 For me, trying to heal from chronic illness was by far one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do in my life. And it's a big piece of how I got into Chinese medicine and ended up even pursuing my doctorate in Chinese medicine. For a lot of people, we are Chiron, the perpetual, the eternal wounded healer. Now during that time though, there were many lessons that I learned about how to heal myself that apply to other people and I want to continue that series in this video here today. Hey, it's Alex Hain, author of the health book Master the Day. So I put together this really interesting case study below. The first link is this guy Li Qingyun who supposedly lived to be 256 years old. Now I don't think he really lived that long, but he lived for sure a long life and he shared four pieces of advice that helped him do that. So I've included it in the free PDF. If you enter your email below, you'll go ahead and you'll get that. So I want to share for me one of the principles that has made a really big difference. A lot of people, especially sensitive people, are more prone to having their nervous system always on and always activated. In other words, they're always kind of firing off stress hormones and honestly not even realizing it. So for the sensitive people watching this, you may be someone who really easily feels other people's emotions. You have a lot of empathy and that's both a gift and a curse. Because if you're constantly feeling like you're being blown by every single wind, gust that goes by or every single wave that goes by it affects you, then you're really easily off balanced and uncentered. Since the people may not even realize that they are unbalancing themselves and activating the stress response a hundred times a day. And I think I was one of those people because I didn't realize that I was in the habit of rushing all the time, even for things that didn't even matter. You know, I would eat my meals and I would just, you know, if I videoed my own face from the side, I would have realized that I was just chewing really quickly. That even reading books, I was always reading books to try to just finish them even though I really liked them. I was always setting timers at my office and where I worked because I wanted to get the work done and I wanted to be efficient with my time. So trying to disengrain this pattern of being someone who's always rushing to the point where I was developing health problems from obviously the stress response. I had to do this affirmation day to day, which was really simple and I just was reading this book one day or this, it was an anthropological report about how these indigenous cultures lived and how different that was from how modern people lived. And the person was saying that modern people spend a tremendous portion of their day in fight or flight, but ancient people and people are more primitive and simple cultures. They can be less than 5% or less than 10%. So I wrote down on a piece of paper, 5% fight or flight, which meant 5% of the day I could rush. That's it. Only 5%. And so day by day, I would sit down, I would eat a meal and I would look at that little card that said 5% fight or flight. And then I would take twice as much time to eat my meals or I wouldn't eat in front of a phone or I wouldn't eat in front of a TV or any kind of distraction. I would just eat and then in the mornings when I was getting ready for work, I would just read that card 5% fight or flight and I would brush my teeth slower, I would shower slower, I would drive to the office slower and then when I was working and then my transition leaving the office to go to the gym and then coming home or on Saturday mornings running out to a yoga class or running out to the gym, read that card 5% fight or flight and I would walk down the stairs instead of run down the stairs. I would leave my phone at home and in general it was kind of surprising how profound the effect was when I just wrote down 5% fight or flight. So if only 5% of my day I can rush, what is that 5% going to be? Now the craziest thing is if you decide you're going to do this 5% fight or flight challenge, the craziest thing is when you do it you realize you get the exact same amount of work done with one-fifth the stress. You ironically get to places almost the exact same time when you're not rushing. You feel better when you eat your food and it takes not that much longer, a few minutes longer when you're not rushing. When you're not rushing to get your work done, ironically you get it done in pretty much the same time and the quality is amazing. And what surprised me the most was despite the fact that I decided not to rush anywhere or activate all that fight or flight, activate all that stress, almost everything got done the exact same time as previously and that was really mind blowing. So if you are someone trying to free yourself from that addiction to stimulation, which I think is this generation is going to have a real hard time learning how to free themselves from that addiction to doing, to just fidgeting, to touching a phone, to having to look at something every time they're eating or when they're with their own friends, sitting in line, just breathing, waiting for your doctor's appointment for five minutes. This should not be a Herculean task, but it is for a lot of modern people. That is a very simple principle. If you're like me and you've realized you've spent a lot of your life rushing, put a little card together that says five percent fight or flight or five percent rushing, which means you only get five percent of your day. So what is basically that 30 minutes of your day where you're going to be rushing? Think about that and try to live your life that way. And you will just be so much more of a relaxed person. And the crazy thing is you'll pretty much get everything done just the same. Now, before you guys go, you can check out that free report down there below, the case study of Li Qingyun's four principles to live to be supposedly 256, but it's a very interesting article. Nonetheless, you can check it out the first link right down there below. And then, of course, I have two related videos on this exact subject right on over here.