"The gods only have the problem of spirit, the animals only have the problem of flesh, but the human beings have the dual problems of spirit and flesh." This sentence reveals the deepest root of human complexity.
We "forget about food and sleep" in this way, naturally at the expense of health. It is said that when the body sends signals due to needs, it should be respected instead of despised, obeyed instead of resisted, and cooperated instead of goring the bull. In this sense, any animal is a teacher of human beings. They all know to "follow their feelings" and will never let their "spirit" and "flesh" conflict.
Vitamin A for mental health should be "philosophical". The B vitamin for mental health should be "integrity." Vitamin C for mental health should be "happy". Vitamin D for mental health should be "love". Vitamin E for mental health should be "generous". Vitamin F for mental health should be "strong".
The first spiritual "pressure reducing valve" should be "giving up". The second spiritual "pressure reducing valve" should be "ignore". The third spiritual "pressure reducing valve" should be "self-relief". The fourth spiritual "pressure reducing valve" should be "catharsis."
In addition to "vitamins" and "pressure reducing valves", our healthy psychology should also rely on three things. The first support is "society". The second support for healthy psychology should be "friends". The third support for healthy psychology is undoubtedly "family".
Our Spirits and Flesh (Part 1)
——Speech at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Zhao Zhizhen
“The gods only have spirits. "Animals only have problems with meat, but humans have dual problems with soul and body." This sentence reveals the deepest root of human complexity.
When we leave our ape "cousins" far behind and step up to the throne of "the spirit of all things", we also pay a lot of price. A popular science TV film I made seven years ago, "When We Stand Up," won an award at the Montreal Television Festival. In addition to explaining the root causes of some human diseases, this program also wants to remind us from a philosophical sense to remember our "animal origins" and not to forget that there is never an absolute good thing in the world that is "all beneficial and no harm", but it often happens There are times when "you get something cheap but you lose something cheap".
If you pay attention, you will find that it is not difficult to find some traces of our ancestors in us even today. For example, when we get goosebumps when it's cold, we intend to stand up the "hair" all over our body, because the fluffy hair keeps us warmer, even though there are only a few sparse hairs left on our skin; children are more interested in climbing trees and swinging on swings. With strong interest, babies can hold the crossbar and hang themselves up less than an hour after birth. It is said that this is because humans retain more monkey habits when they are young; and when we stand on a high place and try to look down, we often see I felt a chill running down my spine, maybe it was a reaction of preparing to hook the branch with my "tail" to avoid falling.
When humans and animals part ways, our bodies are not fully prepared. Take upright walking as an example. Because the circulatory system changes from horizontal to vertical, it causes many cardiovascular diseases. We have also obtained many "patents" such as organ prolapse, spinal compression and hemorrhoids. For example, when we sneeze, we must open our mouths, and cannot rely on the nasal cavity alone to pass large airflow like some animals. This is because the increase in brain volume has brought about the large-angle bending of the nasal cavity and respiratory passages, which has caused easy Colds, sinuses, and frontal sinusitis; changes in our food structure have caused the jaw bones to recede and shrink, causing crowding of the tooth growth space and redundant wisdom teeth. If you study carefully, you will also find some places that humans have not had time to fully adapt to during evolution. But relatively speaking, these can only be regarded as minor "trouble" that have no major purpose. What we are going to discuss now is the largest, most common, and most serious maladaptation in human evolution, that is, the misalignment of knowledge and action, and the imbalance between spirit and body.
We might as well first make a comparison of the most basic physiological needs of humans and animals, and see what changes have taken place after we put on the crown of "human".
