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The Quiet Report
For the Woman Who Used to Make Things
Rated 4..5/5 | Loved by 10K+ customers
Your Plunge is cold. Your Hatch hasn't moved since you bought it. Your Apollo Neuro is in the bottom drawer. Here's the small daily ritual we built for the version of you who wanted to start again.
By Michael Hayes, in his own wordsPublished May 2026 · 9-minute read
The Quiet Report
I want to tell you why this exists, because if you have arrived here, there is a decent chance you have not opened a wellness email in six months.
I had not become anxious. I had not become depressed. I had not become someone whose life looked, from the outside, like it had gone wrong. I had become someone who opened her laptop in the morning and looked at a brief she had pitched to a client three weeks earlier, a brief she had wanted to make, and found that her hands did not move. It was not block. It was not creative fatigue. It was a body that had been in low-grade activation for so long that the prefrontal capacity required to begin anything had quietly migrated elsewhere.
I am the version of you who started the company. I was thirty-six. I had a six-person design studio in a building I still loved. I had clients I had worked years to win. I had a Plunge in the garage and a Hatch on the nightstand and an Apollo Neuro in a drawer next to the Sensate I had used twice. I had a husband who was patient with me. I had two retreats booked for the next quarter, even though I knew, the morning I booked the second one, that I was not going to come back from either of them as a different person.
What I did not have, anymore, was the part of me that could start the work.
I had crossed the line from productive stress into the thing on the other side, and I had bought every tool the wellness industry had sold me on the way over.
None of them were the wrong tools. None of them were sufficient.
This is the company we built next.
The Insight
Productivity is downstream
of regulation
The thing I learned, slowly, over the eighteen months we spent making this, is that productivity is not what I thought it was.
I had been told, by every voice I respected, that the way to come back was to optimize. Better sleep. More cold. More breath work. Stricter morning routine. More AG1. More protein. Better tracking. I had pursued that frame for two years with the discipline of someone who runs a studio. I had not gotten the work back.
What I had not been told — until I started reading the literature properly, with the help of a polyvagal-literate clinician who is now on our advisory team — is that productivity is downstream of regulation. The capacity to begin difficult work is a function of an autonomic nervous system that can shift, on demand, from sympathetic activation into a ventral state where attention narrows, threat reduces, and the prefrontal cortex comes back online. The optimization stack I had been running was demanding output from a system that needed input first. It had the direction of travel wrong.
The ventral vagal complex — social engagement, safety, connection — sits at the top of the polyvagal hierarchy. Cervical tVNS supports its recruitment.
The single most effective intervention in the published literature for shifting that state, daily, with no pharmacological cost and no behavioural training curve, is direct stimulation of the cervical vagus nerve.
The science is real. The mechanism is well documented. The consumer devices that deliver it have existed for a few years.
What had not existed, until we built it, was a device for the woman whose wellness shelf was already full.
"None of them were the wrong tools. None of them were sufficient."
Michael Hayes, Co-founder & CEO — Quietaa
The Context
The wellness industry had tools. They had price points and features and subscription tiers and apps. What they did not have was a device for the woman whose wellness shelf was already full — and whose problem was not information, but a nervous system that had been overloaded for too long.
The Context
If your wellness shelf
looks like mine did
If your wellness shelf looks like mine did, the version of this device that already exists on the market did not, you may have noticed, see you.
Pulsetto built the category. The hardware works. They priced for volume, they designed for clinical-modern, and they put the actual benefits behind a monthly subscription that I, like a number of women I know, lost trust in. The aesthetic was wrong for my nightstand. The commerce model was wrong for the values most of my friends and I were running our businesses on. The device was not unwelcome; it was simply not for us.
The Sensate is for us, in the sense that it lives where it is supposed to live and looks the way it is supposed to look. It is also not, strictly speaking, a vagus nerve stimulator — it works through chest-worn infrasonic resonance, which is a different mechanism. If you have used a Sensate and it has helped, it has helped through a path adjacent to this one. You will recognise the register of what we have made. You will also recognise, immediately, that the input here is more direct.
The Apollo Neuro is also for us, in the same aesthetic sense, and is also a different mechanism — vibration-based interoceptive signalling delivered through the wrist or ankle. Neither of these is wrong. Both of them, in my experience, did some of the work some of the time. Neither of them, again in my experience, was the daily input I came to need for the moment when the body had to come back online before the morning meeting.
