Hey {{ first_name | Reader }},
In last week's email, I told you that parents get one friendship with their children, not two. You can be their friend while they're small, or you can be the adult in charge and hope for the friendship once they're grown.
I've picked the second.
Picking it is easy. Living it at 9 pm on a Thursday night alone is much harder. In 2024, the US Surgeon General issued an advisory on parental mental health. It reported that 48% of parents say their stress is completely overwhelming on most days, compared with 26% of other adults (Office of the Surgeon General, 2024).
If your son or daughter has stopped speaking to you, you know a different version of this. Your mind keeps replaying the last conversation, and your stress doesn't clock off just because nobody needs a bath anymore.
Every time I post a reel on this topic, someone comments some version of the same thing. “Fine, you've pointed out the problem. So what's the solution?”
The standard answer is therapy.
A good therapist can help, but they are increasingly hard to find. Plus, you only see them for an hour a week. The tension tends to turn up when the kitchen's clean, you finally sit down, and suddenly notice your shoulders up by your ears. Nobody books a session for that moment.
What I am about to suggest is one solution, {{ first_name | Reader }}. But it comes with a disclaimer.
Ever since my Instagram took off, I have felt stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to recommendations. On one side, people criticize me for pointing out a problem without offering a solution. And then when I do offer a solution, some people call me a grifter trying to capitalize on people’s vulnerability.
So I take recommending products very seriously.
Nurosym is a small clip for your ear that has helped me and others help manage stress. So when they reached out to me about a paid brand partnership, I was delighted. I could recommend something I actually use myself.
I am sure the dogs are boosting my HRV too!
As they're paying me to write this, read it the way you'd read any advert that’s personally backed by experience. The references are at the bottom.
Gadget companies email me every week, and nearly all of them get a no. The problem is placebo. Strap anything to your body and tell people it works.
The only way to find out whether a device does anything is to test it against a fake version that feels the same and does nothing. Researchers call that a sham.
Good news: Vagus nerve devices make a sham experiment unusually easy. A branch of the vagus nerve reaches the tragus, the little flap at the front of your ear.
The earlobe has no vagal supply. So a trial can clip the active stimulation to the tragus and the identical-feeling fake to the earlobe, and the patients can't tell which one they got.
Stavros Stavrakis and his team at the University of Oklahoma ran exactly that trial with the device Nurosym sells. They recruited 26 women with postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a condition in which heart rate shoots up when you stand. Twelve got the clip on the tragus, and fourteen got it on the earlobe, for an hour a day over two months.
At the end, the active group's heart rate rose by about 18 beats per minute on standing. The sham group's rose by about 32 beats per minute. The active group also had lower levels of antibodies linked to the condition and of an inflammatory marker called TNF-alpha. No side effects were reported with the device (Stavrakis et al., 2024).
Nurosym beat its own placebo in a double-blind trial, which almost nothing in the recovery gadget market can claim.
What Nurosym gives me is an hour in the evening where I sit down, clip it on, and don't reach for my phone. If your head won't switch off once the house goes still or the Sunday Scaries arrive, this might be worth a try.
Next week we're back to the parenting series, with the other way to lose the hierarchy. Thank you for being here.
Hold steady,
Richard
Try Nurosym. You will get 5% off if you use this link.
That’s 5% on top of their 10% discount they are currently running until September 30th, 2026. And they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can test it to see if it’s right for you!
P.S. Nurosym is also known as Nuropod and Parasym in some countries.
Disclosure: This is a paid partnership. Nurosym paid me to write this email, and I earn a commission if you buy through my link. The Stavrakis trial was funded by the US National Institutes of Health, and its authors reported no relevant financial relationships. If you have a heart condition or a pacemaker, or you're pregnant, talk to your doctor before you use any stimulation device.
References
Office of the Surgeon General (2024) Parents under pressure: the U.S. Surgeon General's advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents. Washington, DC: US Department of Health and Human Services. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK606662/
Stavrakis, S., Chakraborty, P., Farhat, K., Whyte, S., Morris, L., Asad, Z.U.A., Karfonta, B., Anjum, J., Matlock, H.G., Cai, X. and Yu, X. (2024) 'Noninvasive vagus nerve stimulation in postural tachycardia syndrome: a randomized clinical trial', JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology, 10(2), pp. 346–355. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacep.2023.10.015