The Three Cornerstones of Health: Emotional Equanimity, a Reasonable Diet, and Moderate Exercise

Although traditional medicine and modern medicine differ in their understanding of many issues, they are of one mind on how best to preserve human health.

Ancient Egyptian medicine, India's Ayurveda, China's TCM, and modern medicine all regard emotional equanimity, a reasonable diet, and moderate exercise as the three cornerstones of health. They differ only in how each expresses these ideas.

Emotional equanimity accounts for the largest share of health; in fact, the other two are also closely tied to it.

By some estimates, health problems caused by psychological imbalance account for about half of all health problems.

TCM teaches that the key to preserving life lies in nourishing the mind. The "Lanjing Midian Lun" chapter of the Huangdi Neijing (Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon) states: "The heart is the ruler of the monarch, from which spirit radiates... When the ruler is enlightened, his subjects are at peace; nourishing life on this brings longevity and freedom from harm to the end of life, and governing the world on this brings great prosperity. When the ruler is benighted, the twelve officials are in peril, the pathways are blocked and not open, and the physical form is greatly injured; nourishing life on this brings misfortune."

This passage means that the human heart—meaning thought, consciousness and all psychological activity—is the key ruler of the body, as important as a monarch. Only when this monarch is an enlightened one will the body be at peace. With a good state of mind, nourishing life brings longevity, and governing the world brings prosperity. If the heart, this monarch, is benighted, then the other organs are in peril. An unenlightened heart is like roads blocked shut; over time it inevitably injures the body, and nourishing life on it will sooner or later bring disaster.

The human heart is hard to govern; everyone knows this from experience. Life is always full of storms. We have love and hate, passion and sorrow, desires and anxieties, and countless conflicts in dealing with others, so the heart is often made very uneasy. Some are long depressed, some long resentful, some long lost in wild brooding; over time, some fall ill from pent-up grief, some die suddenly from rage, and some sicken from prolonged worry.

Although the other reasons for longevity differ among long-lived people, one thing is much the same: these long-lived people have calmer dispositions than average.

Emotional equanimity is truly hard to achieve. Many may claim they have a good mindset, yet in fact they cannot truly sustain it; at the first problem they become deeply unhappy.

Emotional equanimity also exerts a decisive influence on a person's other states of life.

When a person's mind is not at peace, life falls into disorder. Some are driven by envy, some by resentment and rage, some by obsessive lust, some by excessive ego, and they do many things beyond their physical and psychological endurance. Exhaustion or violent emotion eventually makes them ill, and even costs them their lives.

Some of history's great wars were likewise set off by groups of people whose minds were not calm enough.

From antiquity to the present, philosophers, religious teachers, psychologists and writers have almost all labored to regulate the human "mind." Taken across the whole of humanity, emotional equanimity is hard to achieve; more than seventy percent of us cannot be said to be calm of mind.

That is why we are generally prone to the various diseases caused by emotion. The busiest businesses today are hospitals; hospitals in every country on earth are overcrowded. A considerable proportion of patients would never have come to hospital had they remained emotionally at peace, avoided trouble, and not worn out their bodies and spirits.

To solve this, each of us can only work on ourselves, continually cultivating our character, setting life's goals not too high, and as far as possible not growing anxious or angry over events, quarreling less with others, and stirring up less trouble.

A reasonable diet is, for most modern people, also an extravagance. In our materially abundant age, most can indulge their appetites, and the diseases caused by overnutrition now far outnumber those caused by undernutrition. In recent years, diseases linked to overnutrition—various common tumors, diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia—have risen steeply worldwide.

Of course, in some places poverty and war have left many displaced and malnourished. But since World War II, overall material conditions worldwide have steadily improved, people eat better and more, and obese people are everywhere. Many of us are addicted to high-fat, high-calorie foods and simply cannot stop.

How should a person eat in a way that fits the way of health preservation? Personally I think the key is to eat a little less; we are basically all in a state of overeating. Many hunt delicacies everywhere and, full, still want a few more bites. Over time they adapt to being stuffed, whereas in fact the healthiest state is eating to about seven-tenths full.

