Hello lovey humans,

Zhi Tsun's parents escaped a military dictatorship in Burma, polio in Hong Kong, and landed in Canada with almost nothing. This immigrant family passed on a lot of expectations to their son. This is Zhi's story.

The Factory Settings

Every child of immigrants knows the arithmetic. Your parents sacrificed everything, so you are the return on that investment. The expectations aren't just expectations, they're spoken as facts. There is no debate, "You will become a doctor."

Zhi did become a doctor. MD from Harvard and PhD from MIT, where he helped discover components of one of the foundational pathways in longevity science. Board-certified psychiatrist. Serial venture-backed entrepreneur. On paper, the immigrant success story written exactly to spec.

But the spec didn't include instructions for what to do with the anger, or the shame of dealing with parents fought constantly, while simultaneously modeling a world where nobody talked about feelings. Emotions weren't discussed in his household. They were endured.

"When things felt bad," Zhi says, "there was no one to talk to. I learned to hide. I learned to lie. When I got fired from my college job, I didn't tell my parents until I'd found another one."

He calls it the factory settings. These are the emotional programming installed by parents who themselves were never given any instruction manual. His father, escaping a dictatorship. His mother, overcoming a physical disability through sheer intellectual force. Both operating from survival. Neither equipped to teach a child how to name what he was feeling, or that what he was feeling was allowed.

The Descent

The startup years did what startup years do to people who were already running on fumes.

Zhi threw himself into his first company the way his father had thrown himself into a new country. The answer to every problem was simply to work harder. No framework for recognizing that the engine was overheating. No concept of self-care.

He lost thirty pounds. He couldn't make simple decisions, like where to eat, or what to order, despite being a lifelong obsessive foodie. His mind began catastrophizing: would he would lose his wife, would he would end up in jail, would he have to take his own life to escape this hell?

Finding help was its own brutal odyssey. Five different mental health providers before he found the right one. Terrible side effects from the first medication. Then a second. A third. Five or six attempts before he found a regimen that stabilized him.

"That experience shaped everything about how I practice now," he says. "I know what it's like to be on the other side of that desk, trying medication after medication, wondering if anything will work."

Watching the People He Loved Disappear

While Zhi was finding his footing, the people around him were losing theirs.

Both of his grandparents developed dementia. His grandfather spent the last ten years of his life in a wheelchair, not knowing his own name. His mother and grandfather were diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The medications prescribed to them were dosed too high. They became, in Zhi's words, zombies. Present in body, absent in every way that mattered.

He watched the people he loved most get reduced to shadows of themselves by the very system that was supposed to help them. And he made a decision: when it was his turn to prescribe, he would always use the lowest effective dose. He would taper when stable. He would never turn a person into a ghost of who they were.

The Second Collapse

Then, just as he was finding his way back, another startup. More work, more travel, more of the intoxicating feeling that the work was important enough to justify the absence. He was away from his wife and kids constantly. When his second child was born, he was technically on paternity leave — but so consumed by the company that he wasn't really there. His body was in the room. His mind was in the boardroom. "Work addiction almost cost me my marriage," he says.

Then the body started sending its own messages. Pre-diabetes, body pain, small injuries. Except Zhi understood the science well enough to know that these aliments become permanent limitations if you don't build robustness now.

And then his wife had an ovarian cancer scare. They removed an ovary and fallopian tube. The pathology came back benign. But the relief didn't erase the terror of those weeks of waiting. "That moment crystallized everything," Zhi says. "I knew the science of longevity — I'd studied it for my PhD. But I wasn't living it. I was the cobbler whose children had no shoes."

Flourish

Today, Zhi runs Flourish, a longevity and integrative psychiatry practice built on everything he learned the hard way.

His approach is unusual because he refuses to separate the biological from the psychological. Most doctors will treat your cholesterol or your anxiety. Zhi runs fifty-plus lab tests and then he goes deeper: into the trauma, the factory settings, the inherited emotional patterns that keep people stuck in loops their parents started.

He's particularly good with entrepreneurs and creative people. People who value their cognitive performance and can't afford to be dulled by medication. Low doses. Root causes. The conviction that you shouldn't have to choose between feeling stable and feeling like yourself.

"Most suffering is driven by two things," he says. "Biological imbalances that nobody tests for, and the default settings we received from our parents and then reinforced by painful experiences later in life if we don't tend to them."

Why This Matters

Zhi's experiences and approach are beautifully aligned with what we believe at Second Harvest. You are so much more than your parts. It has always been about the whole person. Not just the identity work, not just the what's-next question, but the body, the mind, the accumulated wear of decades spent building something at the expense of yourself.

Zhi will be joining us at the Spring Summit on May 21st to share his insights and approach. He's not just an outsider peering in. He's lived the same stresses that our community has. He understands the specific kind of person who comes to Second Harvest. The one who got the qualifications, built the company, led the team, solved everyone else's problems — and never once asked whether the factory settings they were running on were actually theirs.

It nearly killed him. And then it set him free.

With love,

Richard and Devon

Dr. Zhi Tsun is the founder of Flourish and Second Harvest's clinical partner for the EIR (Executive in Reflection) Program. Learn more at zflourish.com​