Getting healthier by doing (next to) nothing

Around this time of year many of us resolve to take action to improve our health and general wellbeing. The all too familiar avenues such as more exercise, wholesome healthy food, etc. are of course all wise moves, but there is something else we can all do to keep ourselves healthy longer that involves doing very little indeed.

It is a deeply effective pursuit that entails maximally slowing the physiological systems to arrive at what is termed deep rest, where signals between the body and brain align around the simple fact that all is well and good, and there is nothing at all to worry about. It is in essence the opposite to stress.

Deep rest goes beyond ordinary relaxation in that it is a shift of the nervous, immune and endocrine system into a general state of safety signalling. It counters stress, that is a huge drain on the body’s resources including fuelling a raised heart rate, along with the burden of stress hormone production and inflammation, with all the knock-on effects on the cell’s metabolism. And during a stress response (a process called allostasis) the body pauses less-urgent processes such as maintenance, reproduction, digestion and repair.

An allostatic state is temporary by nature - if we can find the right bodily switch we can change the signal and state to one where all is well with no worries about biological bankruptcy.

Researchers set out to find out exactly why contemplative practices such as meditation, yoga and qigong have positive mental and physical health benefits for aspects such as stress levels, blood pressure and inflammation. A first conclusion was that the beneficial effects of such practices are down to a spanner being put in the works of the physiology of the stress process, with the organism being put in a state of lower energy demand. Instead of energy being wasted producing cortisol and speeding up the heart rate, a pool of energy remains for restoration purposes. Regular yoga practitioners have been found to consume up to 15% less energy along with a lower heart rate and blood pressure at rest with fewer stress hormones in circulation to boot.

What the activities above and their associated benefits all initially seemed to have in common was slow breathing. Deep breathing, at around six breaths a minute, activates stretch-sensitive sensors in the chest, which in turn cause parasympathetic activity in the vagus nerve. With high parasympathetic activity, blood pressure, heart rate and other forms of arousal are low and the body gets on with routine maintenance that may have had to take a back seat. A 2025 study on mindfulness intervention seemed to back this up, showing that deep rest does indeed make a measurable difference. Participants who did 10, hour-long mindful breathing and stretching based sessions had higher levels of healthy metabolic markers in their blood, with lower levels of markers associated with disease risk.

There is, however, seemingly no single route to deep rest. Some people even find meditation more stressful than calming. The ultimate state of deep rest is, of course, sleep. The body is then still and breathing more deeply and the body can flush out the brain and make other repairs.

They key seems to be to seek out whatever makes you feel calm, warm and safe from the inside.