Were They Only Feeling Themselves?

I’ve seen people in conference halls who swore they could feel a force. An energy. Something flowing through their body the moment they put the wristband on.

I began to think they were only feeling themselves.

But that’s not meant dismissively. Not at all. What they felt was real. The stability during the test was real. The feeling of standing stronger was real. The conviction that something had changed was real. But did it come from the product? Or from them?

The human body is an incredibly sensitive machine. It reacts to expectation. It reacts to context. It reacts to what it’s told. When a person stands in a room, surrounded by others who are excited, and someone tells them this is going to make you stronger, the body reacts. Muscle tension changes. Posture shifts. You actually stand more stable. Not because something external is acting on you, but because something internal is happening.

That’s documented, studied, reproducible. It’s one of the oldest mechanisms in medicine. Doctors know this. Researchers know this. And anyone who works in marketing knows it too, even if they call it something else.

I did the test at trade shows hundreds of times. I saw the faces. The astonishment. The laughter. The disbelieving head shaking. People who went to get their partners, their colleagues, their kids. Look, you have to try this.

None of them were lying. None of them were pretending. They really felt something. And that’s exactly what makes this so complex.

When someone tells you I can feel it, you can’t say no you can’t. Because they can feel it. The sensation is there. It’s subjective, but it’s there. What couldn’t be proven was the claimed cause. The frequency. The energy. The hologram. Maybe the cause lies elsewhere. In the mind of the person who’s feeling it.

I remember a moment at an event. An older man, tradesman type, skeptical, arms crossed. He said: I don’t believe in this. I said: Just try it. He tried it. Stood more stable afterward. Looked at me. Said nothing. Bought two.

What happened in that moment? He experienced his own body. Not a product. His body, reacting to a situation. To the attention. To the expectation that was there despite his skepticism. To the setting. To the fact that someone had told him: Now pay attention.

And I stood next to him and took his money.

That’s the part I thought about for a long time. Not whether people felt something. But what it means that I knew where it came from, and sold it anyway.

I didn’t promise healing. I didn’t make medical claims. I did the test and let people feel. What they concluded from it was their business. That’s how I explained it to myself. For a long time.

But the explanation gets thin when you look honestly. Because of course I created the context. I told the story. I built the expectation. I built the stage on which their own body performed. Without my stage, they wouldn’t have felt anything, because nobody would have asked them whether they feel something.

What remains is a question bigger than wristbands. How much of what we feel actually comes from outside? And how much of it do we create ourselves, because we want to create it?

The people in the conference halls didn’t need a wristband. They needed a moment where they perceived themselves differently. More stable. Stronger. More aware. The wristband was the occasion. Not the cause.

I sold occasions. That’s less dramatic than fraud and more complicated than honesty. It’s the space in between, where a large part of our economy operates. Products that don’t do what they promise, but that trigger something because we want them to trigger something.

What the people in the conference halls felt was real. Maybe it was their own strength. Their own attention. Their own body reacting. And they thought it came from outside.

That’s not stupid. That’s human.