The oldest advice in the building

The Business Design Centre in Islington was built as an agricultural hall in 1862, and from the upper gallery you can still read the original shape of it, a long iron and glass roof over a floor laid out for livestock. In September it held 141 wellness brands and around four thousand people. There were hyperbaric chambers, whole body light beds, vibration plates, a cold plasma lounger that looked like furniture from a film about the future, and somewhere near the middle, a queue for a machine that measures how old your blood thinks you are.

I went for the hardware, because that is what this publication is about, and I came away with a notebook that is mostly about other things.

The programme ran across four stages and a workshop area for three days, and far more of it happened than any one person could sit through. I chose five sessions, picked mostly for their distance from one another. A former special forces soldier who has made a career out of surviving weather. A neuroscientist with a post at MIT Sloan. A neuro-optometrist who treats vision as something trainable. A researcher who took part in the first study to hold human beings inside a continuous DMT state. And a 67 year old Dutchman who has climbed above the snowline in shorts.

Given that starting point I expected two days of method. What kept arriving instead, from all five directions, were the same four subjects: other people, the ordinary things, discomfort, and how little of any of it has actually been measured.

What people say once they have gone far enough

Bear Grylls spent an hour on the main stage and very little of it on endurance. He said that in selection, skills could always be taught, and the thing they were actually looking for was character, and that the way to measure a life was by the quality of your relationships with the people closest to you. He mentioned interviewing a woman who had reached 104, and asked her what the best part of it was. She told him there was no peer pressure.

Dr Tara Swart closed on the idea that love is all there is. Wim Hof spent much of his hour on the same ground, returning again and again to the argument that a person is more than bones and skin.

Two of these three are known mainly for what their bodies can withstand, and given an hour on a stage, neither spent much of it on the body. Both talked about love in the broad sense, meaning other people, community, the living world, and whether a person manages to extend any of that to themselves. That is not what I had written at the top of my notebook before the weekend started.

The recommendations were free

I started keeping a separate column in the notebook for anything a speaker actually told the room to do. By Sunday afternoon that column had almost nothing in it with a price attached.

What struck me was the order. These were the first things each speaker reached for, ahead of any method and ahead of anything on sale downstairs, and several of them said as much without being asked. Hof put it most plainly.

The comfort problem

The sharpest line of the weekend was also the least comfortable to sit with, and it came from Hof about twenty minutes into his hour.

This is the part of the weekend that connects back to everything Maison Infrared writes about, because a modern week lacks more than light and movement. It has also been engineered to hold every room at the same twenty one degrees from January to August. The body was calibrated by conditions that varied, and we have spent a century removing the variation on purpose, floor by floor and building by building.

Jack Allocca described the same condition from a different angle, in the line I have thought about most since.

Those two observations sit on different axes and point at one thing. The modern week has had its difficulty engineered out and its stimulation turned up, which is how a person can reach the end of a day thoroughly entertained and never once cold, hungry, or absorbed in anything.

Dr Swart, on a different stage, was arguing something close to the opposite and equally true. She said that birds would not sing if predators were around, which is a way of saying that nothing restorative happens in a nervous system that does not feel safe. Set the three of them side by side and the shape of the problem appears. A body needs enough safety to settle and enough difficulty to stay calibrated, and the modern week is generous with the first and almost entirely free of the second.

How little of it has been studied

The fourth thread ran under several sessions without anyone building a talk around it, which is that a good deal of what was recommended from those stages has been examined far less carefully than the equipment on the floor below. It leaves a question sitting there that nobody picked up.

Studies follow the money, and a cold shower has no sponsor. The consequence is that the cheapest interventions tend to be the least examined, which is a different problem from being disproved and needs a different kind of attention.

Jack Allocca, who works at the edge of psychedelic neuroscience, put the necessary caution better than anyone in the building.

We know a great deal more about the body than we did twenty years ago and we still know very little, and a field moving at this speed will turn out to have been wrong about some of what it currently believes. The useful response is to hold the present answers loosely, and to stay particularly loose with the ones that arrive attached to a price.

Back on the floor

After the last session on Sunday I went back down to the stands, which I mention because the obvious conclusion from everything above is that the equipment is beside the point, and that is not what I think.

A red light panel does not replace two hours outside and a sauna does not replace a relationship. What they can do, for people living in a European winter at a latitude the body was never calibrated for, is return some of the variation that modern building removed. That is a reasonable thing to buy and a reasonable thing to write about. The order matters though, and the order was the same from all five stages. Sunlight, movement, other people and getting out of your comfort zone come first, and all of them are free. The equipment is for the part of the year, and the part of the life, when the free version is not available.

Four thousand people came to Islington for the technology and went home with a list that mostly involved going outside. There is something reassuring in that, because it puts the part that matters most within reach of everyone, whatever else they decide to buy.

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