What we built sits inside that gap. The mechanism is more direct than Sensate or Apollo. The aesthetic is closer to your existing shelf than Pulsetto. The commerce model is closer to the kind of brand you would design yourself, if you were starting one.
The Object
What we built, and why
The device is small enough to live on the nightstand without announcing itself. It is the size of a pair of folding sunglasses, in a matte charcoal finish I chose because it would not look wrong next to an Aesop bottle or a Le Labo candle or any of the books I keep within reach. There is a single small warm-amber LED that turns on when the device is active and turns off again when the session is over. There is no app. There is no Bluetooth pairing. There is no screen, no companion software, no notification that asks you to upgrade.
You place it around your neck. You apply a small amount of conductive gel to the two contact points. You press one button. You sit for ten minutes.
The sensation is a soft, even pulse on either side of your neck — not painful, not dramatic, not unlike a very mild massage. Five intensity levels. Most women settle at three. You can read while you do it. You can sit at the kitchen counter. You can be in bed before the day starts. The session ends with a small chime, soft enough that you can use the device at six in the morning without waking anyone.
That is the entire ritual. I designed it like this on purpose. I did not want another tool that required a practice of its own. The audience I was building this for has bought the practice books, taken the retreats, downloaded the apps, paid for the subscriptions, and let most of them lapse — not because we did not value them, but because by the time we got to the point of needing a daily intervention, the last thing we wanted was another thing to keep up with.
The whole thesis of this object is that it asks nothing of your attention. It works for the woman whose attention is the most over-asked thing in her life.
"I want the morning ritual I keep failing to start."
— Quietaa early customer, 37, creative director
The Ritual
The ritual, in detail
The morning use is brief enough to disappear into the rest of the morning. It is the ten minutes before the day begins in earnest. You make the coffee. You sit somewhere you like sitting — the kitchen floor, the window seat, the rug in front of the wood stove if you are one of the women I have been writing this for. You place the device around your neck. You press one button. You can read. You can journal. You can do nothing. The device runs while you are doing the thing you would have been doing anyway.
When the session ends, you have done one thing for yourself before the work starts. The day begins on a different foot.
The evening use is different in tone. You sit with the device for ten minutes after the day has closed — after the laptop is shut, after the children are down, after the email you decided not to send has been left undealt with until tomorrow. The session does for the evening what the slow walk after a hard session in your therapist's office used to do for an afternoon. It signals to the autonomic nervous system that the threat has passed. The body believes it.
The combined effect, over weeks, is that your day starts inside a wider window of tolerance than it would have without it, and ends with more of the activation already metabolised before sleep.
That is the ritual. There is nothing else to it.
The Return
What comes back, and when
The changes are subtle, and they live in the language you use to describe your own week.
02
Around week two
You notice you have begun the thing you had been putting off. Not all of it. Not dramatically. A first paragraph of the brief, a fifteen-minute scribble in the notebook, a return to the project you had stopped looking at. The capacity to begin has crept back up.
04
Around week four
You notice that the meetings that used to leave you in low-grade activation for the rest of the afternoon — the difficult client conversation, the financial review, the team meeting where someone was going to push back — are no longer doing that. You finish the meeting. You stand up. You make a tea. You sit back down. The activation has metabolised through the body in twenty minutes instead of eighteen hours.
08
By week eight
You are not a different person. You are the version of yourself you remember, with a nervous system that is meeting your life with less resistance than it had been in the year before this started. You make a thing again. Not the great thing, necessarily, but a thing you wanted to make, in a window where you could have been doing something easier. That is the metric.
Published research on bilateral cervical vagus nerve stimulation documents measurable heart rate variability improvements within two to four weeks of consistent twice-daily use.
For the audience this device was built for, the subjective marker we hear back about most often is not a number. It is the quiet return of the capacity to begin.
Source: published research in Frontiers in Neurology, Brain Stimulation, and Neuromodulation, 2021–2025
The Materials
The materials
A few specific things about the object itself, because they matter for the kind of woman who reads this paragraph closely.
