When in Lisbon! ☀️🧠
SONA CSO @tony.steffert took to the International Neuromodulation Society conference this week for discussions about everything in the field.
Conversations like these are crucial to make sure SONA stays at the forefront of latest developments in the field.
#neuromodulation #vagusnerve #neurotech #sonahelp #neuroscience
Running a deep tech neuroscience company centred around the nervous system is not calm work.
There’s an irony I sit with every day. I make a device that helps regulate the nervous system, and my nervous system is constantly being tested.
So I’ve had to get deliberate about what works in terms of actual, repeatable practice that’s grounded in the science. If you’re a fellow founder, I’m sure you can relate!
1️⃣SONA every morning and evening for ten minutes. It’s not a ritual for the sake of having one. The vagus nerve stimulation primes my parasympathetic nervous system before the day starts and settles it back down before I try to sleep. My HRV tracks whether it’s working. Usually, it is.
2️⃣Music at 70bpm, no vocals. There’s real neuroscience behind this: tempo influences cognitive state and lower BPMs loosely sync with resting heart rate, holding the brain in a focused state of low arousal. I put it on when I need to think clearly and stop fighting the noise.
3️⃣Lists, seriously! Everything out of my head and onto paper. This is a productivity habit with direct neuroscience behind it: working memory has finite capacity, so when it fills with unresolved tasks, your prefrontal cortex starts to throttle. Writing it down closes those open loops and frees up the cognitive bandwidth you actually need.
4️⃣Notifications off. The anticipation of a notification alone is enough to fragment attention, meaning your brain is already partially elsewhere before it even arrives.
None of this is groundbreaking, but the gap between knowing and doing is exactly where most founders quietly lose their calm.
What’s the one thing you protect no matter what the day throws at you?
#SonaHelp #VagusNerveStimulation #NervousSystemRegulation #FounderWellness #HRV
Can 10 minutes actually reset a yoga instructor’s nervous system?
Even for those who teach others how to breathe for a living, some days are just loud.
Love this testimonial from @danilunayoga ! From elevated heart rate to deep chill mode. After sitting with SONA for ten minutes, the shift in her physiology was almost immediate.
The SONA companion app is designed to work in tandem with the device, using specific soundscapes that prime the brain for relaxation while the earpiece delivers a personalised pulse.
This dual approach creates a multiplier effect on the nervous system, which is why we encourage our users to pair stimulation with other “calm cues” that push the body into the parasympathetic ‘rest and digest’ state.
We’d love to see the potentials for combining VNS with yoga: while yoga uses movement and breath to tone the vagus nerve, SONA provides a direct signal to the same pathway. Combining the two helps the body move out of a sympathetic state and into deep recovery much faster than either could alone.
A ten minute session can turn a high-pressure day into a grounded one.
#SonaHelp #vagusnervestimulation #nervoussystemregulation #yogarecovery #HRV
Tension ➡️ calm in 10 minutes.
Many of our users experience an immediate shift in state within their first ten minutes of using SONA.
After one session @sarahcarolidesnutrition ‘s HRV data showed a clear upward trend and she felt a sense of calm return. While this immediate relief is a vital part of the experience the real power of vagus nerve stimulation lies in the long term.
Think of that first ten minutes as a signal to your nervous system that it is safe to downregulate. When you repeat this daily you are not just getting a temporary boost in recovery. You are essentially retraining your autonomic balance.
Our data shows that while most feel a change quickly, the most significant results happen over weeks of consistent use. This is where we see the baseline HRV begin to climb and the body develop a higher threshold for stress.
The goal is to move beyond just managing a busy day, so that our users are building a nervous system that stays resilient regardless of the pressures they face.
Are you more interested in immediate stress reduction or building long term resilience?
#SonaHelp #NervousSystemRegulation #Biohacking #HRV #StressManagement
We’re celebrating our first 1000 sessions from our early adopters, AKA 1000 sessions of nervous system intelligence 🎉🎉🎉
🧠Here’s what your nervous systems are telling us so far:
🔹An average HRV increase of 10ms in every session, about an 18% jump from baseline level. This shift is a tangible indicator of the body moving back into balance. Many users are recording significantly higher.
🔹We’re also seeing the emergence of “super-users”, our top 20% of users who are seeing a dramatic jump in their data during SONA sessions, well beyond average.
This is just within the first month of use, and over time we expect baseline HRV to climb, stress recovery to become faster and that calmer, more focused state to stop feeling like a session outcome and start feeling like a default as the nervous system retrains through vagus nerve stimulation over the following weeks and months.
For the people who came to SONA burned out, struggling with sleep or simply carrying too much cortisol for too long, that’s the shift that matters, and we’ve loved hearing all your stories so far about better sleep, less stress and higher HRV.
If you’ve noticed any jumps in your HRV, better sleep or a calmer state of being, we’d love to hear about it in the comments!