For a while I posted notes on WeChat and Weibo promoting a simpler diet. Many people popped up to ask me whether this would not risk malnutrition. It shows how fixated modern people are on nutrition. The several very elderly people around me, by the standards of modern city folk, all look malnourished.

The patients and families I treat, most of them ask me what tonic they can give the patient to nourish them. Having gotten sick from eating too well and too much, they need to eat even better food to make up for it? This is truly absurd.

If most people cut the meat on their plates by half and reduced the amount of each meal by half, their diseases would fall by half.

Then there is exercise.

Many who lose their health are deeply sedentary people who rarely exercise. Once ill they treat themselves with a convalescent mentality. Some of my cancer patients, physically quite capable of going out to exercise, instead choose to stay home watching TV or sitting at the card table playing mahjong with friends—anything but exercise.

Eating a lot, eating well, absorbing excess nutrition and calories, yet disliking exercise—this is the common malady of modern people. Everyone knows where the root of the disease lies, yet cannot overcome their own inertia.

When I prescribe medicine, most of the time I also urge patients to exercise more. I have made my exercise requirement concrete: I tell patients to jog five kilometers every day.

I hold a view that the design of modern hospitals is fundamentally wrong. Hospitals should bring healthy lifestyles and the building of a healthy psychological state into their scope of work. This is especially important for chronic-disease patients. We should let patients learn healthy lifestyles and attain a healthy mindset before releasing them back into life.

As a doctor, I often write as my orders: exercise more, eat small frequent meals, be vegetarian as much as possible, and keep a cheerful mood. This is already the routine advice of most clinicians. But sadly, over the years I have treated tens of thousands of cancer patients, and those who actually put these orders into practice are as rare as morning stars. In fact this advice is more useful than medicine, yet patients cannot carry it out—even facing the threat of death, they still cannot.

Many of the patients I have seen survive cancer beyond five years, and some of my own long-term survivors, have basically all put the doctor's advice into practice.

I have one patient with peritoneal mesothelioma whose survival has now far exceeded what any ordinary doctor would expect. Before falling ill, he was out socializing and entertaining almost every evening, never home.

After cancer, he suddenly realized his past lifestyle was completely wrong. From then on he changed utterly. Treating his disease he spent all his savings, and when he could borrow no more money, he realized that his old life of wide associations with disreputable friends had all been wrong. From then on he never went out socializing at night. Following my advice, he controlled his diet and began to increase his exercise, until eventually he was exercising far beyond what I had asked.

Now his physical strength and condition are far better than those of so-called healthy people. By ordinary medical rules he should have died five years ago; instead he is not only alive, his work and life are unaffected, and his physique is nearly that of a professional athlete.

All these years he has controlled his cancer simply with the cheap Chinese herbs I prescribe, while actively changing his attitude and lifestyle. Given his current condition, in five years he will still be alive and in excellent shape. In ten or twenty years, he should still be here.

I often hold him up as an example to educate other patients. I believe standard cancer treatment should be exactly the kind of treatment he has undergone. But not every patient has his perseverance, nor his wisdom.

Over the years, while popularizing cancer-treatment knowledge, I have also written articles on mental health and life experience; he is one of those who have benefited. He has steadily read everything I write and been deeply influenced by it. I believe that successful cancer treatment must treat body and mind together.

If one day I can withdraw from worldly life, I might found a kind of rehabilitation institution, dedicated to guiding a group of patients to correct their psychological attitudes and living habits, while coordinating moderate treatment.

My personal experience is that only in this way can patients truly recover. Today's medical institutions offer purely technical medical treatment, which is a far cry from true medical care. Within today's institutions, we doctors have merely become machines that can operate and prescribe.

Yet many patients are everywhere searching for so-called miracles. I greatly like a saying of the scholar Zhou Youguang, who lived to 112: "There are no miracles, only routines." We must first get these simplest routines right before we can create the unexpected miracle. To seek so-called miracles when one cannot even get the basics right is pure nonsense.