When a cow is hungry, it will instinctively look for food. If you find any green grass, chew it. Even if it is someone else's wheat seedlings or even expensive flowers and plants, as long as they are delicious, they will be eaten. But people are different. When we are hungry, we may see delicious food in store windows within easy reach, but if we are short on money, we dare not think too much about it. The little match girl in Andersen's fairy tale could only get the roast goose in her hallucination before she died. Even when you are already sitting in front of the dining table facing the fragrant dishes, if the guest of honor has not arrived yet, you may have to wait patiently; in addition, there are also situations where we already need to eat, but we are busy at work." Don't care about "eating." All of these are caused when our stomach makes a request to "eat", but is ruthlessly rejected by our "spirit". As a result, "fighting with the stomach makes it hungry", gastric juice is still secreted, and the stomach has already made all preparations to digest food, so it has to "digest" its own stomach wall. On the contrary, sometimes the stomach is full and sends a signal to stop eating, but the "spirit" instructs the stomach to continue eating. Maybe it was because there was leftover food, or maybe it was just because breakfast at the hotel was free. Therefore, it is true that the stomach cannot be responsible for all human stomach problems.
Unless animals are specially trained, they will always be "convenient" when they need to excrete. The farmhouses in Zheng Banqiao's poems often have "cows all over the ground and dung in every household". Birds in the trees are unapologetic about pooping on your head. But people have to find the toilet. We are often too busy to go to the toilet. There is a saying that "playing chess and cards makes you pee big bubbles", which means that people who are addicted to playing chess and cards often will not move until their bladder is broken. It is said that Premier Zhou Enlai's bladder cancer was related to the fact that he often held in his urine while receiving foreign guests one after another. Needless to say, it goes without saying that even if we want to fart in the elegant hall, we can only "fart with caution". This is all the result of the "spirit"'s "strict discipline" over the "flesh".
Everyone must have heard the idiom "hanging beam stabs the stock". Sun Jing of the Han Dynasty studied "morning and evening" and tied his hair to the beams with ropes to prevent him from dozing off. During the Warring States Period, Su Qin was too sleepy from studying at night, so he used an awl to prick his legs, to the point of self-abuse. In addition, measures to drive away drowsiness include pouring cold water on them. We modern people resort to smoking and drinking strong coffee. In short, the "flesh" has declared fatigue and repeatedly asked for sleep and rest, but the "spirit" insists on forcing it to endure hard and stay awake.
We "forget about food and sleep" in this way, naturally at the expense of health. It is said that when the body sends signals due to needs, it should be respected instead of despised, obeyed instead of resisted, and cooperated instead of goring the bull. In this sense, any animal is a teacher of human beings. They all know to "follow their feelings" and will never let their "spirit" and "flesh" conflict.
Let’s take a look at the “love” of animals. To a hen, a rooster means "I love you without any negotiation." The courtship process can be said to be straight to the point and "accomplished in one go". And people are too complicated. When a man and a woman are happy, various physiological reactions may be in place, but they can often only be kept deep in the heart and difficult to express in words. The first chapter of the Book of Songs tells the story of the feeling of "not getting what you want, falling asleep and thinking about it, leisurely, tossing and turning". Now after we "fall in love", we often go back and work hard to write love letters and think of strategies. Sometimes a "dating" lasts for several years. As for the way Ah Q in Lu Xun's novel treats Wu's mother, directly saying "I sleep with you", it is considered to be a typical uneducated, uncivilized, primitive and rude behavior worthy of ridicule, because it violates the ancient saying of "Fa Hu" Love ends with etiquette." I have seen a couplet that reads: "Filial piety is the first of all good deeds, but the heart is not concerned with deeds. There is no filial son in a poor family; all evil deeds are the first, and deeds are not considered to be heart. There is no perfect person in the world." This second couplet is very effective. It reflects the monitoring and restriction of natural desires by human spiritual consciousness. Liu Xiahui's "sitting in arms" is obviously an example of human beings boasting after successfully controlling "spirit" over "flesh". The literature of almost every nation has left many unforgettable and soul-stirring love stories, which undoubtedly best reflect the mutual constraints and interdependence of human social attributes and animal attributes. That's why some people lamented that "the greatest happiness is the unity of love and morality."
