Why hygiene?

I describe myself as a cognitive~kinesthetic hygienist because for generations, medicine and therapy has overemphasized pathology and the treatment of symptoms, rather than serving to restore deep health and wellbeing.

The reality is, the vast majority of people seeking help through traditional psychotherapy, counseling, and physical therapy have nothing truly "wrong" with them. Rather, the symptoms people seek to address through these experiences are signs of cognitive and kinesthetic deconditioning, which simply means that the basic function and structure of our body~minds have been compromised by the pressures of industrialized, high-tech society (more on this below). So, rather than treating the symptoms of this situation (which only yields a temporary, superficial relief), we need to address the root cause by strengthening our innate cognitive~kinesthetic abilities.

The English term "hygiene" derives from the Greek hygiene techne, which means "the healthful art." And the roots of the Greek term mean "having a vigorous life; living well; vital force."

Health and wellness are not a matter of "fixing" what's "wrong" with someone: they are what results from having proper hygiene in all aspects of life.

Think about dental health. You don't brush your teeth everyday because there is something wrong with your teeth; you brush your teeth everyday because that is necessary to keep them clean and healthy. Likewise, you don't want to rely on occasional visits to the dentist to maintain your dental health: imagine if you didn't brush your teeth everyday and only had your teeth cleaned every few months...that would be gross!

This is how we should think about health and well-being generally. With proper dental hygiene, you only need to see a dentist for checkups and minor cleaning. Likewise, with proper cognitive and kinesthetic hygiene, you won't get to the point where you need to see a mental health therapist or physical therapist to "fix" the "problems" that are actually just symptoms of this more basic deconditioning of our body~minds. It is only in our pathologizing medical culture that these symptoms are interpreted as signs of "problems" or "issues" or "illnesses" that require special, professional treatment to resolve.

The Dis-Ease of Modern Industrial Society

The health and well-being of our body~minds is compromised because we live within conditions we did not evolve to endure. The movements (or lackthereof) and cognitive demands required to function within modern industrial, high-tech society work against our biological design, which has been fine tuned over the course of millions of years in environments totally lacking concrete, cars, computers, desks, office buildings, smartphones, and TVs.

While it's true that modern civilization has improved health in many ways, it has simultaneously harmed our health and well-being in a variety of ways never before experienced by humans. Today, citizens of the richest nations on Earth suffer from a range of chronic diseases and conditions that our ancestors rarely experienced.

In short, the mechanical and computational nature of modern life (which now pervades our movement, communication, thinking, and countless specific aspects of work and recreation) has compromised our basic biological structure and function, which are fundamentally not mechanical or computational. (Insofar as these ideas are used to describe or explain human cognition, movement, anatomy, physiology, etc., they are used metaphorically not literally, and they are ultimately bad metaphors in that they obscure far more than they reveal).

The Remedy: Restore Innate Function through Proper Movement and Cognitive Hygiene

The whole idea behind "cognitive and kinesthetic hygiene" is that if we regularly take care of ourselves by supporting the innate strengths and abilities of our body~minds, we will naturally sustain health and well-being and resolve many of the symptoms that drive people to seek therapeutic or medical treatment. In the pre-industrial past, there wasn't as much of a need to engage specific practices to maintain kinesthetic and cognitive coherence, because people's lives generally featured qualities and characteristics that supported our natural functioning (such as frequent and extensive walking and other natural movements, rather than relying on machines to do a lot of our moving and work for us). Today, however, most people have become deconditioned through the chronic use of machines and technology that are designed not for human health and ergonomics but for the maximization of industrial and economic efficiency.

The remedy for this is simple: re-learn how to move and think naturally! We can always recondition ourselves into a form that serves health and well-being rather than conforming ourselves to the machines and devices that now pervade our lives.

The key to restoring our innate, natural, vital biological structure and function is the fascia.

Simplistically, fascia refers to all the soft, collagenous connective tissues throughout the body. It comprises a complex, dynamic, multidimensional web of various types of tissue and surrounding fluids, and it functions as a unified whole mediating form, structure, movement, communication, fluid exchange, and energy flow among all our other biological systems and functions - cognition included. Long neglected by anatomists, physiologists, and psychologists, the fascia has finally received the attention it deserves. Research over the past few decades has revealed that fascia is simultaneously:

• our primary sensory organ (it contains more nerve density than even the skin, tongue, and eyes!)

• our primary organ of form and movement (in tandem with muscle, which is technically part of fascia)

• the central system for perceptual and emotional integration

• the body's inclusive and integrating communication and signaling network

Fascia is the missing link between what modern science inaccurately divides conceptually as "body" and "mind." There is no such duality: life as such is a cognitive phenomenon! It is only because we have constructed a social world pervaded by machines and computers that fragment our attention, activity, and communication that we have come to mis-believe that we are constituted by two basic, different "things:" body and mind. Through the comprehensive paradigm shift in the life and mind sciences that I explored in my doctoral dissertation, our best sciences now reveal that there is no such mind-body duality. Literally everything in human life is a cognitive experience.

Fascia is where we recover and how we experience this unity of mind~body. It is no coincidence that modern science and medicine has simultaneously operated according to this false duality while almost entirely neglecting the fascia in both research and practice. It has only been in the past few decades that fascia has finally been taken seriously among anatomists, neurophysiologists, medical doctors, and other clinicians, researchers, and practitioners.

The result of these few decades of research reveals something remarkable: fascia is simultaneously our primary organ and system of movement, structure, perception, and cognition. Cognition cannot be reduced to, or even primarily identified with, nervous system activity. Given this, Holos Therapeutics centers on conditioning the fascia to restore proper movement, structural coherence, and cognitive function. This is the essence of cognitive and kinesthetic hygiene.