By Dr. Chris Cormier, DC
In a long career I have been disagreed with about a great many things. Methods, equipment, what I think is going on in a particular body. Some of it was fair.
But I have never once had anybody argue with me about breathing, water or daylight. Not a single person, not once. They nod. They agree. Several have told me it is the most sensible thing they have heard in months.
And then, very often, nothing happens at all.
The particular silence of being agreed with
Being contradicted is energising. You can work with it. I have written about two decades of being looked at oddly in twenty years of being looked at funny, and I would take that any day over the alternative.
The alternative is total agreement and no change. There is nothing to push against. Somebody tells you that you are completely right, and six weeks later their bedroom is still too warm and they still have not been outside before noon. Nobody has argued. Nothing has moved.
For years I found that genuinely baffling. I took it as a listening problem, which was convenient for me, because a listening problem is somebody else’s.
What I eventually worked out
It is not a listening problem. It is a format problem, and the format is mine.
Obvious things do not feel like information. They feel like filler — the part of a conversation you wait through.
When somebody comes to you worried, having felt wrong for a year, and you say breathe more, drink water, get some sunlight — they do not hear advice. They hear the thing people say when they are getting to the real answer. So they wait politely for the real answer, and if it does not come, they conclude you did not have one.
That is not stubbornness. It is a completely sensible reading of how conversations normally go.
Three things that changed whether it landed
I did not change the advice. I changed how it arrives, and the difference has been larger than anything else I have done.
An order, instead of a list
A list invites you to pick the easiest item, do it for a fortnight, and conclude it did not work. An order tells you what depends on what — and once somebody understands why oxygen comes before water and water before light and nutrients last of all, it stops sounding like a platitude and starts sounding like a mechanism. The full version of that is written up at BodyCharger.
A reason, every time
Not “get more daylight” but “outdoor light is far brighter than indoor light even on a grey day, and that difference is what sets the rhythm deciding how you feel at two this afternoon.”
Same instruction. Entirely different weight. People do not act on instructions, they act on explanations — and withholding the reason to keep things simple is a mistake I made for years.
A first step small enough to be embarrassing
Not a regime. One thing, tonight, that takes four minutes: turn the thermostat down and find something to cover the window properly.
The point of a step that small is not the physiology. It is that somebody does it — and then they are a person who has started, which is a completely different position from being a person who intends to.
The part I am least comfortable writing
I was right about this for a very long time before I was any use with it.
That is an uncomfortable thing to realise about your own work. Being correct felt like enough — I had the information, I gave it away freely, and if people did not take it up, that was a shame but not my department. Meanwhile the thing I actually cared about was not happening in anybody’s house.
Correct and useless is a real combination, and it is more comfortable than it should be, because it lets you keep the satisfaction of being right while giving up on the outcome. I have written about a related version of that in everyone asks about the chamber — wanting the answer to be impressive rather than effective.
And if you are on the other side of this
Which, if you are being honest, you probably are about something.
Almost everybody has a thing they entirely agree with and do not do. More sleep. Going outside. Water before coffee. The gap between agreeing and doing is not a character flaw and it is not laziness — it is nearly always that the thing was never translated into something small enough to start.
So when you catch yourself nodding at advice for the third or fourth time, that nod is the signal. Not to try harder. To make it smaller. One thing, tonight, that takes four minutes and that you could not reasonably fail at.
The slower, sadder version of not doing it is in the morning you stopped noticing — which is what happens when the agreeing eventually stops too.
What I would want you to take
If somebody tells you something obvious about your health and you find yourself agreeing without moving, the problem is probably not the advice and it is probably not you.
It is that nobody gave you the order, the reason, or a first step you could do before bed. Ask for all three. Any practitioner worth your time will be relieved to be asked, and if I have learned anything in this stretch of my career it is that the asking does more than the nodding ever did.
More of what I have written is at the writing page. How I came to practise this way is the about page, and you can always get in touch.
Dr. Chris Cormier, DC
Lafayette, Louisiana
Clinic care at nervehealth.com. At-home protocols at bodycharger.com. Circulation and oxygenation at ebooprime.com.
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