The body of the device is injection-moulded medical-grade silicone over an aluminium frame. The matte charcoal finish is a single colour we tested across thirty samples before settling on it. The two contact points are surgical-grade stainless steel with a soft polish that does not catch on skin. The warm-amber LED — the single point of light on the entire device — is a 2700K diode behind a frosted lens, the same colour temperature as a softly-warm light bulb.It is the only place on the device where the design admits to being electronic.
The packaging
What's in the box
The packaging is a single softboard box in unbleached natural fibre. Inside: the device in a small dustbag, a 30ml bottle of conductive gel in a recyclable glass bottle, a printed card with the founder's note, the brand FAQ, and the prepaid return label. There is no instruction manual that doesn't fit on a single card. There is no marketing insert. There is nothing in the box you will not use.
The packaging
What we refused to include
We refused, in development, to include a charging dock that did not earn its place. The device charges through a single USB-C cable. We refused to include a velvet bag. We refused to print the brand logo on anything you have to look at every morning. We refused to ship a sample of anything we did not make.
The whole product is the device, the gel, the note, and the box. The whole product is also the absence of every wellness-brand object you have thrown away in the past two years.
"Designed for your nightstand. Built for the ritual you don't keep failing at."
The Brand
One more thing about the brand, because it matters to the women I have been talking with through this product’s development.
There is no app subscription. There will never be one. The full set of session protocols ships on the device. They stay on the device, free, for as long as you own it. There is no premium tier. There are no advanced programmes behind a paywall. We made the commercial decision, before we made the first prototype, that we would build the business model around buying the device once.
This was not a marketing decision. It was a values decision. The category leader monetises post-purchase through a monthly subscription that, in the threads our customers read before they arrived here, lost the goodwill of the women who put them on the map. I did not want to build that brand. I did not want to operate that company.
The decision to not have a subscription is also a decision about what kind of business I want to come into work for every morning.
If you ever email us with a question — and you should, if you have one — you will get a reply from me or someone on our team who I can name. There is no support ticket queue. The founder's email address is on the contact page. It is mine. It works.
Audience
Who this is for
Quietaa is for the woman who is in the gap between the version of herself she remembers being and the version she is now.
It is for the woman whose wellness shelf is already full, who has tried the things you have tried, and who is not in the market for another product that requires a practice of its own. It is for the woman who runs a thing — a studio, a business, a creative practice, a household, a project — and who needs the part of her that runs it to come back online.
✦ For her
The woman who, when she places the device on the nightstand the morning after it arrives, will know — without anyone telling her — that the brand was made by someone with the same standards as her.
– Not for her
The woman in active acute crisis. If you are in that place, this is not the first tool. A practitioner is the first tool. Come back to this when the acute work is done and the maintenance work is what's left.
– Not for her
The woman shopping for the cheapest device on the market. We are priced fairly for what we are. We are not priced to compete with what we are not.
– Not for her
The woman whose wellness shelf is empty. This device sits beside an existing practice, a nightstand, a morning. It is not the first thing. It is the right-sized next thing.
Thirty Days
Thirty days, no risk
The device ships with a 30-day at-home trial. Use it for a month. If by the end of the month it has not done what we have told you it does — if your week has not begun to feel like a different shape, if the capacity to begin has not come back, if your sleep has not softened — send it back. Free return shipping both ways. No restocking fee. No questions beyond a single email.
The trial exists because the only test that matters is the one in your own life, your own morning, your own week. We have built the brand around that fact rather than around it.
30-day at-home trial
No app subscription. Ever.
Founder-led. Accessible.
The version of you who started
The woman you were before all of this is not gone.
She is on the other side of a nervous system that has been on alert for too long. Bring the system back, slowly, with a daily ten minutes that asks nothing of your attention, and she comes back too. Not all at once. Not dramatically. The way these things actually return — quietly, in the moment you notice you have started the work again, in the morning you wake up before the alarm and feel curious about the day.
This is what I made the company to do.
I hope it does it for you.
"Ten minutes of nervous system regulation, designed beautifully. Made for the ritual you're actually going to keep."
Founder Signoff
Michael Hayes
CEO & Co-founder, Quietaa
You can reach me directly. The founder's email address is on the contact page. It is mine. It works.
shop@quietaa.com
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Ten minutes of nervous system regulation, designed beautifully. Made for the ritual you're actually going to keep. Designed for your nightstand.