However, from a health perspective, the disconnection and suppression of "spirit" and "flesh" in love are obviously detrimental to human health. There are countless examples of people losing interest in eating and drinking, becoming ill because of love, and seeking life and death. Having said that, the power of human culture and morality is sometimes strong enough to directly regulate the occurrence of its natural desires. For example, incest is prohibited in any known civilization, and a healthy person's sexual orientation will never be directed toward his biological relatives.
There is a word that is no longer unfamiliar to us, and that is "stress". If we take the word literally, we can understand stress as the response of organisms to external stimuli. A bug is lying on the ground motionless. To know whether it is alive or dead, you can pull it with a small stick to see if it responds to this stimulus. Some life forms in the primitive ocean began to respond to external light stimulation, which is probably the origin of eyes. The most important stress response that animals often encounter and occur at any time is the "fight" or "flight" response. That is what is called "Fight or Flight" in English.
A hungry and cold wolf was looking for food despondently in the snow. Suddenly discovering a rabbit, the wolf will immediately become "different from the other two wolves". Its entire body immediately goes into "mobilization". Under the instructions of the hypothalamus, epinephrine, norepinephrine and glucocorticoids pour out and pour into the blood, causing capillary contraction to ensure that blood throughout the body is diverted to the heart, lungs and skeletal muscles first. A wolf with surging blood, accelerated heartbeat and breathing, and gushing vitality in its limbs has completely switched from "energy-saving mode" to "hunting mode". The rabbit that was so carefree will react in the same way, mobilizing all its strength. But its little bit of adrenaline is secreted to escape. Then, when the wolf gets his wish and catches the rabbit, or the rabbit is lucky enough to escape, the adrenaline in their blood will be consumed in the violent "fight and escape", the stress state will be relieved immediately, and the body will return to normal. The "fight or flight" response is the most precious gift given by nature to almost every animal, and the most effective magic weapon for survival. Our distant ancestors were able to successfully hunt for food and escape from predators in the primeval forest, and this "fight or flight" stress response was indispensable.
To this day, this "fight and flight" response still works wonders in us. There are reports that a frail mother bravely moved more than 100 kilograms of rocks to rescue her child during the earthquake. When I was a child, I lived in the courtyard of the Henan Federation of Literary and Art Circles. I saw with my own eyes the old poet Xu Yunuo carrying two buckets of water to his house when there was a fire, but he didn't know how to get out afterwards. People in a highly stressed state can indeed explode with much greater strength than usual.
However, after all, human living conditions and environments have changed rapidly over thousands of years, while our biological attributes have changed slowly on a scale of millions of years. The stress functions written into our genes have not "kept pace with the times" at all. When we encounter things today that are tens of millions of times more complex than our ancestors in the forest, our stress response systems still use the same old methods from millions of years ago to deal with them, squeezing out a little adrenaline as a "panacea." . This kind of trick of "confronting complexity with simplicity" and "confronting ever-changing things with immutability" often seems out of date.
For example, during a meeting, a colleague with malicious intentions may frame and slander you. You are already furious and your blood is rising. This response is intended for "fight or flight." According to the logic of your body, your next step should be to pounce on him and twist into a ball. If you don’t believe it, you can’t help but clench your fists. But you can neither "fight" nor "escape" (so someone added another Freeze to the Fight or Flight response. Stay put.) You often need to sit quietly, like an engine running at high speed. But a car that cannot be put into gear. Maybe after you come down, you will write a letter of complaint to your superiors to express your hatred, but these actions will not effectively reduce the concentration of adrenaline in your blood and consume your potential to mobilize during stress. In the end, only your own body will be damaged. We all will inevitably encounter similar situations, such as unwarranted criticism from others, unwarranted criticism from superiors, and unreasonable punishment from the police.
