live as long as possible.
Meghan’s patch is the best possible advertisement for its manufacturer, the firm NuCalm, which promotes it in an almost impossible-to-understand jargon, and basically says that it emits beta frequencies into the brain that, thanks to a complex combination of algorithms , physical and mathematical laws, reduce levels of anxiety and stress, and facilitate – with the help of headphones, a mobile application, special glasses and music – “a restful sleep of twenty minutes is equivalent to two hours of they are normal”.
NuCalm says football coaches, Golden State Warriors basketball players, Federal Express fleet pilots and members of the military wear their patches to reduce stress, relax, get their work done in the best possible conditions or fight post-traumatic stress syndrome. But in appearance it is nothing more than a round sticker with a symbol, like the ones children wear, which makes it difficult to imagine how it “processes biological signals and sends them from the wrist to the brain, with neuroacoustic software that uses the oscillations and vibrations to alter the mental state in a positive way”.
The scientific – and not so scientific – community is divided over Meghan’s patch between believers and non-believers, just as there are those who place their faith in alternative medicine or Chinese medicine and those who believe that it’s a story Professor Edzard Ernst, of the University of Exeter, accepts its merits in combating anxiety and stress, but his colleague Guy Leschziner, of the Department of Neurology at Kings College London, does not give credit to the claim that twenty minutes of “NuCalm sleep” is equivalent to two hours, and says that it rather seems like “pseudoscience”.
The most skeptical see hidden cat in the cost ($30 per month) of the application needed to access the software that sends the vibrations, oscillations and biological signals to the middle pericardium (a traditional acupuncture pressure point) through its neuroacoustic technology, without any wires or needles, and in the $80 the company charges for a pack of miraculous (or scientific) patches. In any case, for Meghan, the basketball players and the biohackers of Silicon Valley, it is not an exorbitant amount, considering the thousands of euros spent.
Without going any further, the Duchess of Sussex, in the photo in which she appears with her anti-stress device, wears Chanel shoes and an expensive Hermes scarf.
A placebo for the gullible, a lie like the old elixirs of eternal youth or a success of alternative medicine? Anything that soothes Meghan, the Windsors say, is welcome.
