 You know, one of the most interesting things about being in America is that when people get ill, what I see so often is extreme reliance on just diet, as if that green juice that kale juice was what your great grandma, who lived to be 99, was consuming daily. Hint. She wasn't. Now, in this video I want to share one aspect of health that's very, very interesting and a quote that kind of blew my mind that I think will help you in your own journey. Hey, it's Alex Hine, author of the book, Master of the Day, and I've included the first link in the description as for a free PDF, which is five Chinese medicine daily rituals that can potentially help you add 10 years to your life. You can check it out right there, the link in the description. So I was reading this Bernie Siegel book, and he was talking about in cancer as a general rule, people that are happy don't get sick very often. And I thought about this quite a lot. You know, there's such an over reliance in the United States specifically on diet, on the material things that make a person healthy. I mean, the number of people I talk to around the holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas, that they say, you know, oh, I just really need to do like a detox or a cleanse, or I need to take some supplements that are going to help me poop a bunch and get it out of my system. Or the first thing I see when people are diagnosed, like for example, with cancer, or this whole, you know, natural health movement in California, people just think that your diet is a magical cure for everything. But I don't think that that it's true. You know, one thing that really surprised me was looking at the research on the blue zones, half the factors that predicted whether or not you would live to be a hundred in good health had nothing to do with diet or exercise. Almost 50% of the factors were having close friends, close family, being a part of a community, religion, having a purpose, like completely non material things in a person's life that just affect the state of the spirit and the emotions and how you feel about your life. You know, it's like eating healthy and working out and then going to a job you hate every day with people you hate every day versus working out, eating healthy and then going to a job. Even if you hate the job, if you work with people you love, it's so much more enjoyable. And so you imagine nine or 10 hours a day of sending stress hormones throughout your body or calm throughout your body. And it's funny because again, whenever people are sick, the first thing like my old assumption was is always, oh, it's just my diet and my exercise. I have to tweak those up a little bit. Rather than, you know what? The relationship I'm in really kind of sucks and I'm unhappy. You know what? I feel kind of crappy about my entire life altogether. I should probably find something to change, to live a more meaningful and a more exciting kind of life. Now, what's really cool in Chinese medicine and really surprising to me was that when you read some of these old texts by some of the most renowned physicians, the thing they always talk about is that the highest form of healing and the priority is what's called the healing of the spirit. Now, that can come in many different ways. It doesn't mean like a shaman is laying on hands and banging a drum. What it means is the things that make you feel good internally. That's it. Everyone recognizes what spirit, a person in good spirits. We use this word in English, good spirits, poor spirits. Everybody knows what that is. They can recognize it. It's the barista that's like, what's up? Welcome to Starbucks. How are you doing? Or the brief said, it's like, yeah, how's it going? OK, grande, mocha loco, dappofrappuccino, yeah, OK. Like we all recognize that it's not a complicated medical thing to diagnose. And yet it's one of the last things people focus on in terms of treatment. Yet all these great physicians throughout history have said the highest level of healing is you focus on the spirit first. It's very difficult for someone to be healthy when they eat right and exercise, but they don't feel good internally, daily. They have negative thoughts. They don't like their life. They internally are sending a hormone cascade of stress. It's very difficult, surprisingly, to overpower that even with diet and exercise. And so when it comes to healing and longevity, prioritizing the spirit, which just means what makes you feel good every single day. What is that thing that puts a smile on your face? What is that thing that helps you feel alive again? And if you've ever gone into a depression or had a dark phase of your life where you don't feel like yourself, we say that colloquially, what are the things that make you feel more like yourself again? And that's what I want to leave you in today's video. When things are not going well or you're healing and trying to recover and work on some condition, prioritize the healing of the spirit, which means not just the 50 supplements you take, but what makes you feel good? What puts a smile on your face like you did when you were a kid? Do more of those things, and this will become an integral piece of your own healing going forward. So I hope that helps. Again, the first link in the description is for a free PDF, five daily rituals that can possibly help you add 10 years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. And then you can check out my last related videos in this exact topic right over here.