Human society is completely different from "ape society", and interpersonal relationships are also fundamentally different from "ape-to-ape relationships". Sometimes we can't help but "when a common man sees humiliation, he draws his sword and stands up to fight" because this primitive stress response takes over. "Words of joy are too many to be trustworthy, words of anger are too many to be disrespectful"; "If you are angry when you are angry, you have no face to say it again". "A little impatience can ruin a big plan." These words all show that the ancients had great experience in controlling stress reactions.
If the "fight or flight" response is only to deal with "enemy situations", it may still have its rationality. But our bodies just like to "sound the alarm" in other situations. For example, walking into the examination room, standing on the podium, facing the TV camera, meeting with superiors, dating your first girlfriend... at least this is not considered "enemy love". But your stress system is firing on all cylinders. Your adrenaline is surging, your heart is pounding, you are short of breath and sweating, your hands and feet are even shaking, your mind is blank, and your entire mental system is in chaos. Some "nervous masters" often get "stage-sick", "field-sick", "lens-sick", "official-sick", "women-sick", and even faint, (which is equivalent to "blowing a fuse" "Or "tripped".) In short, it is the result of excessive stress response. Originally, in these situations, maintaining a certain degree of tension and excitement may be beneficial, but what is obviously needed more is calmness, calmness and calmness. Our stress system treats them all as "fight and flight" problems in a simple, rough and general way. Isn't it completely confusing and doing a disservice? There is an experience from the ancients called "If you speak to an adult, you will despise him", which points out the mentality you should have when meeting senior officials. It is indeed a very precious insight.
Seriously, the "fight and flight" reaction does not just happen occasionally in daily life, but almost always follows. Delayed flights, traffic jams on highways, constant noise outside the window, loss of important things, sudden water and power outages, the defeat of our favorite team... will all make us feel "head-scratched", and even our blood pressure will rise suddenly. However, this kind of stress response has neither a target to "fight" nor a place to "escape" from. Contemporary fast-paced and high-load life is full of stressors. Today's children have been on the road to becoming "child prodigies" almost since they were three years old, let alone the subsequent stages of their lives. As a poem says, "What face is not haggard? What heart is not tired? What shoulders are not tired?" Our stress system is becoming more and more "excited" every day.
It is also important to mention that our stress response does not always start after an event actually happens. In addition to using "ongoing tense", it also often uses "simple future tense" - "advance" worries due to worries about the future. For example, you are worried about going to court for a lawsuit in two days, worried about an operation you will undergo next week, worried about the depreciation of the stocks you bought, worried about possible layoffs and unemployment, worried about your children's further education and the medical care of the elderly, worried about the resurgence of SARS, worried about rampant terrorism... …"It's also a worry when you're going forward, and you're also worried when you're retreating." There are endless things worth worrying about. We already have enough troubles that we have, and we have to worry about the troubles that we don’t have. Our stress system is even more "never peaceful".
As the spirit of all things, one of the characteristics of human beings is that they know how to foresee the future. If it were a pig, even if it was sent to the slaughterhouse tomorrow, it would still eat, sleep and play as usual today. And people, even criminals who kill without batting an eye, will have a lot of thoughts on the day before execution and can't sleep at night. The concentration of catecholamines in the blood is dozens of times higher than that of normal people. Having said this, I can't help but think of some obsessive believers of cults. The practices they practice may really be beneficial to "health". Because they have given everything they own, including life and death, to the leader unconditionally and without reservation, and no longer have any personal desires or "attachments", thus greatly reducing their daily stress reactions, and they can It is said that a kind of inner "tranquility" and "balance" have been achieved. But we don't need to reach this "state" because it is not far from the animal state.
Now we can go back and summarize a little bit. Ever since we drifted apart after the "Farewell of the Apes", the stress mechanism carefully designed by Mother Nature for us has become increasingly unable to keep up with the situation.
