The Ability to Manage Stress and Stabilize Emotions Is Crucial for Health
The World Health Organization proposes four cornerstones of health: a balanced diet, moderate exercise, smoking cessation and alcohol restriction, and mental health. The first three are easy to put into practice because their standards are objective, but the last—mental health—is not so easy to define.
WHO defines mental health as follows: a person with a healthy mind has an integrated personality; feels good about themselves; has stable emotions with more positive than negative ones; has good self-control and can maintain psychological balance; has self-respect, self-love, and self-confidence, and knows their own strengths and limits. A mentally healthy person feels adequately secure in their environment, can maintain normal interpersonal relationships, and is welcomed and trusted by others. A mentally healthy person has clear life goals for the future, keeps striving in a realistic way, and has ideals and career aspirations.
WHO's standard of mental health is not uncontroversial. It is a psychological paradigm formulated with reference to the findings of modern psychology, very Westernized, with the shadow of Protestantism. In fact, people raised in different cultural settings do not have exactly the same standards of mental health, and psychological research has already found this.
Easterners, who value the holistic view, and Westerners, who value analysis, differ not only in thinking style but also in their understanding of the happy life. Easterners may more readily identify with the open-minded, at-ease, nature-aligned lifestyle of Tao Yuanming and Su Dongpo, and may not necessarily weigh life goals and the spirit of constant advancement so heavily.
In Pacific island nations such as Samoa, parents have a tradition in child-rearing: they like to excite a child and then suddenly bring the child down emotionally, letting the child realize that all joy ultimately comes to nothing. These children receive low-desire training from an early age; when grown, they are less likely to feel lost upon encountering setbacks, and their happiness index is high.
Buddhism often speaks of the four great elements being empty; in places where Buddhist faith prevails, people also take low desire as the standard of mental health. In places like Sri Lanka, where Theravada Buddhism is devoutly practiced, people may not value ideals and career, but they are devout in faith; although not rich, Sri Lanka is one of the world's happiest countries, while developed Switzerland is one of the countries with the world's highest prevalence of depression.
So the standard of mental health is hard to set, and we should relax it. Otherwise, many people, on finding themselves fitting the description, will conclude they are mentally unhealthy; people who were living fine may become anxious and distressed precisely because they find themselves not matching this Western psychological paradigm.
Physiology textbooks tell us that metabolism, irritability (excitability), adaptability, and homeostasis are the four basic characteristics of human beings, and that these four form a whole jointly maintaining our health. Among them, excitability, adaptability, and homeostasis all have some relationship with the human psyche.
If a person lacks excitability, life will be passive; but if a person is always in a state of excitement, the nervous system carries a heavy load and easily collapses. Through natural selection and survival of the fittest, the stronger a person's adaptability, the greater their survival ability; human adaptability is the result of coordinated development of brain and body. Homeostasis is the key to maintaining life: both excess and deficiency cause physical and mental illness, and only the middle state keeps us healthy and whole. In physiological terms—whether body temperature, blood pH, cholesterol or blood glucose, or various hormone levels—all should lie near the middle rather than be too high or too low, otherwise a person cannot remain stable. The human psyche is the same: only when the various divisions of the brain are coordinated and instinct, emotion, and reason do not conflict with one another can we avoid living in tension. Here we seem to see the shadow of the Chinese philosophy of the mean.
I therefore believe a more accurate formulation is this: a person's ability to manage stress and stabilize emotions is crucial for health. If we can manage our stress, turning it into tolerable rather than toxic stress, and can stabilize our emotions and avoid excessive emotional reactions, then our mind is healthy. In this way we can maintain a sustainable homeostasis and avoid overconsuming our lives through stress and negative emotions.
So how can we improve our ability to manage stress and stabilize emotions?
First, one needs a good upbringing. The most important periods of a person's life are roughly divided into five: early childhood, adolescence, courtship and marriage, middle age, and old age; the upbringing in early childhood and adolescence is crucial to a lifetime. Various physical and mental illnesses and life problems we encounter in courtship, middle age, and old age can basically be traced back to early childhood and adolescence. But this is also a kind of paradigmatic thinking; it helps physicians look for causes, but once dogmatized it easily leads to errors. Disease causes are very complex and cannot be judged by a single paradigmatic framework. For example, a virus invading the nerves or a tumor causing mental stress can both make a person despondent, and these have nothing to do with early childhood or adolescent experience.
