The holidays are upon us. The aunts are loud. Uncle Dave is explaining cryptocurrency again. There are seventeen children under the age of nine ricocheting off the walls like sentient pinballs, and somewhere — mercifully — there is a guest room with a door that locks.
This is the old way. The sacred way.
The Ancient Art of The Disappearing Act
Those of us who grew up with ADHD before it was a personality aesthetic didn't have apps. We didn't have wearables. We didn't have a carefully curated "sensory toolkit" that we ordered from a wellness influencer's Amazon storefront. We had instinct. We had survival. And most importantly, we had a laptop and a YouTube rabbit hole that could swallow three hours whole without even blinking.
The protocol was simple, elegant, and required zero subscription fees:
- Survive the first forty-five minutes of the gathering. Shake hands. Compliment someone's casserole dish. Say "wow, the kids have gotten so big" to a child you genuinely cannot identify.
- Announce — to no one in particular — that you're "just going to grab something from the car."
- Walk directly past the car.
- Enter the guest room.
- Open laptop.
- Watch a twenty-two minute video about the history of parking meters, followed inexplicably by a three-part documentary series on competitive wood carving.
- Emerge forty minutes later looking suspiciously refreshed.
No one asked questions. It was a gentleman's agreement between you, your nervous system, and the hollow-core door with the slightly broken handle that you had already mentally claimed as your sovereign territory.
Enter The Gen Z Vagus Nerve
Now, apparently, this is no longer sufficient.
The youth — God bless them and their beautiful, validated, thoroughly diagnosed brains — have discovered the Pulsetto. For those unfamiliar, the Pulsetto is a sleek, Scandinavian-looking device that clips to your neck and delivers gentle electrical stimulation to your vagus nerve, theoretically calming your nervous system when the world becomes too much.
It retails for the low, low price of more money than your first car.
To be fair, the science is genuinely interesting. Vagus nerve stimulation has legitimate therapeutic applications and researchers are actively exploring its benefits for stress and anxiety regulation. This is not in dispute.
What is in dispute is whether you need to announce it at Thanksgiving dinner.
A Tale of Two Coping Mechanisms
Circa 2003: You excuse yourself quietly, nobody notices for forty minutes, you return having watched an inexplicable amount of content about the Mongol Empire, you feel great.
Circa 2024: A family member appears at the dinner table wearing what looks like a USB device strapped to their throat, opens their phone to a calming soundscape, and explains to your grandmother — who survived genuinely difficult historical circumstances — that the "ambient noise profile of this gathering is dysregulating their nervous system."
Your grandmother, it should be noted, also had ADHD. She called it "being a bit much" and handled it by going to tend the garden for twenty minutes or picking an argument with someone she didn't like very much, which also, in retrospect, was probably stimulation-seeking behavior. Truly we are all the same.
In Defense of the Guest Room
Look. The guest room asked nothing of you. It required no charging cable, no Bluetooth pairing, no monthly wellness subscription. It didn't need to sync with your phone. It simply was — a quiet, slightly cold room with a floral bedspread and a framed print of a lighthouse — and it held you gently while the chaos of thirty-seven relatives raged on the other side of a hollow-core door.
The YouTube algorithm understood you. It knew, somehow, that what you needed at 3pm on a holiday was a forty-minute deep dive into the geopolitical history of a sandwich, and it delivered, without judgment, without asking how you were feeling, and absolutely without suggesting you process the experience in a shared family talking circle afterward.
A Measured Conclusion
Are the new tools bad? No. Is it genuinely wonderful that people feel more comfortable naming and addressing their neurological needs openly? Absolutely. Progress is real and it matters.
But there is something to be said — something quietly dignified — about the person who simply gets up, disappears for an unknowable stretch of time, and returns to the table having apparently watched the entire filmography of a channel dedicated exclusively to restoring vintage hand tools.
We didn't need a device. We needed a door.
And we always remembered to bring the charger.
The author has been "just getting some air" since approximately 2001 and has no plans to stop.