Twenty Years of Being Looked At Funny

By Dr. Chris Cormier, DC

For a long stretch of my career, a good number of people thought I had lost the plot.

Not rudely, mostly. It was the particular look people give you when they have decided to be polite about something — a slight pause, a change of subject. I got that look about breathing. About sunlight. About sleep. About the idea that what goes into a body might matter as much as what you do to it afterwards.

Some of those same people now tell me I was right all along.

And here is the thing I actually want to write about: that part is the least interesting part of the story, and it is certainly not the useful part.

What it is actually like

Being early is not a triumphant experience. It is mostly just lonely and slightly tiring.

You explain something carefully, watch it not land, and have to decide whether to try again or let it go. You get invited to fewer conversations than you would like. You develop a slightly defensive way of introducing what you do, which you then have to unlearn later.

And underneath all of it sits a question you cannot ever fully answer from the inside:

Am I early, or am I simply wrong?

Because both feel identical. In both cases the room disagrees with you. In both cases you have reasons that seem good to you. Conviction is not evidence, and anyone who has spent time around strongly held beliefs knows that the strength of the holding tells you nothing about the quality of the thinking.

So I had to find a way to tell the difference. What follows is what I landed on, and it is as useful for a reader whose family thinks they have gone peculiar as it was for me.

Three tests

1. Can you say what would change your mind?

This is the first one and it does most of the work.

If you can describe, specifically, what would make you abandon a position — what result, what evidence, what outcome — then you are holding a view. If you cannot name anything at all that would shift you, you are holding an identity, and identities are much harder to be right with.

I could always answer that question about the things I do. If people did the foundational work consistently and nothing changed, I would have stopped. They did, and it did, and so I did not.

2. Is what you are doing reversible and cheap?

A great deal of what I was dismissed for twenty years ago was breathing deliberately, drinking water in the morning, getting outside early, sleeping in a cool dark room.

Every one of those is free, reversible, and carries essentially no downside. The cost of being wrong about them is zero. That is a very different situation from being wrong about something expensive or irreversible, and the two deserve completely different levels of scrutiny.

If what you are doing is cheap and undoable, you can afford to be wrong. If it is neither, you had better be very sure.

3. Are you adding, or replacing?

The most important of the three, and the one I would want every reader to hold onto.

Adding something sensible alongside what you are already doing is nearly always reasonable. Replacing care you are receiving, on your own authority, is a different act entirely — and the fact that something is natural, or ancient, or makes intuitive sense does not change that.

I have been doing this for decades and I still hold that line. Add freely. Replace carefully, and in conversation with someone qualified.

A word about the people doing the doubting

It would be easy to write this essay with an edge in it. I do not want to, because the edge would be wrong.

The people who looked at me sideways were not being foolish. They were doing what human beings are built to do — recognising patterns and staying inside them. That instinct is not a flaw; it is the thing that keeps most people out of most bad decisions most of the time. It is genuinely good equipment.

It just has a specific blind spot, which is anything that has not become a pattern yet. And the honest truth is that the same instinct protected me from plenty of nonsense over the same twenty years. I do not get to keep it only when it suits me.

So if someone in your life is sceptical about what you are doing, they are probably not attacking you. They are running perfectly good software on an unfamiliar input.

The world moves, slowly, and then noticeably

What has changed is not that I became more persuasive. It is that the ground shifted underneath the conversation.

Sleep used to be something you bragged about skipping. Now recovery is a respectable subject. Breathing practices used to be faintly embarrassing; the NIH now has a dedicated centre studying this category, and its own summary notes that mindfulness meditation “may help reduce insomnia and improve sleep quality.”

None of that was true in the conversation twenty years ago. The ideas did not get better. The reception did.

What I would say to you, if your family thinks you have gone strange

Three things.

First, run the tests above on yourself honestly. Not to defend your position — to check it. If what you are doing is cheap, reversible, additive, and you can name what would change your mind, you are on solid ground and you can relax about the raised eyebrows.

Second, stop trying to convince anybody. I spent years on that and it achieved very little. What changes people is watching you be well, not hearing you explain. Nobody has ever been argued into sleeping better.

Third — and this is the one I wish someone had told me — you do not need the room to agree with you in order to proceed. You need your reasoning to be sound and your downside to be small. Agreement is pleasant. It is not a prerequisite.

The quiet part

It was never really about being right.

What I actually wanted, through all of it, was for the people in front of me to feel better. The vindication is nice in a small way and it changes nothing about the work. I would do the same things if nobody had ever come around, because the reason to do them was never that other people approved.

That is the part I would hold onto if you are somewhere in the middle of your own version of this.

Where to start

If you want the cheap, reversible, additive end of all this — the breathing, the water, the light, the sleep — it is on BodyCharger, and it is where I would send anyone.

If you want measurement rather than estimation, that is the clinic work at The Nerve Health Institute. And where circulation and oxygenation turn out to be part of your picture, that is EBOO Prime.

More of how I think about this is in my writing — including a piece on how I changed my own mind about something I was known for — and the longer version of how I got here is on the about page.

Frequently asked questions

How do I handle people who do not support my health choices?

Stop trying to convince them and check your own reasoning instead. If what you are doing is cheap, reversible and added alongside your existing care, and you can name what would change your mind, you are on solid ground. What changes people is watching you be well, not hearing you explain.

How do I know if I am early or just wrong?

Three tests. Can you state what would change your mind? Is what you are doing reversible and low cost? And are you adding to your existing care rather than replacing it? Clear answers to all three mean you can afford to be wrong — which is the position you want to be in.

Should I tell my doctor what I am doing?

Yes, always. Adding things alongside your care is reasonable; doing it secretly is not. Anything you take or do is part of the picture, and the person helping you needs the whole picture to help you well.

Why do people dismiss this kind of thing?

Because human beings recognise patterns and stay inside them, which is excellent equipment that happens to have a blind spot for anything not yet a pattern. It is not hostility and it is usually not foolishness. The same instinct protects all of us from a great deal of nonsense.

What should I start with?

The free end. Breathing deliberately, water first thing in the morning, early daylight, and a cool dark room at night. Cheap, reversible, additive, and they are the things that carry most of the available ground anyway.