How to Better Maintain Psychological Balance

A person with a clean heart, clear thinking, and no superfluous emotions or delusions gives others a sense of security. Because he neither harms others nor harms himself; he makes no trouble and troubles no one. To some extent, this is a kind of keeping the precepts.

— Lin Yutang

If you want to be happy, take your friend to lunch; if you want to reach a correct conclusion, take your enemy.

— (US) Daniel Schader et al., Psychology

There are twenty hardships for human beings: giving charity while poor; studying the Way while rich and noble; abandoning life to face death; seeing the Buddhist sutras; being born in the Buddha's time; restraining the senses and desires; seeing the beautiful without coveting it; being insulted without anger; having power without wielding it; acting without attachment; learning widely and studying deeply; destroying self-conceit; not despising the unlearned; acting with an equal mind; not speaking of others' faults; meeting wise teachers; seeing one's nature and studying the Way; following conversion to guide others; remaining unmoved by circumstances; and skillfully adapting the means.

— The Sutra of Forty-Two Sections (Fo Shuo Si Shi Er Zhang Jing)

The World Health Organization lists psychological balance as one of the four cornerstones of human health, showing just how important it is. So-called psychological balance means that our emotions are stable and our inner hearts have no great turmoil; in a Chinese popular saying, it means peace of mind.

There is a saying in Cai Gen Tan (Conversations from the Vegetable Root): "With a peaceful mind, even a thatched hut is secure; with a settled nature, even vegetable roots taste sweet." If a person lives at peace—without worry, depression, or anxiety, their inner heart calm most of the time, even if occasionally, after some misfortune, they are briefly in a state of grief and pain, but can adjust their mental state well and quickly return to calm—then their life is a happy one.

How can one become such a person? Personally, I think we must work on two fronts to raise both ourselves and our children to be such people. The first is to form correct cognition; the second is to improve emotional regulation.

In cognition, several points are crucial:

First and most important is to have a deeply rooted egalitarian outlook, which must be cultivated from childhood. If we learn from our parents in early childhood to view all people as equals—not looking up to the powerful and rich, nor looking down on the powerless and poor—we can live our whole lives neither servile nor arrogant; that is the best possible outcome.

If our parents are social climbers and we learn sycophantic skills from childhood, this life will be sad. We will not only conflict constantly in dealing with others, but our sense of our own worth will also be unstable: inferior before the strong, arrogant before the weak; prone to liking the same person at one moment and hating them at another; and our own hearts will find no peace.

I have personal experience of this. My mother was a person neither servile nor arrogant. She never curried favor with anyone all her life and treated everyone equally. When I was studying in my hometown and came home on holiday, sitting with my mother listening to her chat with the neighbors, I often heard her tell them that being rich and powerful was nothing special and there was no need to look up to such people. I also often heard her say that mouths are on other people, and we need not care how they comment; we cannot control others' mouths, but we can control our own.

My mother's detached attitude toward everything influenced me greatly. All our neighbors said she was a bundle of joy; whether chatting or playing cards with her, you could hear her hearty, artless laughter. Her optimism was contagious. And my mother was very compassionate, always glad to help people in difficulty. So when she died, many people came spontaneously to mourn her.

A reader once asked me what books one should read to have a good mindset. I told him that mindset has nothing to do with reading. My mother was illiterate, not recognizing a single character, yet her mindset was good all her life. Because she treated all beings equally, her mind was psychologically balanced all her life. She was happy when our family was poor, and she was happy when conditions improved. I always feel it was a great blessing that my father married a woman like my mother, and that my brother and I had such a birth mother.

I think I inherited and learned this egalitarian outlook even in the womb. I believe that in swaddling clothes, as my mother held me at the doorway sunning myself and chatting with people, she repeated this worldview countless times, so my egalitarianism is deeply rooted. No one in this life can make me bow and scrape, nor will I be overbearing before others. I have lived in poverty and in wealth; in both states my feelings were much the same.

Only a deeply rooted sense of equality can bring steadily stable emotions and a lifelong unchanging calm and equanimity. A person who holds an egalitarian view will not, like so many in this society, toil away chasing how to improve their lot. If all beings are equal, then whether my station is that of a humble laborer or a social celebrity makes no difference. Having enough to eat and wear is sufficient; seeking more is of no benefit.

