Some principles and details will be found in various books.[B] There is no space here for more than a few suggestions.
Better Foods and Drinks
Years ago, the late Dr. Forbes Ross told me that, when he was medical superintendent of a certain Asylum, he found that the patients were very violent on Thursday afternoons. On Thursdays, at the mid-day meal, they had Beef-Extract. He forbade this, and at once the Thursday afternoon violence ceased. In my own case, the depression of years ceased when I gave up flesh-foods and meat-extracts more than 23 years ago.
This does not mean that such foods are a cause of non-happiness in all cases. Still less does it mean that they are the sole cause, or even the main cause, in all cases. Many haphazard “vegetarians” have been miserable.
It rather means that some better Diet may be an important factor in Happiness.
The general idea of Diet, for producing or increasing mental and physical Well-Being, which includes Happiness, would surely be to get first such a régime as shall clear out the clogging and depressing or irritating toxins and waste-matters, and shall not add to them, but shall re-build a clean and healthy body and mind by a better Balance of the various Food Elements.
The Drinks, in order to increase the Well-Being and the subsequent Happiness, should be cleansing, and should include the minimum of undesirable elements (whether overstimulating, or narcotic).
There is no need here to explain how Food and Drink affect the mind. We all know some of the depressing effects of “Liver,” Indigestion, Constipation, etc., and the partial dependence of these troubles on the Food and Drinks. But few who have not studied the subject as I have been enabled to do, thanks partly to my work with the leading Clinical Analytical Expert, Mr. C. H. Collings,[C] could guess how some of the most common and respectable errors of Food and Drink—such as excess of starchy and sugary stuff, of fruit, of tea or coffee or cocoa, and so on—can produce non-Health and consequent Non-Happiness, partly by affecting the Brain and the Solar Plexus through tissue-storage of toxins and Toxœmia or an acid and poisoned bloodstream.
There are thousands who imagine that, because most of their “civilised” acquaintances regularly take certain meals as a matter of course, therefore these meals must of necessity be “all right”; not knowing that Nature does not withhold from us her results according to Law—often called her “punishments”—merely because large numbers of other individuals are making similar mistakes! To be orthodox in life is not the same thing as to be immune from the effects of orthodox mistakes.
I could show letter after letter that tells how, beside better Foods and Drinks, simple Water-treatments, and various Exercises have tended to Health and Happiness. There are Exercises (like those in “Economy of Energy,” pp. 79, 83, 86, 87, 90, 94, 97) which help improve the Position of the body, the fulness and the rhythm of the Breathing, the economy of the muscles, by Relaxing and so forth. There are Stretching Exercises, Foot-Exercises, Trunk-Exercises, Athletic Exercises, and so on.