As a preparation and prelude to behavior, the animal's stress response is directly linked to the behavior. The two work closely together and strictly correspond to each other. They are mutually beneficial. However, human stress is often disconnected from actions. It is our "spirit" that cuts off the direct link between stress and behavior and intervenes to block and control it. At the same time, the scope of human stress has seriously expanded. Thousands of problems that we would never encounter when we were apes have become switches that trigger stress today. It is difficult for us to outline in a panoramic manner how the "spiritual-flesh contradiction" profoundly and cumulatively damages people's health. Taking our stomach as an example, when a person is eating, if he suddenly receives bad news, such as the death of a relative or friend. The meal in front of him will immediately become unpalatable. I have never seen anyone who can "turn grief into appetite." Because your brain no longer pays attention to the signal to eat, it also removes the blood sent to the stomach. A person has a "stern" face when he is angry. If we can get into his stomach like Sun Wukong, we will see that he also has a "stern" stomach. Many people have diarrhea when they are nervous or under a lot of work pressure. This is called nervous diarrhea. It seems inappropriate to put business negotiations and work meetings on the dinner table. The intestines and stomach are indeed the most emotional organ of the human body. Many problems of the digestive system, such as gastrointestinal disorders, gastric ulcers, gastritis and even gastric cancer, are originally caused by "spirits", but the intestines and stomach take the blame.
Our cardiovascular and cerebrovascular systems are undoubtedly the more direct victims of continuous stress response. Whenever adrenaline and norepinephrine pour down and flow through the body, our heart beats faster and our blood pressure rises, often becoming a direct cause of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular accidents. If there is a forensic examination after Zhuge Liang's three attacks on Zhou Yu and Wang Lang's death, he will definitely come up with pathological reports such as myocardial infarction and cerebral artery rupture. More often than not, the concentration of catecholamine hormones in our body remains high, the basal metabolism of the whole body is enhanced, cell division is accelerated, platelet aggregation and microvessels are in a state of contraction, causing hemodynamic changes and chronic ischemia of many organs. , including our skin. This is exemplified by the fact that people turn pale when they are angry or frightened. Therefore, sorrow etches more wrinkles on a person's face than time does. Our memories must be "cached" in the hippocampus before they can be "transferred" to the "hard drive" in the cerebral cortex. If hormones such as "cortisol" in our body often "high tide", it will damage and atrophy the hippocampus, causing memory loss
We have rarely heard of animals having insomnia, but among humans There are too many people who cannot sleep peacefully. Liu Yong, a poet in the Song Dynasty, obviously had a deep understanding. He wrote, "The clear night is almost cold, and I fall asleep again when I wake up. I can't sleep at all times, and the night is as long as an age." In fact, most people's insomnia is due to stress reactions that destroy normal biological rhythms. and autonomic nervous system balance. After we lie down in bed at night, our neural activity is "excited" to "get off work" and "suppressed" to "go to work", so we fall asleep naturally. I don't dare to talk much when I get up at night to go to the toilet, for fear that I will wake up if I talk, that is, I am afraid that I will arouse "excitement" and drive away "inhibition". Now, our increasing stress response is increasing the excitement of the sympathetic nerve every day. As a result, it does not leave when it is time to "turn over" at night, and the "inhibition" cannot be in place, so we suffer from insomnia. "I can't fall asleep and sleep hard", I can only wake up more and more. Insomnia often stems from "something on the mind," especially fear. A vicious cycle can form here. We are afraid of exams, afraid of getting sick, afraid of being punished. In short, we can be "fearful" of anything to the point of being unable to sleep, and "fear of insomnia" can naturally be "feared" of being unable to sleep. The fear of insomnia itself has become the most stubborn source of stimulation and excitement that hinders sleep.
Everyone must have heard the "howling" caused by the sound from the speaker being fed back into the microphone. That is, the output of a system in turn strengthens the input, which is called positive feedback. Our "insomnia" symptoms further strengthen the fear of insomnia and will also cause the "howling of life". Therefore, this malignant biochemical channel must be cut off.