And to our early users and followers, thank you for all your support and feedback so far: it truly means the world to us 🌍💙
#SonaHelp #HRV #StressReduction #Biohacking #SleepTips
For calm before and after competitions 😌
Before wingfoiler @xavi.corr hits the water, he gives his nervous system a head start, using SONA pre-training for a dose of focus to get him in the zone.
Most athletic recovery protocols address the muscles, but few address the autonomic nervous system running everything underneath. The applications of vagus nerve stimulation aren’t just limited to stress and sleep. Before a session, it primes parasympathetic tone for sharper focus and cleaner decisions. After training, it pulls the body out of cortisol overdrive and into the rest and digest state, where HRV climbs and real adaptation happens.
This makes it a crucial training tool for people like Xavi who are constantly pushing their body to the limits.
How do you use your SONA?
#SonaHelp #VagusNerveStimulation #AthleticRecovery #Biohacking #NervousSystemRegulation
Can you share your SONA with others? Yes!
We are currently facing a stress epidemic and our goal is to get SONA onto as many ears as possible.
There are two things to remember to keep the experience effective for everyone:
👉The physical hardware can be shared between multiple people.
👉Every person needs their own separate app account.
The technology is designed to learn your unique nervous system. It reads your specific heart rate variability and respiration patterns to find the optimal stimulation window for your body.
If two people share one account the data becomes mixed and the AI cannot provide the same level of precision. By using separate accounts the device continues to refine its understanding of your biology while your partner builds their own profile.
By separating data we can ensure the support remains as individual as the person using it.
#SonaHelp #VagusNerve #NervousSystemHealth #Biohacking #StressRelief
We’ve tracked more than 1000 SONA sessions 🤯So, what are we learning so far from our first users?
1️⃣More is not always better when it involves the nervous system. Targeted, well-timed sessions far outperform longer ones with higher intensity settings.
2️⃣The stimulation doesn’t have to be stronger; it’s how we apply it that moves the needle.
We’ve found that our early user results point to one thing: precision matters far more than intensity.
Co-founder @eliot.frazier describes this process like tuning an orchestra: when everything locks into one rhythm, the system starts to self repair and self organise. Coherence begins to emerge from the noise.
This is why SONA uses AI to find the optimal timing and length for each session. We are looking for the specific window where your biology is most receptive to change.
A ten minute session at the right time is often more effective than an hour of intense stimulation at the wrong moment.
That’s why we encourage our users to test different settings at different times in order to find what works best for them.
#SonaHelp #VagusNerveStimulation #Neuroscience #Biohacking #NervousSystemRegulation
We saw some really interesting results from this user’s first session with SONA ✔️
It shows how the body can shift from feeling scattered to feeling settled when the nervous system finally gets the signal to downshift.
After ten minutes with SONA, that heavy pressure lifted and was replaced by a genuine sense of relief for this user.
We often see Heart Rate Variability (HRV) climb during a session as the vagus nerve is stimulated. This immediate response is the body moving back into a parasympathetic state.
The AI reads your biometrics to find the optimal stimulation for your biology in that specific moment. While the instant calm is what you feel, the technology is working to lift your HRV baseline over time.
This is about building a body that recovers faster from stress.
#SonaHelp #VagusNerve #NervousSystemHealth #HRV #Biohacking
From energised to chilled in just 10 minutes ☺️
We saw lovely results from this user’s first SONA session:
🌀He arrived wired and full of energy
🌀Within minutes, that energy began to soften into something much quieter
🌀By the end of the session he described feeling deeply chilled
🌀He watched his heart rate dropping live on the app dashboard
🌀His breathing became slower, more regular and noticeably deeper
SONA reads these biometric signals in real time to deliver a personalised stimulation pattern. This helps the body exit a state of high alert and enter the parasympathetic mode required for genuine rest.
Seeing the data change on the screen confirms exactly what the body is feeling. It turns the invisible process of nervous system regulation into a clear and measurable event.
Have you ever tried a science led approach to manage physical restlessness?
#vagusnervestimulation #RLS #nervoussystemregulation #biohacking #SonaHelp
What happened when we took SONA on the road to @wired Health 2026?
Our founder @janeollis.neuro took to the stage to speak and showcase SONA alongside some of the most important voices in health, technology and science right now; @reidhoffman on the future of AI in healthcare, @tim.spector on what we still do not understand about the body and Ming Tang on what genuine innovation looks like inside the NHS.
The energy at our stand was incredible as we watched people experience the technology for the first time. We got some great feedback from SONA from everyone that came to visit us at the perfect place for vagus nerve stimulation in the middle of a conference day.
And what an opportunity to showcase SONA alongside some of the hottest products at the intersection of health and tech!
#SonaHelp #WiredHealth #VagusNerveStimulation #NervousSystemRegulation #HealthTech
