How to be well

Reading much of the media coverage of the current covid-19 pandemic, it’s both notable and understandable that the emphasis is overwhelmingly on “how we avoid getting the virus”.

Here I want to focus on the other side of the equation, an area which I’d argue is being overlooked amidst all the fear:

How can we be as well as possible: how do we cultivate robust health, a calm mind, an adaptable nervous system, and an optimally functioning immune system?

This is an area that Acupuncture & Chinese Medicine has a lot to say about. In fact you could go as far as to say that it’s a central focus of this particular medical system.

So how do you do it?

Well, broken down to its basic components, “how to be well” or yang sheng as it’s called in Chinese, is alarmingly simple:

You eat a healthy diet, you practice healthy movement, and you take appropriate rest.

Of course each of these 3 areas can become infinitely nuanced as we look at what, for example, eating well might mean in the context of an individuals life:

How old are they, how strong is their digestion, what work do they do, are they experiencing high levels of stress, is it summer or winter? etc etc

The devil is most definitely in the detail. Or more accurately: the more detail you go into in order to make the advice as person-specific as possible, the better the results you can achieve.

I will be exploring each of those 3 areas: diet, movement and rest over the coming weeks, breaking each of them down into further constituent parts in a series of blogs.

But the key point that I want to emphasise here is that although we are facing a very particular new threat to our health, we can do far more than just passively hope that it passes us by.

We can actively promote and enhance our health purely by adapting aspects of our lifestyle. We can do this for ourselves, in our own time and in our own homes. And even better, as we make progress we feel good!