Elle UK - 04.2020

191

Elle WELLNESS

ELLE.COM/UK April 2020

n a low, cavernous room

with stone floors and a

single window, through

which daylight is peeping in,

several bodies lie inert. Some

are covered in woollen blankets, others fortressed by pillows.

Some just lie there, motionless, feet bare, palms curled skywards

• undulating diaphragms the only clue they are in fact alive.
  Most of the people in this room are high flyers fallen to earth.
  There is an exhausted TV reporter who nips around the globe on
  a weekly basis, and a famous garden designer whose knee
  twitches with pain. There is a doctor, too, whose days start
  at 4.3Oam and go on long into the night, as well as a glossy
  magazine editor, whose phone and mind buzz with stories, leaving

I

her on the verge of panic. Ostensibly, their

lives have little in common, but they share one

fundamental desire: to reclaim their body and

mind. They want to breathe again, move again

• in short, they want their mind to move at the
  same rate as their bodies. They want to salvage
  the last vestiges of what it means to be human.
  The teacher who stands at the front of
  the class understands this only too well. After
  all, she has spent her entire life searching for
  this very answer. Thirteen years of research
  and constant, painstaking experimentation
  has finally resulted in Nahid de Belgeonne
  discovering a solution that may just save us
  all from a life of chronic pain and burnout. Its
  name? The Human Method. Its promise? To
  teach us how to become humans all over again.
  To understand why something like The
  Human Method even exists, let alone why it is
  quietly practised by everyone from Hollywood
  stars (Gemma Arterton is, among others,
  a fan) to some of the country’s most influential
  leaders, you first have to understand what
  has happened to humankind over the past
  several decades – but, more
  precisely, what’s happened
  to us over the past 2O years.
  It could be argued that
  the more culture advances,
  the more degraded the
  human experience becomes.
  Technology has affected our
  long-term memory, while
  phones have distorted our
  posture. And social media,
  with its relentless tide of
  inflammatory messaging and
  vanity-puffing commentary,
  has pulled the plug on
  our mood-moderating
  mind chemicals.
  ‘Human downgrading’
  is the term used by Tristan
  Harris, a prominent Silicon
  Valley thinker, who believes
  that technology has, at last, overwhelmed human limits. As a result,
  we have shorter attention spans, increased levels of narcissism
  and we live in a perpetual state of stressful moral outrage. (A study
  by New York University found that every word of moral outrage
  added to a tweet increased the amount of retweets by 2O% .)

• Facetune apps and filters, meanwhile, threaten to leave us
  scarily out of touch with the human aesthetic, while sedentary jobs
  and constant mobile phone use are causing neck strain, shoulder
  stiffness and tension headaches. Furthermore, mobile phone

H AV E W E

F ORG OT T E N

H OW TO

be HUM A N?

TECHNOLOGY HAS PUSHED US TO OUR

PHYSICAL AND COGNITIVE LIMITS. THE CURE?

RECONNECTING WITH OUR PRIMAL

ROOTS VIA A REVOLUTIONARY NE W PR ACTICE

PHOTOGRAPH by FLORIAN SOMMET

*Emotion shapes the dif fusion of moralized content in
social networks,

2O15, Brady WJ, et al.