Healing From Anxiety: The Dietary Link According to TCM

Patients end up seeking out alternative or integrative care and as someone who's experienced it myself to quite a severe degree, I know from the inside how terrifying pretty severe anxiety can be and how much it can really take over your life. Now this video I want to share something that may not be on your radar if you're someone who's struggling with it or someone who's trying to figure out how to really resolve it or reverse it to the point where you can have a normal functioning life again. There are some interesting links in Chinese medicine that I was not aware of beforehand that I think can really help you. Hey, I'm Dr. Alex Hine, author of the health book on Habits, Master the Day, Chinese medicine doctor and licensed acupuncturist and I've included a free link below this video which is for a download on four daily rituals that can help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. Now if you're interested in becoming a patient of mine locally or online via telemedicine, the link below will also provide information on my clinic as well. One of the main reasons I got into Chinese medicine is because I've always struggled with lifelong gut problems. It's something that genetically runs on my maternal side of the family and even though I was raised in a family that always ate very healthy, clean food and even though I've been cooking ever since I went away at college, I don't even know, more than 15 years ago, I've always had digestive problems, sometimes quite severe, that have led me to seek out alternative and integrative practitioners to try to figure out what's really going on here. Now, fast forward maybe about 10 years, I become an entrepreneur, I start working really really long stressful hours and then eventually after about 3-4 years, for the first time in my life, I start experiencing anxiety. I start having nights of insomnia for the first time consistently, I start having nights sometimes where the anxiety was so severe I couldn't sleep at all, zero hours in a night. I started having just about a half a dozen other unusual symptoms that it took me 4-5 years to know were connected to that initial digestive pattern. Now I can relate to a lot of the patients that end up spending tens of thousands of dollars, I've done it, who go seek out crazy spiritual mystical new agey gurus, I've done it, because you don't have the answer and nothing seems to really be kind of resolving the condition for good. I know what it's like to go to the psychics, to go to the shamans, to go to the alternative people that are really really fringe alternative people, I know it because I've lived it. Ultimately, the resolution for me was a lot simpler than that and yes, it was Chinese medicine and Chinese herbal formulas. And I wanted to share it because I find now that in practice, this is the most common anxiety picture that I see. And I think for a lot of people it can help manage some of those anxiety symptoms quite a lot. I don't think it applies to everyone, but this is the big picture of many patients with anxiety that I see. For the biggest chunk of patients that I see with anxiety, it's strongly correlated with digestive problems and it's often an offshoot. One is the root and one is the branch. So my symptoms at the time, for example, were having low or no appetite, having a frontal dull headache pressure, what people now call brain fog, kind of felt like I was wearing a hat all the time, easy bloating with most meals or getting a food baby easily, I've always been more on the thin and the pale side, prone to having a lot of mucus or phlegm in my throat, difficulty falling asleep, sometimes for three hours or very, very shallow sleep that felt like I didn't sleep at all. And ultimately feeling on edge all the time. Now in Chinese medicine, one of the things they teach you in school is that a very common picture for insomnia and anxiety is what's called the spleen qi deficiency with heart blood deficiency pattern. So basically the person is experiencing symptoms of both digestive problems and the insomnia anxiety or depression picture alongside it. It's common enough that for thousands of years it's been documented as a very predictable common pattern. So the reason for this is that in Chinese medicine there's a saying that the spleen generates the blood. Now clinically when you talk about spleen qi deficiency, the pattern is low appetite, bloating, typically pale, thin, like my kind of general body type, and the person may have food allergies, may not want to eat that much or be a very picky eater. But when it morphs into a more serious pathology or a deeper pathology in terms of the spleen not generating the blood, this looks almost like a loose anemia picture where the person can have floaters in their eyes now, extreme fatigue, dull headaches. They can have a very pale or scanty menses or stop menstruating altogether. They can have insomnia, anxiety, depression, much deeper psycho-emotional or psychological symptoms. So at the base level you commonly clinically have the pattern of this quote spleen qi deficiency. The person with very very common digestive problems you see many people having today. But then it can morph into a deeper pathology where there's now this heart blood pattern. Or in general, it's a loose anemia pattern, it doesn't have to be necessarily anemia and often it's not. But the root, is what I'm saying, is still the digestive pattern. And I found that for many of these patients by just treating digestion, the core pattern and this anxiety, depression or insomnia picture will improve dramatically by itself as well. So they don't have to be treated separately, they are often one and the same thing. One is just deeper into the root, the trunk of the problem of the person, and one is just a more severe or the same pathology just with more time applied to it and it hasn't been reined back in and brought back under control. I brought this up very quickly because I think that for so many people they can spend a very long time trying to figure out what is causing this, not knowing that the root can be digestion. And for many people that is the fix I find clinically. So that's something worth thinking about, this idea of the spleen generates the blood. Very very important concept clinically and very very common in today's people and today's patients. I've lived it, it's not fun, but for many people it's not very difficult to help move back in the right direction. Alright you guys, that's what I have for today. Again, the first link below this video is for the free guide on 4 daily rituals that can add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. Also info on how to become a patient is right there below. And there are two related videos on this topic in this series here.