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IDUNTechnologies
We worked with the Swiss neurotech company IDUN to measure what actually happens during a Vernay scent and breathing session, using EEG earbuds that read brain activity in real time.
Most wellbeing work asks you to take its word for it. We wanted to find out whether the calm people feel after a Vernay session actually shows up in the body, as something you can measure rather than just a pleasant feeling.
So we ran an early proof-of-concept study with IDUN Technologies, a Swiss company that builds earbuds able to record EEG, the electrical activity of the brain, from inside the ear. The question we wanted to answer was a simple one. When someone goes through one of my scent and breathing protocols, can a sensor actually pick up the shift toward calm?
The short answer is yes, the early signs are there. Below is what we did, what we found, and, just as importantly, what this does and does not prove.
Each participant wore IDUN's Guardian EEG earbuds the whole way through. We recorded a calm baseline, then a guided session that paired one of five botanical scent blends with a breathing and audio protocol, then a second baseline. The whole thing was bookended by a validated relaxation questionnaire, once before and once after.
A control condition used pink noise and no scent, so we could tell the protocol apart from simply sitting quietly.
The clearest result was also the most human one. On the relaxation questionnaire, every participant came out feeling more relaxed than they went in, across all four dimensions and across every protocol we tried. Not once did a session end lower than it started.
This is the kind of subjective shift that wellbeing work usually rests on. The interesting part is what the EEG added underneath it.
EEG sorts brain activity into frequency bands. Two of them matter for our purposes. During the scent and breathing sessions, the recordings tended to move in a consistent direction.
Linked to a relaxed but wakeful, restful state, the kind of settled attention you feel with your eyes closed and your mind in no hurry.
The shift in these bands, seen mostly during the scent sessions and not in the pink-noise control, points to a real effect of the protocol itself.
The control condition, sitting quietly with pink noise and no scent, stayed fairly flat. The scent and breathing sessions did not. That contrast is really the heart of the finding. Something in the protocol itself, and not just the act of resting, was moving the needle.
I would rather you trust this than be impressed by it, so let me be clear about its limits.
This was a proof of concept, not a clinical trial. It involved a very small number of participants and was built to answer one question. Is the effect measurable at all? It was. But a small study like this can show that a signal is worth chasing. It cannot show that the signal is universal.
We also saw exactly what you would expect from real people. Different brains responded differently. That variation is not a flaw in the work. It is the reason the next step is personalisation, shaping sessions around how a given person actually responds instead of assuming one protocol suits everyone.
And one honest detail: while people felt reliably more relaxed afterward, the brain-activity bands tended to drift back toward baseline once the session ended. The session creates a state; keeping it is what daily practice is for.
None of this is treatment, and none of it is a medical claim. It is something simpler, and to me more exciting. It is the beginning of a way to actually see the work, so that it can keep getting better.
IDUN Technologies is a Swiss neurotech company developing in-ear EEG, the Guardian earbuds, to bring brain sensing into everyday life. Their Brain-Battery metrics track relaxation and engagement, which turns a session into something you can actually observe. This study was run on their Guardian 3 hardware in March 2026.
Most wellbeing asks for faith. We would rather show you the data, and then use it to make each session a little better than the one before. That is what the expeditions and the daily practices are built on.
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