I often miss the days of my childhood, when the son of my sixth-grade teacher—a little boy several years younger than me—and I studied the habits of bees in the rapeseed fields. We were so focused, and so curious. The work I do now is, in nature, much the same as studying bee habits in the rapeseed field. If I did not have this sense of equality, I would easily drift with the social tide, pursuing standing out rather than immersing myself in my interests.

Second, a person must have a just conviction. A just conviction means treating both oneself and others with fairness. Thus, when we live in society and have disputes or conflicts with others, we can more easily keep our own hearts balanced. A just person neither takes advantage of others nor fails to uphold their own rights.

Many people are delighted when they gain a little advantage and upset when their interests suffer. But gains and losses of interest are not always caused entirely by the outside world; we ourselves may have influenced them. If we can view issues fairly, we will find that when we suffer setbacks, we reflect on our own errors while also identifying external shortcomings; we can handle what befalls us impartially, and our hearts are not easily stirred.

My father in middle age played the role of a judge in our village. From childhood I saw many people come to our house to squabble and settle disputes. My father could always calmly settle disputes so that both sides were convinced; everyone trusted his fairness. A motto my father often repeated at home was: "Think of yourself in the first half of the night; think of others in the second half." That is how he taught us to be.

Because of this, I now find it hard to hate anyone. Most conflicts in the world are caused by both sides; few accidents are one-sided. As our Chinese saying goes, it takes two hands to clap. When we deal with others or have disputes, if each side can stand in the opponent's shoes, we can form an impartial understanding that dissolves the great majority of hatred.

There is another saying in Cai Gen Tan: "Winning the delight of a thousand people is not as good as releasing the resentment of one." Resentment is an emotion that especially drains a person and easily triggers further retaliation. And the persistence of resentment may be the greatest of all bad emotions; I often see people hate their enemies for a lifetime, torturing others while also torturing themselves to death.

If we act justly, most resentment directed at us will dissipate. To live in the world without making enemies is a very wise course. If a person continually makes enemies of all sorts, they can hardly know happiness or peace. Moreover, they will lose out economically, because such people are poor cooperators and hard to keep long-term partners. Most undertakings in the world, to be done well, require long-term persistence and cooperation with others.

A just person is also someone more willing to yield. If we meet an exasperating person and know we have done wrong and provoked them, and we recognize our own fault, we are more willing to take a small loss for the sake of peace. Taking small losses saves a great deal of trouble. After we admit our shortcomings to the other side and then are generous, taking one step back, we can usually see a vast open sky. If one step back does not work, take a few more; we can always retreat to safe ground. Thereafter we learn a lesson from the setback and keep appropriate boundaries with such unreasonable people.

Third, cultivate the habit of assuming the best of people rather than the worst. Assuming the best brings out the good in others and delights ourselves; assuming the worst brings out the bad in others and displeases us. Everyone, ourselves included, is a mixture of good and evil; there are no absolutely good people and no absolutely evil people in the world. But when we assume the best of others, they show us their good side in the great majority of cases; when we assume the worst, they show us their bad side most of the time.

People interact with each other mutually; like force in physics, it is a mutual variable. When we treat others kindly and trust them, they are more likely to treat us kindly and trust us; conversely, when we harbor ill will and question others, others will harbor ill will and question us.

Even if we suffer some loss in interacting with others, we only give thanks for their good side and do not dwell on their bad side. Evil is judged from one's own standpoint; viewed from the other's standpoint, it may not really be evil. A grateful person attracts many kind people; a person who assumes the worst ends up alone.

In all my life, in over 99.9% of my time, I have trusted the kindness of others; so many people think I am easily taken in. But forty-some years of life have taught me that I have almost never been cheated; most people who have dealt with me have not had the heart to cheat me.

Sometimes others do not treat me kindly, yet I still prefer to see their kind side. This is not Ah-Q-ism; it is that I deeply know human nature is complex and that even the worst person has kind moments. I will remember their good and forget their bad; this is good for others and good for us. Thus we do not pile up too many negative memories in our hippocampus, our amygdala does not over-activate, and we keep a little farther from depressive mood.

Pessimistic people are always pursuing correctness; optimistic people do not nitpick, so optimistic people always overlook the depressing negatives that pessimists see—overlook, not fail to see. They can see too, but they are able to look without seeing, listen without hearing; they see and do not take it to heart, nor speak of it. The greatest sorrow of depressed patients is being unable to escape ruminative thinking and catastrophic thinking, always turning over every event and every person again and again, and finally insisting on interpreting others' kindness as ulterior motives before they will let go—only to end up depressed themselves.