Biologically, early childhood and adolescence are called the early life period, and most epigenetic changes occur then. Lifestyle and upbringing during this period profoundly influence a lifetime; for example, the habit of eating pickled foods formed in early life makes us more prone as adults to cancers such as gastric and nasopharyngeal carcinoma. If we do not receive sufficient love and proper care in early life, we lack a sense of security all our lives and develop many psychological illnesses.
So there is a saying in medicine: inherited genes are not the decisive factor in our physical and mental health; inherited genes are only a gun loaded with bullets, and it is the acquired environment that pulls the trigger. If the acquired environment is beneficial to physical and mental health, even if we carry some gene predisposed to disease, we can remain healthy all our lives, because beneficial epigenetic changes induced by the environment can silence the expression of those disease-predisposing congenital genes.
We can hardly change congenital genes, but the acquired environment is something people can decide. The story of Mencius' mother moving three times has some truth to it; the child's upbringing is very important to a lifetime. Both Hemingway and Churchill were depressives; Hemingway committed suicide, while Churchill lived past ninety. The difference may have lain in a nanny Churchill had in early childhood. This childless nanny gave Churchill meticulous care, which he never forgot; so although he was tormented by depression all his life, he could always find ways to escape it. Of course, this is only one possible explanation, not necessarily the most reasonable. Both Churchill's and Hemingway's fathers were also depressives; Churchill's father did not kill himself, while Hemingway's father, though a physician, chose suicide. Their congenital genes may also have been one factor influencing the question of suicide.
We are born needing care. Not long ago, after the teenager Liu Xuezhou, who had searched for his birth parents, killed himself, we learned from the news that he had long been taking antidepressants. Abandoned by his parents at birth and orphaned again when his adoptive parents died early, his life was a tragedy; he lacked care and security from childhood. This is a typical tragedy of stunted psychological development caused by the acquired environment; many people spend their whole lives treating the harm caused by the lack of care in early childhood.
The natural love of parents for children is an important source of a person's sense of security. A person who receives sufficient and appropriate love in early childhood will not have major psychological problems in later life. Children adopted by loving families differ little in this regard from ordinary children raised by their own parents.
So what is sufficient and appropriate love? How should one raise children so as not to harm their physical and mental health? Why do modern people pay so much attention to their children's upbringing, yet modern children's psychology grows ever more fragile and the incidence of common psychological illnesses such as depression, anxiety disorders, and phobias keeps rising?
We can hardly give a precise definition of appropriate care, just as we can hardly explain why an intact car can run on the road. But we can discover what kinds of care harm a child's physical and mental health, because we have found certain special experiences in the upbringing of those children and adults who are unwell—like a car that suddenly won't start: we find which part has failed, and then know what that part does in driving.
Parents spoiling their children, failing to respond promptly to their emotional expressions, overprotecting or underprotecting, overcontrolling or overindulging, communicating too little or nagging incessantly, parental anxiety or depression, and parents packing every moment of a child's life and study schedule—all of these can distort a child's psychology. The children of anxious middle-class adults have the strongest anxiety when grown; children from extremely poor families lack self-confidence; spoiled children are more prone to violent tendencies as adults; children raised on nagging tend to develop obsessive-compulsive traits as adults; children trained in various after-school classes from an early age are utterly bored with life when grown.
From these failures we can find some rules: young children need parental help in emergencies but hate parental interference every minute; they need affirming responses, but parental overprotection on their behalf makes it hard for them ever to know themselves; they need entertainment, but moderate deprivation and boredom also do them good; their growing brains need occasional periods of quiet, cannot run fast all the time, and can let instinct, emotion, and reason compromise with one another in occasional blankness and idleness. So parents who pack their children's time with schedules ultimately reap a child with no joy in life.
Adolescence is the fastest stage of brain development and remains highly plastic. But a feature of adolescence is that the young no longer accept their parents; children who were most strictly controlled in early childhood show the strongest adolescent rebelliousness. Some children will attempt suicide—and of course some clever ones deliberately threaten suicide to force their parents to yield.
In late adolescence, intelligence plays a decisive role in learning ability; thus some straight-A students of primary and junior high school see their grades slide through high school, while children who were mediocre in primary and junior high school suddenly make a spectacular showing in high school. If a person in late adolescence meets a good teacher they can respect, their development is influenced in ways beyond imagining. Because by late adolescence parents have little influence, the teacher's guidance is decisive. The Chinese tradition of honoring teachers is not without reason; we used to set up tablets of "Heaven, Earth, Sovereign, Kin, Teacher" because the teacher is the most important guide on life's road, especially in late adolescence.
