Matthew Ferry's Blog

Someone once told me that diseases of the mind are far more destructive than the diseases of your body. And I’d like to add to that and say that it’s so often that I see a person who has a disease in the body that started off with a disease in the mind. Now, are they directly correlated? I’m not a scientist, so I can’t tell you whether they are or not. But I can tell you that anecdotally, it occurs to me over and over that when people have physical destruction going on in their body, when their body is deteriorating, when things aren’t working, physically, in their body, it seems to be preceded by thoughts that are focused on, “Life sucks.” “I’m bad.” “Why did I do that?” Regret and guilt, these kinds of thoughts. To allow the drunk monkey in your head to have these kinds of thoughts will be so degrading to your experience.

I can think of times when I go into a slump in my own life, I find that I am naturally drawn to things that I know are not good for me. I find myself more drawn to sugar, more drawn to fat. I find myself more drawn to staying up late, not getting enough sleep. When I’m feeling down, when I’m feeling bummed out, when I’m not appreciating my world, I find it’s so much easier to skip meditation, to skip working out. When I am eating effectively, sleeping effectively, meditating, working out, when I’m doing those kinds of things, being preventative in my way of operating, my physical body responds very positively and I’m not getting sick, and things like that.

But when I’m leaving those things out, my body begins to deteriorate. So, the disease of the mind is definitely more destructive than the diseases of the body.