Fourth, recognize that the world is vast and boundless, with infinite possibilities. This cognition increases flexibility and avoids rigid thinking. We always see some people clinging stubbornly to a certain view, with deep sectarian bias, arguing endlessly and hard to change their obsessions; such people have easily backed into mental dead ends since childhood.

Only when a person recognizes that the world is vast with infinite possibilities will they undertake all kinds of exploration. The human brain develops more fully only through wide exploration. Open-minded people keep growing; closed-minded people merely mark time and struggle to move forward.

Buddhism says there are "five poisons" in the human heart: greed, anger, infatuation (attachment), arrogance, and doubt. If we are instilled in childhood with the above four basic cognitions and they are continually reinforced in real life, we can easily rid ourselves of these five common human negative emotions.

But there are still many moments when we cannot control our emotional reactions; then we must learn emotion-regulation skills. The most important skill in regulating emotion is self-affirmation and self-comfort.

When my son was nine, I once saw him in his room, angry, yet repeatedly writing the words endure and forgive on a piece of paper. I asked him: Son, what are you doing? He said he was restraining his anger. I said: Why are you angry? Who made you angry? And how are you restraining your anger? He said that Mom and Dad had made him angry; he was persuading himself that his parents loved him and that their current misunderstanding of him was perhaps an unintentional mistake, so he was persuading himself to forgive them.

After hearing this, I quickly asked about the specific triggering event, then patiently listened to his explanation; after he finished, I apologized to him. I asked what kind of apology gift he wanted, saying Dad could give him one to show his sincerity; then he turned from anger to joy. People are born with the ability to comfort themselves, but parents who give correct love and guidance can better improve a child's self-comforting ability.

Not long after my child entered the first year of high school, he clashed with a classmate and they even fought; but by the time they graduated from the third year, they had become close friends. I appreciate both boys, because they resolved their grievances with a self-regulatory ability far stronger than adults'. This shows that the other boy's parents are also good at raising children, and are probably broad-minded themselves.

As long as they are not under constant suppression, most people are born with this instinct of self-affirmation and self-comfort. The most terrible kind of parent is one who constantly suppresses the child: continually belittling and abusing their children, suppressing them, and damaging their self-esteem. People raised in such families easily become inferior and anxious as adults.

Human confidence comes first from parental affirmation of the child. Psychological research finds that it takes 5000 affirmations and praises for a child to build confidence, and one suppression can offset four affirmations. If parents continually suppress and belittle their children, the children's confidence and self-comforting ability are damaged from childhood.

This makes them feel their whole lives that they are unlovable and unworthy of the life and emotions they want; once they get them, they live in constant worry that they will lose everything sooner or later. This is emotional deprivation. Such children, when grown, also often deal with others through emotional deprivation, using verbal or physical violence or cold violence to make people submit; their relationships will be poor.

Conversely, if parents, when the child is small, teach self-affirmation and self-comfort by affirming and comforting the hurt child, then such a child, when grown, can quickly regulate their emotions when setbacks come and rise rapidly out of emotional lows.

Another effective way to regulate emotion is to shift attention, distracting ourselves for a while from overly focused grief and pain. There are many ways to shift attention: spending hard times with friends who help distract us; going out into nature ourselves to feel the beautiful scenery; or relying on music or anything else that can capture our attention.

But when a person is in extreme pain, it may be hard to shift attention. At such times, let the emotions flow and accept the presence of bad feelings. Generally, it only takes a week or two for our most intense emotions to ease naturally, because of the self-regulation built into our genes. Once they have eased somewhat, we should go out into the world more and distract ourselves; this distraction helps us climb out of the abyss of pain faster.

Doing the above, our emotions can basically remain stable most of the time, and our minds easily stay balanced. People whose minds are usually balanced have milder characters and are less prone to quarrels.

I have been married nearly twenty years, and our family of three has quarreled fewer than twenty times—on average less than once a year. The few quarrels were basically triggered by members of the extended family; our small family usually communicates in a friendly and humorous way. But I know many families quarrel almost every day, with big fights every few days, and some even come to blows; this greatly affects the happiness of family members.