Adolescence is the fastest period of cerebral cortical development; if a person receives correct teacher guidance during this time, they can correct many erroneous thinking and behavioral habits formed in the original family and achieve well-rounded development.
Once past early childhood and adolescence, a person is basically set. Some changes occur in adulthood, but they only enrich the model established in early childhood and adolescence. This is not to say the self cannot be changed in adulthood, only that correcting a whole set of behavioral and thinking habits as an adult requires great effort. Those who begin self-reflection after serious illness or accident in adulthood can be transformed and start anew; those who remain stubborn can hardly escape childhood shadows for a lifetime.
Stress arises from low security and high desire. The way a hen cares for her chicks teaches us much: when chicks are threatened, the hen clucks angrily and flutters her wings to frighten off the intruder and shield them; when night or daytime temperatures drop too low, she covers the chicks with her wings to help them resist the cold; at other times she rarely interferes, merely leading them around to forage and play.
In fact, this is all young children need. If parents protect them when harmed, soothe them under competitive pressure, and let them feel warmth when life is hard, these children can be secure and confident even growing up in a poor family. But if parents are exhausted by life, unable to respond—or respond impatiently—to the child's emotional needs, while themselves having strong desires for fame and gain and expecting the child to strive for rich rewards in adulthood, the children will mostly grow up anxious and depressed, in severe cases developing intractable anxiety and depression.
Do not fear children's quiet moments; quiet moments are when the brain rests. We should even encourage children to set aside some idle time every day or regularly. During this time, do nothing, think of nothing, just soak in the sun and zone out. In such moments, our main brain regions, limbic system, and cerebral cortex can coexist harmoniously; instinct and reason no longer conflict, and moderate boredom helps a person discharge stress and stabilize emotions.
When I was in sixth grade, I would sometimes skip class and take my homeroom teacher's son (a sturdy five-year-old) to the rapeseed fields to zone out or catch bees; when I was in first year of high school I would sometimes skip class, lie on the platform of the school pigsty in the sun, squinting and savoring the lazy hours. This kind of happiness is still vivid in my memory. Writing this, I realize that my happiest school memories are all connected to skipping class—an indication that modern education is truly too dry and too oppressive.
It is not only modern education that is deeply dry and oppressive; modern life is no different. If modern life were not oppressive, we could not understand why modern society has so many people suffering from all kinds of physical and mental illnesses, such that we who study medicine have endless work to do.
Both adults and children need enough boredom. Even now, every morning, noon, and evening I set aside a few minutes of boredom: sitting quietly on the balcony and tapping a Buddhist singing bowl, idly zoning out, or lying down on a patch of grass midway through a ride to zone out. This daily training can keep a person out of a psychiatric hospital; if you read some psychiatric literature, you will find that psychiatrists advise patients with anxiety and depression to learn sitting quietly and meditating—which works much the same as zoning out.
A person should often let the brain fall silent before illness strikes, and not let instinct and reason perpetually battle; many physical and mental illnesses are the result of fierce struggle between instinct and reason. For example, a child who cannot help playing is expressing human instinct, yet fears his parents and must repress that instinct, frantically studying all kinds of knowledge and skills his parents think will bring future rewards. The result is that the child's instinct and reason conflict every moment; this conflict lasts a lifetime and makes peace hard, lowering learning efficiency and disturbing normal life.
Some parents' educational ideas strike me as absurd. For example, they make children study music and other talents in the name of future happiness; if we later discover we truly like something, would it not be better to learn it then for our own enjoyment? I only started learning music in my thirties. Why must children be forced, on top of intense study, to attend various talent classes? Do children really want to spend their precious time this way? Do they not need to play with peers? Do they not need their own time to do what they want? Do they not need time to zone out and empty the brain? Why must these parents wait until their children break down in adolescence or after life setbacks before they wake up?
The ability to manage stress and stabilize emotions is actually not hard to cultivate; it is in fact one of human instincts, needing no cultivation at all. We need only give children security from an early age, yield to them, and not disturb their spontaneous growth; children will learn the skills of managing stress and stabilizing emotions on their own. Only when, as adults, we find ourselves unable to manage stress or stabilize emotions do we need to re-cultivate these abilities.
Setting aside dedicated time to listen to the needs of the heart is the ultimate rule of stress management and emotional stability; only then will the heart not be broken by stress and emotion. The ability to manage stress and stabilize emotions also grows through steady accumulation. As long as we often listen to the needs of our own hearts and of our children's, and let the divisions of the brain reconcile themselves, we need not worry that our ability in this regard will be insufficient.