How to Live to 100: The 1:1 Principle

One of the first chapters of one of Chinese medicine's most important texts specifically says how to live to 100 and why the ancient people did and why modern people do not. Now in this series of videos I want to start sharing the basic principles behind what this ancient text says you can do to live to 100. Hey guys, Alex Hein, author of the health bestseller Master of the Day. Now I've included the first link below this video is a little PDF on five daily rituals that can potentially help you live to 100 with classical or traditional Chinese medicine. You can check it out right there the first link in the description. Now I want to read to you this dialogue it's between a physician known as Qi Bo and this mythical person called Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor. Now in this passage Qi Bo is responding to Huang Di and he's saying you know why is it that people used to live to a hundred but now they don't? What are they doing differently? Now what Qi Bo answers he says as for people in the most ancient past their knowledge of the Dao was such that they modeled themselves after yin and yang, harmonized their actions with the various arts of divination and computations. They knew the perfect measure in their food and drink, had routine in their periods of rest and activity, and did not recklessly tax their bodies by excessive physical activity. For this reason they were able to keep their body and spirit together and thus live out their heavenly or allotted years to the end, only departing after more than a hundred years of age. Now by comparison when he talks about the people of today here's what he says the reason why the people of our present times are not like this is that they use liquor as an everyday drink, take recklessness as normal behavior, have sexual intercourse when intoxicated. As a result they exhaust their essence because of their desires and scatter the genuine because of their squandering lifestyle. They do not know how to preserve the state of fullness or properly time when to drive their shen their spirit. They live in the service of pleasing their hearts and thereby they go against the true pleasures of life and do not know the proper measure of activity and rest. For this reason they become decrepit after only half of a hundred years. Now today in this video we're going to be talking about principle number one, modeling themselves or modeling your life after yin and yang. These are very clinical, relevant, actionable things you can do every single day. So let's talk about yin and yang in work and rest. Now we know humans have evolved to have 16 hours awake and 8 hours sleeping. We know that because other animals and other organisms are not like that. They have varying sleep and wake schedules. They sleep longer, they sleep shorter. But humans we know 16 hours up, 8 hours sleeping. That's the general pattern one-third yin, two-thirds yang. The very fundamental is do you dedicate that time to that time? Do you sleep five and you're dedicating those extra three to work? Do you sleep six, seven? What is the number for you? You know in my early or my mid to late 20s I was building my own business while working a full-time job. So I was dedicating nine to five to work and then three more hours to work and frequently I was getting less than seven hours of sleep. So that only intensified doing my doctorate in Chinese medicine where then I was not only still running my business I was doing a four-year doctorate. So that even I went from working basically nine you know nine to twelve hours a day to twelve to fifteen hours a day where I was literally busy. Not just like working eight hours a day. I was busy or working from 8 a.m. until 11 p.m. That's what like a 15 hour straight day of work. Did that for years. Now after years of this I started noticing some symptoms. Sleep problems, feeling hot and agitated at night, digestive problems that then progressed into very very bad things like panic attacks, anxiety that took several years to recover from, severe insomnia to the point where I couldn't sleep at all some nights and on and on. Now the very fundamental lesson I was breaking. I was violating the law of yin and yang in terms of balancing work and rest. The other thing is that this is different for each person. What you can do is different compared to other people. Your age, your current level of vitality and health. If you love the work versus if you hate the work this all changes the balance of yin and yang. But as a general principle think about that. The second thing is balancing yin and yang in terms of emotions and the spirit. You know one physician said life is about eight hours sleep, eight hours work, eight hours rest or play. No exceptions. Now how often do you really do that? I know I certainly don't. I would kill for eight hours of play a day. Are you crazy? That would be sweet. I would love that. But when it comes to emotions they're often one of the first suggestions or indications that we are sowing the seeds of illness. You know I noticed reflecting back on my journey that I was getting agitation a lot. A feeling of agitation like mini anger. Not true anger. I wasn't raising my voice at people but I was getting snippy. That was the seed along with some very rare sleep problems that I was creating a hurricane in my life. And oh it played out into a true hurricane times ten. But most people are on the spectrum. You know I was listening to the guy that wrote Love Medicine and Miracles. I'll probably post up here what his name is. Bernie Siegel I think. And I saw him speak live in LA and he said most pathologies in the DSM, the psych handbook, are a spectrum between hyper rigidity and hyper laxity. This is yin and yang. Most people their pathologies psychologically come from either too much rigidity. That's the neurotic. That's the anxious type. That's the worrier who tries to control everything. Or too much laxity. Sleep 12 hours a day. Can't get motivated. You know not disciplined in eating. But emotions also reflect that. The hyper rigid type is always prone to agitation and anxiety. The hyper lax type is maybe prone towards a little bit more melancholy. Lack of drive. Maybe more prone to sadness and lack of discipline. Things like that. Where are you in the middle? For the hyper type A type what will often heal them over time is them learning to deal with that rigidity and that tension and that high strongness and that control. And the lax type what often allows them to heal is the understanding that they need to be more disciplined. More routine. More regular. Discipline their sleep. Discipline their dieting. When we can find the middle point of our emotional set point that often is enough to heal over time. What about yin and yang in terms of diet? The most obvious thing in modern people is how much you eat. Do you regularly feel like you're eating until you're 80 90 percent full? Do you regularly eat until you're stuffed? Are you going out every night and you're having big meals? Heavy pasta dishes with a couple glasses of wine and you're like you're just so stuffed after. This is also yin and yang. And also the temperature of food. Are you eating fried chicken every day? Are you eating vegetables? You know one is very heat generating in Chinese medicine. One is not as heat generating. It's a little bit more cooling. And as acid reflux is an epidemic in modern people most of us could use eating a slightly more cooling diet. And then obviously the frequency that you eat. Are you snacking and you're not allowing your stomach to fully empty? All these other factors. Not just how much and the temperature of foods and the frequency and the quality of what we eat. And finally yin and yang is applicable to your life because the big picture. The gestalt of your life. What is the image? Right? Is the image a life of hustle? Life of grind? Life of productivity? Is it a life of leisure and relaxation and play? Almost the pathological side where you're not getting stuff done and you're missing your bills and you're not holding your promises. What is it? Anything in between. Where is it in a manifestation of yin and yang? In other words balance and homeostasis. It's a very simple principle that people pay lip service to because they don't understand how effective it really is clinically. Because all of us are on some spectrum in a state of yin and yang of balance. That when we tilt it in one direction for too long we start noticing symptoms. And then health problems and illnesses come from there. The problem is the seed looks like this. The illness is like this. But the time from here to here could be three years, five years and it regularly is. So if you can spot it when you're tilting this direction or you're tilting this direction you've already been given the biggest gift of your healing and your prevention. Okay? That's an intro to yin and yang and living to a hundred based on the Yellow Emperor's classic of or the inner classic we could just call it the Huangdi Neijing. I hope that helps. Before you go check out that free guide below. The free download on five daily rituals that can possibly help you live to a hundred. We're gonna film more videos in this series tackling everything in the Neijing that you can apply in your life. So you can check it out then check out my last related videos right on over here.