The First Brain I Had to Change Was My Own

By Dr. Chris Cormier, DC

There is one sentence I hear more than any other, and it almost always arrives in the same tone — flat, a little apologetic, as though the person is warning me in advance not to get my hopes up.

I have tried everything and nothing works.

I never argue with it. I just know something about that sentence that the person saying it usually does not yet.

What people actually mean

When someone says they have tried everything, they are being completely honest. They have tried a great deal, often for years, often at real expense, and they are tired in a way that goes beyond the physical.

But what they have almost always tried is everything within one category. One way of thinking about the body. One set of tools. A dozen different attempts, all drawing from the same well.

That is not a criticism of them and it is certainly not a criticism of the category. It is just how any of us work. You search inside the frame you have, and when the frame runs out, it feels like the world ran out.

I know that precisely, because it happened to me first.

The period I do not talk about much

There was a stretch of years when my own family needed answers I did not have.

I was already practising. I had trained properly, I worked hard, and I was good at the things I had been taught to do. And still, in my own house, I kept arriving at the edge of what I knew and finding that the edge was closer than I wanted it to be.

That is a very particular feeling for someone in this profession. You can carry not knowing when it is a stranger. It sits differently when it is the people you go home to.

I want to be careful about how I say the next part, because it would be easy to turn it into a complaint about somebody else, and it was never that. Nothing had failed me. Nobody had let me down.

What had actually happened was simpler and much more useful: I had stopped learning. I had reached a comfortable competence in one way of working and mistaken it for the whole territory.

The line I come back to

What changed was not a technique. I did not discover a device or a protocol first and then get better results. It went the other way round.

Once I opened my brain up to new possibilities, everything opened up.

That is the entire origin of how I practise now, and it is why — on a week when everyone is talking about brain health — I find myself thinking less about the organ and more about the thing it does when you let it. The first brain I had to change was my own.

Everything that followed, the whole method, the clinic, the platform, came after that and not before it. The sequence matters. People sometimes assume I found the tools and became convinced. I became willing, and then I found the tools.

What I found when I started looking properly

What I ran into, once I was actually looking, was almost embarrassingly fundamental.

Your brain is wired to roughly 30 trillion cells — every muscle, every bone, your organs, your glands, your skin. As the NIH’s neurological institute puts it, “all sensations, movements, thoughts, memories, and feelings are the result of signals that pass through neurons.” The whole body runs on that connection.

And the connection runs on ingredients that are, in order: oxygen, water, light, then frequency, magnetism, and only then nutrients. I had spent years working several steps down that list without ever examining the top of it.

Most people have. That is not a failing — it is simply where the conversation usually starts. The full explanation of how that works is on The Nerve Health Institute, and the daily version you can run at home is on BodyCharger.

Why “tried everything” is better news than it sounds

Here is the part I actually want someone who found this page at eleven at night to read.

If you have genuinely tried many things and none of them moved the needle, the most likely explanation is not that you are beyond help. It is that the things you tried were all drawn from the same shelf.

That is a hopeful finding, not a discouraging one. It means the unexplored territory is not some exotic last resort — it is usually the foundational end of the list that almost nobody starts with. Breathing. Water. Light. Sleep. The things that are free and that get skipped precisely because they are free.

I am not promising you that a glass of water in the morning resolves a decade of symptoms. I am telling you that in my experience, the foundations are the most commonly skipped step, and skipped steps are the cheapest kind of problem to have.

Three columns, and permission to be imperfect

Everything in a day lands in one of three places: physical, emotional, environmental. How you move and sit and sleep. What you carry. What is in your air, your water, your food, your light.

Nobody is perfect across all three. I am not. I have never met anyone who is, and I have been doing this for decades.

So the goal was never perfection. The goal is to be ahead — more going into the good column each day than the other, and a little further ahead each month. That is a target an ordinary person can actually hit on an ordinary Tuesday, which is the only kind of target worth setting.

It is the same reason I tell people to aim at eighty-five percent rather than a hundred. There is more interference in modern life than at any point in history, and a perfect number would just be a new way to feel like you are failing. Eighty-five you can hit and hold — and the distance between where most people are and eighty-five is where all the difference in how they feel actually lives.

What I would ask you to do

Not to believe me. You have no particular reason to, and anyone who found this page by searching for something desperate has every right to be sceptical of the next person offering an answer.

What I would ask is narrower. Before you decide nothing works, check whether you have actually tried a different category or just a different product.

Those are not the same thing, and the difference between them is the difference between being out of options and never having looked at the first three.

Where I would start

If you want the free end of it, start with the foundations — breathing, morning water, morning light — and the structured version of that is the 28-day programme on BodyCharger.

If you want measurement rather than estimation, that is the 88-nerve assessment and the in-person work at The Nerve Health Institute. If circulation and oxygenation turn out to be part of your picture, that is EBOO Prime.

And if you just want to read more of how I think about this, it is in my writing, with the longer version of how I got here on the about page.

The outcome I actually want

My favourite patients are the ones who end up needing me less.

They come in for the corrective work, they learn the home practices, and over time they understand their own body well enough to handle most of what comes up without me. They have become, in the only sense that matters, their own mechanic.

That is not a smaller version of care. It is what I was trying to get to the whole time — back when the person I most needed to teach that to was me.

Frequently asked questions

I have tried everything and nothing works. What now?

Check whether you have tried a different category or just a different product. Most people have explored one way of thinking about the body very thoroughly and never looked at the foundational end — breathing, hydration, light, sleep. Those get skipped because they are free, not because they do not matter.

Where should someone with long-standing symptoms start?

With the foundations, because they cost nothing and they change how everything else performs. After that, measurement — knowing where your nerve function actually stands rather than estimating it. Both at once works better than either alone.

What changed your approach?

A period when my own family needed answers I did not have. Nothing had failed me — I had simply stopped learning and mistaken a comfortable competence for the whole territory. Once I opened my thinking up, everything after that followed.

Why do you aim at eighty-five percent rather than a hundred?

Because a hundred is not achievable in the modern world and chasing it just gives people a new way to feel like they are failing. Eighty-five is a target you can hit and hold, and the gap between most people and eighty-five is where all the real difference lives.

Do I have to choose between seeing you and doing things at home?

No, and the people who do best do both. The home practices make the in-person work hold, and the in-person work tells you which home practices matter most for you specifically.