Nothing Heals
What if the best thing you could do for your health & well-being this New Year was absolutely nothing?
We are a society of doing, constant doing, consuming, shopping, producing and achieving; driven to acquire that elusive wealth which, evidently, is never quite enough. We do workouts, buy and consume supplements, monitor health gadgets, subscribe to health and wellbeing newsletters, and listen to health industry podcasts. Getting healthy seems to involve a great deal of doing yet ironically, it is this very obsession with doing that is at the root of much that ails us.
Sometimes nothing is the best thing we can do.
The weight loss industry is massively profitable, yet always involves you eating something, buying another product. As one fashionable diet is replaced by another and nutritionists continue to argue amongst themselves about fats, sugar and salt, scientists are finding that one of the best things you can do for your health is to eat nothing for set periods of time.
Fasting has a long history associated with cleansing and rejuvenation but it has been dismissed as pseudoscience (even as dangerous!) usually by those who have their own ‘health’ product or medicine to sell you. But now, finally, fasting has the backing of a Nobel Laureate for medicine as it has been proven to stimulate health and longevity.
Fasting differs from low calorie diets and it differs from starving. It turns out, not eating at all is better than dieting—not just for weight loss (because that is fairly obvious) but for health and wellbeing. Animals on low calorie diets fare less well than intermittently fasting mice in mental acuity, length of life, and recovery from illness even when total calorie intake is the same.
“Planned 24-hour fasting can eliminate the need for diabetic medication.” British Medical Journal
The scientific explanation for the benefits of not eating won Yoshinori Ohsumi a Nobel Laureate for medicine in 2016. In the absence of food, your body cleans up the waste materials hanging around in our cells. Autophagy (self-eating) is a process of cleansing and clearing but it only starts to happen after 16 hours of no food. Chronic disruption to this process (by eating even low calorie foods) increases incidence of cancer, diabetes type-2 and Parkinson’s disease. Our cells need periods of fasting in order to reorganize themselves.
We relax by listening to calming music, affirmations, the healing sounds of nature but again scientists have found that an absence of listening—total silence—is even better for us. A mere two minutes of silence enables more beneficial results of relaxation than far longer periods of listening to relaxing music.
Silence regenerates brain tissue.
Silence is under-rated in our stimulation-rich, things-to-do, must-never-get-bored, society. The ceaseless attentional demands of modern life put a significant burden on the prefrontal cortex of the brain, where we organise thinking, decision-making and problem-solving. Over time, of course, our attentional resources become depleted. As a result, we become mentally fatigued, and may struggle to focus, solve problems or come up with new ideas.
Fortunately, the brain can restore itself when we lower levels of sensory input during silence. Two hours of silence a day can generate new cells in the hippocampus, a key brain region associated with learning, memory and emotion. Researchers are hoping that silence could be therapeutic for conditions such as depression and Alzheimer’s, which are associated with decreased rates of neuron regeneration in the hippocampus.
“Speech is a river, Silence is an ocean,” Sufi mystic and poet, Rumi
When there is silence from outside, we have an opportunity to process our inner lives. Our brain uses its default mode network processing the backlog of information making way for deeper creativity. Attention restoration theory suggests our brain needs silence to cleanse and restore itself.
Laziness is a source of shame and surely leads to poor health but not all inactivity is unhealthy. Lazing on the sofa watching TV while eating junk food is not complete inaction. There is quite a lot going on here; putting in food means your cells cannot cleanse themselves and bombarding your brain with images and sounds means your brain cannot repair and regenerate itself. This laziness is bad for you because it is not doing nothing. Truly doing nothing would produce a better result.
So important are healing pauses that they occasionally spontaneously occur. A bodywork client can become so deeply relaxed that they appear to fall into a form of stasis. This can be alarming for the uninitiated, but the client will eventually reboot, start rebreathing and often have no idea that anything happened. In craniosacral therapy this pause is known as The Long Tide, a deep healing state when the full breath cycle can take 100 seconds.
“The long tide isn’t accessed by holding the breath or even by trying to access it. It’s not something that can be ‘actioned’ but it is rather a place that can be found through inaction; when your mind is no longer striving.”
As evidence mounts that nothing heals, that there is a natural opportunity for self-healing when all other operations have paused, perhaps we need to re-frame silent non-doing, not as laziness but as a temporary state of repair and recuperation.