 If you feel like you've fallen off track with your health and you're really not sure what to do going forward, there are three practices that I recommend doing daily and being conscious of from a Chinese medicine point of view that can help you avoid the major reasons that people die young. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hine, author of The Health Book Master of the Day and doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. So before we jump into this video, there are two very important links right below the video. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, just click the link below to reach out to my private practice. And the second is I put together a free guide, which has four daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine. So those are right below this video. So when we talk about the first practice here, we're talking about what I consider lymphatic movement. This is the general category. So I like to say that for people to live long, you need resources and habits that strengthen the yang as a concept and the yin as a concept. So I like to think of yang as your ability to output, your ability to work, to exercise, to have energy, and yin as your ability to recover, to heal, to restore, to calm down. Right? Yang is doing work. Yin is recovering or resting or healing. Now when I think about lymphatic movement, the main thing I think about is anything that creates circulation. So whether that's qigong or breath work or yoga class or lifting heavy weights in the gym or just walking, I view the king of yang is movement. And there's a saying that in Chinese medicine, the 10,000 kinds of qigong of these breathing exercises are designed to generate movement and opening. And we say tong. So it's opening and movement, because if there's lymphatic movement, if there's cardiovascular movement, your risk of diseases like cardiovascular disease and cancer decrease. And we know that certainly in America, dying of cardiovascular disease, whether it's a heart attack or stroke, or it's something secondary, such as dementia or similar like diabetes where there's a circulatory component, often the people who are the most active and the ones who have the diet most aligned with good blood circulation are the ones who live the longest with the least pathology. So the first epidemic is the lack of yang, right? Lack of lymphatic movement, lack of blood circulation, lack of good cardiovascular health. This is yang. The second epidemic is the epidemic of what I call nervous system disorders. So when you look at the statistics today for the rates of anxiety and depression and sleeping problems, insomnia, these are astronomical and they've only seemed to increase since the industrialized age has begun. So since humans have been living this light bulbs, we can be up late at night, this loud noise industrial life, this working 70 hours a week at a desk in front of a computer typing with no physical movement. We've had very different kinds of disorders come to the forefront. And for me, one of the most disabling that I've seen is this psycho-emotional or psycho-spiritual if I can use that term illness that you see in so many people today. And one of the antidotes is more time in yin. So the first and most fundamental way to generate more yin quality in your life, that winter, that rest, restoration quality is sleep as the biggest one and rest. So that may mean working 40 hours instead of 80 hours. It may mean just prioritizing eight hours a night. But there are other ways to generate that nervous system calming too. Because of course, for example, physical exercise movement, somatic therapies are some of the best ways to help the nervous system heal as well. I mean, there's a whole researcher, Bessel Vendorkoch, who wrote the book The Body Keeps a Score that was showing that these somatic therapies are much more clinically effective at healing trauma than, for example, talk therapy or other cognitive-based therapies. Even for conditions like anxiety or depression, physical exercise and somatic therapies are really, really effective. But there are other qualities as well. For example, when you look at the Blue Zone's research, the people who live to be 100 in the highest percentage that we've seen in the world, about half the factors that predict your longevity have nothing to do with what you eat or how much you move, which surprises people. About half of those factors are about social belonging, having good social ties, community, going to church, having a purpose for living, you know, having a family-centered or just a community-centered life. And those aren't quantifiable in the same way that exercise is, but they have the same effect on the nervous system in some ways, which is a calming and a down-regulating of the nervous system. Now, the third practice to be conscious of is what I would call preventing digestive stagnation. So we know that digestion and diet is one of the primary factors involved in diabetes and cardiovascular disease and even some cancers. But what's very important is that digestive stagnation is at the head of many different kinds of conditions. GI is my main specialty simply because I have so many people coming in complaining of GI problems. And look, maybe most of them will just stay bloated for the rest of their life, or maybe some will progress to gallbladder disease, like having gallstones. Maybe some will go even further and have baritisophagus, or a very small percentage will develop cancer. But realistically, digestive stagnation is a major issue today. If you look at the tens of thousands of gallbladder removal surgeries that are happening day to day, surgeon doesn't even blink an eye, take out the gallbladder. It's very common to see digestive stagnation as one of the other major causes of disease today. And on top of that is lymphatic stagnation that can be secondary to that. So the way I view the modern world is you need to generate more yang with physical movement, more yin with a rest and connection, and prevent the stagnation or blockages that for a lot of people on the immaterial side is emotional from stress, or on the material side is physical from food too much or a bad diet. So those are the three practices I think everyone should be very, very careful of and pay close attention to daily if you want to live a long and healthy life. All right guys, that's what I have for you today. If you want to learn more about my private practice or that free download, check them out below this video and I'll see you soon.