A friend of mine has a very unique point of view. He said that the effect of being knocked unconscious for two hours is completely different from that of sleeping for two hours. Taking sleeping pills is equivalent to being knocked unconscious, but instead of being "knocked out" by a stick, you are "knocked out" by pills. In fact, many sleeping pills can regulate the balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves.
Maybe more often it just acts as a placebo, but the effect is often better. There is a term called "iatrogenic diseases", a large proportion of which are caused by doctors misdiagnosing or exaggerating the condition, which puts a heavy burden on the patient, leading to a rapid deterioration of health conditions. I read a Soviet children's novel about a child who read the symptoms described in a book. The more he compared the symptoms, the more he felt that he had the disease. As a result, he was worried all day long and could not relieve himself. It wasn't until one day that I suddenly discovered that the words "horse disease" were written behind the symptoms, that I burst into laughter and suddenly recovered. In fact, sometimes the pain of hypochondriasis is as painful as the disease. Originally, health means not feeling its existence. For example, only when we have stomach pain will we constantly and clearly feel the presence of our stomach. On the contrary, if your "spirit" is always taking the initiative to feel here and there, you will often feel that something is wrong. This is the reaction of sensation on entity, the interference of psychology on physiology. Therefore, the more afraid you are of getting sick, the more likely you are to get sick, because worry is "negatively related" to the outcome.
Take the contemporary super-killer cancer as an example. Some people were chatting and laughing before going to the hospital. As soon as they said they had been diagnosed with cancer, their spirits immediately collapsed. As a result, the cancer took over and his health completely collapsed, and he was dead within a few months. In fact, under normal circumstances, each of our cells will make mistakes during division and replication. Nature has evolved through mistakes in biological replication. There will be a very small amount of cancer cells in our bodies, and we are in "human cancer survival" at any time. It's just that our error correction mechanism and immunity function promptly identify and eliminate these cancer cells, preventing "microcancers" from turning into "clinical cancers". The "sentence" of cancer and the tension and fear caused by it destroyed the immune system in one fell swoop. Therefore, the medical community does not unconditionally support overly sensitive detection methods such as "one drop of blood to detect cancer". At the same time, long-term physical and mental fatigue, anxiety and sorrow will also greatly reduce the efficiency of our error correction mechanism, just like the proofreader in a printing factory falls asleep and the wrong version is printed in batches. In this sense, many cancers are often caused or caused by our mental factors.
Friends who have installed a radio will have a concept of "signal-to-noise ratio". The whole machine should be quiet when there is zero signal, and the noise current should be as small as possible. When receiving a program, the effective signal should "rise from the ground", forming a sharp and high peak. The same is true for our healthy body. It is peaceful and quiet in its daily state, but it quickly mobilizes its potential during times of stress to form high-efficiency explosive power. However, modern life can easily cause our stress system to be in a tense state of "triggering without triggering" or "playing with the princes in a beacon fire" style. It gradually turned into an overused rubber band that "has no elasticity when pulled and cannot be retracted when released." The "signal-to-noise ratio" of life is greatly reduced. Many people usually doze off but cannot fall asleep when lying down; they are not hungry at ordinary times but do not eat much even though they are holding bowls; they often want to urinate but only urinate a little at a time; they usually have many thoughts but cannot concentrate during exams; they usually have wild thoughts and have trouble in bed. Sexual impotence. In short, the gap between stress and non-stress states has been greatly reduced, the peak of the wave has been reduced, and the waveform has been flattened. This is actually a reflection of the reduction in the degree of organization of the body, the increase in chaos, and the increase in "entropy" value.
