Listening to the Body: How Emotion and Mindset Shape True Health

Illness is just another form of God’s love that reminds us to wake up from our mistakes.

The mind should be calm, the body should be active, and nutrition should be balanced but not excessive. These are the three magic weapons advocated by health experts from various traditions throughout the ages. The most important of these is our heart.

The body cannot lie. It faithfully helps us store all our emotions. Being sick reminds us to look inward and acknowledge our hearts and emotions.

"Sickness is caused by oneself. If you don't bring it upon yourself, you won't get sick."

As the saying goes: Before the age of 50, people seek illness; after age 50, illnesses seek people.

The beginning of life is the beginning of aging. Preserving health and anti-aging is a lifelong journey. A long-term reversed day-and-night schedule, an unrestrained diet, and a lack of exercise will cause disease. These habits are destructive to one's body and are essentially "creating disease."

Now everyone understands why we must emphasize "nurturing the heart." It may be difficult to put into practice, but at least it is good to keep this in mind and remind ourselves at all times:

"The truly brilliant doctor is inside you."

When people are thirsty, they look for water, and when they are hungry, they look for food. This is because the body's self-regulation mechanism is at work.

This is not only the thought of Traditional Chinese Medicine, but also the perspective of modern medicine.

Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, said 2,500 years ago: "The recovery from disease depends on one's own self-healing power, and doctors only assist."

Therefore, the truly brilliant doctor is not in the hospital, but in your body; the most precious panacea is not in the pharmacy, but within yourself—it all depends on whether you can activate it.

"If you don't hold onto anger, you won't get sick."

Emotions are a human instinct, but in a highly competitive living environment, mental pressure naturally increases, causing various negative emotions to affect our health.

You see a lot of people complaining everywhere, unhappy with everything they see: "Why is the country like this, society like this, and my workplace like this?" When they get home, they complain about their family too. Complaining is a negative emotion.

According to statistics from the World Health Organization, more than 90% of diseases are related to emotions. As long as we manage our emotions well, we can avoid getting sick, avoid getting seriously ill, get sick less often, and delay disease.

"The mind needs to be calm and the body needs to move."

Nurturing the mind, meditating, cultivating inner peace, and regulating consciousness and emotions are common-sense foundations of health care. Unfortunately, they are not taken seriously by everyone, leading to "incurable stomach problems" and "pharyngitis that lasts a lifetime."

When the mind is calm, the body is at peace; when the body is at peace, the body is healthy; and when the mind is at peace and the body is healthy, all kinds of diseases are less likely to occur.

Kinetic energy generates yang. If yang qi is strong and flows freely, qi and blood will flow smoothly, muscles will be full, and muscles and bones will be strong.

The mind should be calm, the body should be active, and nutrition should be balanced but not excessive. These are the three magic weapons advocated by health experts from various traditions throughout the ages.

The above suggestions are based on a professor’s 50 years of medical experience: emotions have a huge impact on physical health. Every sentence makes sense. Many people are still tortured by diseases without realizing that they are affected by emotions.

“All diseases in the world occur when the immune system loses the battle.”

We have always underestimated the wisdom of the body. The human body has a sophisticated immune system.

This is not only immunity in the narrow sense of Western medicine, but also includes self-diagnosis, internal resource management, self-repair, and regeneration.

When we experience various negative emotions, the body's immune system is attacked first. More than 70% of people process their emotions by attacking their own body organs, which is one of the biggest causes of illness.

Take women as an example: frequent anger makes one prone to mammary gland hyperplasia, and long-term emotional stagnation makes one prone to breast cancer. Neglecting female identity will affect ovarian health and disrupt menstrual cycles, while couples who are emotionally incompatible often suffer from gynecological issues.

Research shows that common emotions that cause immune system problems include anger, sadness, fear, melancholy, hostility, suspicion, and seasonal emotional fluctuations (such as frequent disputes and friction in summer, or higher rates of depression in winter).

When we feel symptoms such as skin allergies, throat discomfort, stomach pain, ulcers, insomnia, frequent dreams, or headaches, we often wonder: "Is there something wrong with my body?"

In fact, many times, persistent negative emotions are the hidden culprit behind the scenes.

“When you are sick, you can’t just treat the disease—you must also find the cause of the disease.”

When we have gastrointestinal discomfort, we often just swallow a lot of stomach medicine while avoiding the source of stress and tension. When rashes erupt on our skin like small volcanoes, we fail to recognize the message: "I am very angry; please look at my troubled heart."

Many diseases are caused by our own emotions. Even if we temporarily recover, if our emotional state deteriorates again, our health will slip away.

We often say, "I'm so angry," "I'm so stressed," or "I feel resentful." This is exactly what our emotions are doing to us.

Anger makes people feel out of control, causing the body to automatically release factors that harm the respiratory system; anxiety keeps the body in a state of dry boiling, like an empty iron kettle wearing away a person's mental energy bit by bit; stress depresses people like an invisible hand covering their face—they can see through the gray sky, but cannot reach past it.

The body does not lie. It faithfully helps us store all our emotions. Being sick actually reminds us to face our real needs, handle them appropriately, and trust the body's capabilities.

The human body has a strong ability to repair itself. Without this ability, no doctor could provide effective treatment.

We need to awaken the body’s inherent self-healing power and let recovery happen naturally.

Disease is just a symptom. We must not fear these symptoms; instead, we can look past the phenomenon to find the true cause behind it.

Illness is just another form of God’s love that reminds us to wake up from our mistakes.

There is no easy and effortless life in the world; a good future is built through effort. If we want to be responsible for our dreams and our families, we must manage our emotions well and maintain a strong body.

I wish everyone a positive attitude and a happy lifestyle, so that life and health will continually improve, turning well-being into visible wealth.

Thank you for reading!