If I had a dollar for every time I’ve joked about getting a lobotomy, I’d be able to afford one right about now. This feels like the modern woman’s dilemma. We once thought we’d be living better than previous generations, yet now “having it all” includes a ton of paradoxical fine print. Searches for “lobotomies near me” may have risen a staggering percent during the last two presidential administrations, because no amount of Calgon can take us away.
I know it isn’t very useful to just throw up our hands and proclaim, “We were never supposed to process this much information!” The burden of knowing everything, everywhere, all at once has many of us yearning for a hard reset that can only be achieved through escapism or neurological intervention. Someone really needs to invent a way out that isn’t through. But until then, we have Exomind.
If you haven’t heard of transcranial magnetic stimulation (T.M.S.), neither had I, until I was introduced to its most recent iteration, called Exomind. T.M.S. has been around since the 1980s as a neurological therapy utilizing magnetic pulses on neurons in certain areas of the brain to treat depression, anxiety, trauma, and even addiction. Humans, fortunately, have access to neuroplasticity throughout our lifespans, despite pessimistic adages about people never changing and all that hooey. We can change! And magnets can help.
Yes, magnetically re-arranging your brain circuits sounds alarming. It did to me, too. But my friend, the illustrious makeup artist Robin Black, underwent six Exomind treatments and raved to me about how her brain fog had cleared and how she was able to do all those tedious tasks she’d been putting off for months. As the girlboss of my own life (freelancer), let’s just say that I am my own personality hire. My therapist recently introduced me to the term “executive dysfunction,” to which I said [looks knowingly at camera], Who, me? I constantly wrestle with the belief that if I had the focus and mental fortitude of my youthful past self, I would actually be able to achieve all the things I say I want to achieve. I miss her ambition, her drive, her ability to focus on a single task for prolonged stretches of time. Imagine the depths of dysfunction one must be in for something like “I actually replied to all the e-mails I’ve been meaning to, and it only took 10 minutes!” to be the siren song that makes you immediately sign up for neurological scrambling.
Executive dysfunction aside, the most prevailing incentive for me to undergo a brain-altering treatment enthusiastically was that I’d spent the summer months feebly clawing my way out of a tunnel of emotional grief with the mental equivalent of a grapefruit spoon. There’s only so much soothing that astrological transits, angel numbers, and predatory manifestation can do about my unforeseen tragedy. (O.K., fine, it was a breakup.) Some fresh energy was direly needed, and in F.D.A.-cleared doses.
The site of my mind makeover was Dr. Yael Halaas’s office—a stylish, aesthetic practice in Midtown Manhattan. My Exomind shepherd, Roison Allaeddini, told me that it’s been helpful for many of their clients dealing with stress, burnout, insomnia, and even addictive habits. I was to undergo six, 25-ish-minute sessions during which I’d lie down with the magnetic coil positioned on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or the top front part of the head, slightly left of center (an area where I’m told mood regulation and cognitive function are headquartered in the brain).
The treatment feels like a mild nerve twitch, gentle taps and clicks in rhythmic succession. I actually dozed off during a few sessions, awaiting the expected results: better mood regulation, less depression and anxiety, deeper and easier sleep, more focus, and re-invigorated motivation. I wasn’t expecting an overnight miracle, as someone whose experiences with psychoactive substances always tended to be a bit underwhelming. Plus, neuroplasticity takes time. Between sessions, I’d try to keep my ruminating demons at bay, visualizing the offending neurons being put in mind jail as I perused the T.M.S. subreddits for reports on experiences with Exomind.
One interesting side effect that kept coming up was “T.M.S. dip,” which Redditors described as a spike in their symptoms before they improved, usually around the two-to-three-week mark. And true to their experiences, I soon found myself making absent-minded mistakes that were out of character in ways that proved entirely inconvenient: I went to the wrong 58th Street (West instead of East) for an appointment and spent a disproportionate amount of time getting mad at Apple Maps for leading me astray before I realized my mistake. I peeked at my ex’s Instagram Stories and saw an otherwise innocuous post that, given the present context, threw me into a spiral that would make a pig’s tail look straight. I was late, by a lot. I had vivid dreams with densely layered plot twists. Oh, yeah, and more spiraling—which was the most annoying part, considering the time spent ruminating and spiraling in the last few months had been the most disruptive for my cognitive productivity, let alone joie de vivre.
And just as I was going to call it a wash, I received some very distressing information (the kind of information that’s never beneficial to know when your heart is still situated between someone else’s teeth). And instead of thoroughly descending into a vortex of disappointment, betrayal, and rage, and committing to going full evil mode … I could feel my neck become very warm for a moment, and then, in the next, a clear voice in my head just shrugged, Eh, this isn’t the worst thing in the world, though, is it? And, O.K., I was still vexed, but I wasn’t lost in the overwhelm of vexation. I could look at the situation in front of me as if it were a movie, consider my options, and be curious about them.
Now this was different.
It’s been about three months since my treatments. No, I am not “cured” of being myself. Far from it. I still have unpredictable sleep patterns. My time management remains on the mediocre side (not helped by the city’s public transportation system). And I continue to procrastinate. But the awareness is different. I now recognize that my pattern of procrastination is triggered when I truly do not want to do something, never wanted to do it, and don’t even know why I agreed to it in the first place (something to consider when making future decisions). When I find myself indulging in an anxiety loop of rumination, I catch myself before it unfolds to Bravo levels of melodrama, hurting my own feelings. I have a newfound spaciousness between my feelings and my thoughts about them—I don’t judge them automatically; I’m curious where they came from. Metacognition: unlocked!
I recalled something else my friend Robin told me, about a friend of hers who had also done a full set of Exomind sessions and felt no different at first; she didn’t feel changes until about two months later. Brains are unique, after all. And they also need different things to function in the ways we want them to (despite how much we are or aren’t meant to be processing). If I can’t do it all—because who can, really?—I will gladly take a calmer approach to task management and, more importantly, a kinder and more patient one.
Maybe my neuroplasticity needed an emotional jump scare to scatter my neurons into exploring those newly organized pathways. And what’s more of a jump scare than love?
Sable Yong is a beauty writer and a co-host of the podcast Smell Ya Later. She writes the Hard Feelings newsletter. Her essay collection, Die Hot with a Vengeance, was published by HarperCollins
