When your living situation cannot be changed in the short term, you should do your best to create a system for healthy living with minimal resistance. In other words, when you cannot change the larger environment, you can only refocus your attention on the elements of your daily life. The simplest three things are sleep, eating, and exercise. These three are the fundamental elements you should carefully consider in your daily routine. That is, you spend a whole day today, a whole day tomorrow—you need to eat, sleep, and exercise every day. When you can consistently optimize these three aspects, they will become the most important anchors and levers for your physical and mental state. Moreover, these three elements interact and influence each other.

When they reach a harmonious relationship, just these three points are enough to support a very healthy lifestyle system, even more effective than taking certain medications. First, do not delude yourself into thinking that doing one specific thing can make your body improve overnight. If someone tells you that eating one particular thing can make a certain symptom disappear, don’t believe it—he is definitely a scammer.

Second, do not dissipate your energy on external factors beyond your control. You can either change your environment entirely by migrating from one system to another, which might already reduce half of your problems. As for the remaining issues—rather than trying to control complex relationships or uncontrollable external factors—it’s better to focus on your daily life system: eating, sleeping, exercising, or practicing skills like meditation or sitting quietly. By consistently doing these actions, living each day well, and gradually improving your state, your physical and mental health will naturally improve.

To build such a life system, sometimes relying solely on your own strength is not enough. If your small family is something you can influence, for example, if you currently have a partner, you can motivate your partner. You both supervise each other—like going to bed early or not using phones during the first hour after waking up. Or if I have a good friend, we agree to eat healthily every day, or I cook with my roommate daily. This is also a small system.

Once you establish this small system, you won’t need to struggle alone, pushing yourself like an ox every day—using a lot of effort just to live well. If you cannot meet these conditions—say, you cannot migrate, and it’s difficult to build a small, mutually supportive influence system on your own—then I think you should consider finding a community that shares your interests and values to help support you.