When I was at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in April this year, Leslie Cheung’s suicide shocked the country and abroad and became the headline news on TV and newspapers for many days. The son of South Korea's Hyundai Group jumped off a building and caused the world to sigh. Currently, suicide ranks fifth on the list of causes of death in humans and ranks first among the causes of death among young people. Just talking about our Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge, more than a thousand people have jumped off it in more than 40 years. It has simply become a "resort for finding shortcomings". This is really the tragedy of modern civilization. It seems that the World Health Organization’s designation of September 10th as Suicide Prevention Day from this year is not unnecessary. Most people who commit suicide suffer from depression, and there are many celebrities, writers, wealthy people and high-ranking officials with decent careers and brilliant careers. They were all unable to escape from extreme mental anguish and soul torture. After long-term failed efforts and desperate struggles, they finally "murdered themselves." This is a massive psychological collapse. The violent conflict between "spirit" and "flesh", the vicious interaction, the entanglement of life and death, and the final inability to resolve the destruction caused. Maybe the "spirit" told the "flesh" to die and the flesh had to die. Maybe the changes in the "flesh" distorted the shape of the "spirit" step by step.
Of course, depression is a "real disease". Patients have obvious imbalances in the concentration of neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine, serotonin and dopamine. The reasons can also be found at the level of heredity and genes. The long-lasting low mood, self-abasement, and pessimism of patients with depression are essentially different from the bad mood and sadness of normal people. But there is no doubt that long-term mental stress and psychological conflicts caused by continuous stress will become the trigger and catalyst of depression. This is also a reasonable explanation for why the proportion of patients with depression is increasing among the population today.
The idea of ??"leaving your soul to God and your body to doctors" is actually a major misunderstanding of human health. To put it in a sensational and disrespectful way, it is this tradition of seeing the "flesh" but not the "spirit" that has led to the fact that our hospital has been essentially the same as a veterinary hospital for a long time. Many scholars believe that the current main threat to human health has shifted from acute infectious diseases caused by bacteria to chronic diseases caused by mental factors affecting immune function, leaving a large number of people in a critical "sub-health" state for a long time. Today, many wounds on our body can still repair themselves. Some of our diseases, such as colds, can be cured naturally, relying on the self-organizing function and immune system. Each of us has a "doctor" in our body, and excessive stress But the harassment made this "doctor" confused and paralyzed. There may even be constant chaos in which the immune system attacks itself. Therefore, what we need to do now is to reawaken this "doctor" sent by nature and give it the opportunity and conditions to work.
In France, when I visited the Lachaise Cemetery, I roughly counted hundreds of birth and death dates from the tombstones, and found that people a century or two ago did indeed only live to be fifty years old on average. . Today’s average life span has reached more than seventy years, which is a blessing brought by modern medicine. However, why human lifespan cannot reach 7 times the maturity period or 8 times the growth period according to the rules of other mammals, that is, 140 to 160 years old? It seems that the misalignment of stress response and the disconnection between "spirit" and "flesh" are probably is an extremely important reason. Can we say that modern medicine's health care of "meat" contributed to the first leap in human lifespan, but the realization of the next leap will depend on our care for "spirit"?
The United Nations Health Organization has already added indicators such as "mental balance" and "the ability to live in harmony with the surroundings" in the definition of human health. It should be said that it reflects the significant progress in human understanding of the relationship between "spirit" and "flesh". Our emphasis on hygiene should no longer be limited to washing hands, brushing teeth and sterilizing tableware. We should also systematically pay attention to mental health care and mental hygiene. We respect the elderly and hope that they will live long, love our children and hope that they will grow up, and always go out of our way to ask them to eat something. That is to say, through nutritional supplements and tonics, efforts are devoted to the reward of "meat". Now it seems that it is obviously not enough. We should also try to keep them happy and mentally healthy, and work hard on the care of their "spirits" by eliminating stress and tension.
So, how can people achieve "harmony of body and mind, and peace of mind and body"? Perhaps at this point, we have solved the problem. If we have discovered many nutrients with definite functions for the human body, is there a similar list of nutrients for the human spirit?
I think that vitamin A for mental health should be "philosophical".