Why You're Always Exhausted

Are you tired all the time? Do you find that by the time you get home from work, the only thing you have energy for is sitting on the couch and scrolling endlessly through social media, cat videos on Instagram, viral videos on Facebook, and random news on YouTube. Well, you know when it comes to fatigue in Chinese medicine, there are really three main causes and I want to share those in today's video here. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hein, doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine and author of The Health Book Master of the Day. So before we jump into this video, two very important links right below. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, you can contact my private practice right below this video. And the second is for a free guide for daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. So fundamentally when we talk about fatigue and being tired all the time in the context of the modern human right now on Earth, what you're seeing is too much yang time and not enough yin time. So very often when we talk about yang and yin, yang is often doing and yin is often resting, right? These are just concepts. So this is one way we can interpret these but very often the yang time can be anything from physical. For example, you're a super highly paid but super busy consultant who's working 80 hours a week and as a result, you're working two full-time jobs. So you're using your yang twice and your yin is one and that's not even assuming you have any problems with sleep or you're sleeping less. So when you talk about people who sleep only six hours a day and are working 60 plus hours, that's a clear imbalance in terms of way too much on time, not enough off time. But at the same time it can also be mental for example, right? Going through your phone endlessly in your free time is not rest. You know, one of my mentors says that going through the phone as opposed to going for a walk in the woods with your dog, the phone is still using yang. It's using your nervous system. It's using attention. It's not the same thing as reading a book. It's not the same thing as going for a walk without your phone. It's not the same thing as just laying down and listening to the birds outside and trying to take a nap. They're different. And so there can be mental aspects of too much yang, not enough yin, even just laying on the couch. But there could be psychic aspects or maybe another synonym would be psycho-emotional. For example, you're in a toxic relationship. And so you're constantly having these negative interactions, these fights, this little nitpicking. It can be that you're at a job you hate and so every day you're drained because you always have to push. It can be that you're in a difficult financial situation or you have some kind of stress or you're in an area that's not safe. So fear of violence or fear of poverty, all of these requiring your nervous system to be on in some way. And so you're utilizing your yang, you're utilizing your resources and further draining the batteries. So always the first most obvious explanation is too much doing time and too little being or resting time. The second most common area I see where people have fatigue is what we consider stagnation in the taiyin or yangming organs. So stagnation in typically digestion. For a lot of people this looks like either they have a low appetite or they're frequently overeating or they have irregular bowel movements or they're very prone to acid reflux and indigestion and that sort of thing. So digestive stagnation as we think of it in Chinese medicine is a very common cause of fatigue. You know, I had one of my mentors give a kind of a famous story now where he was saying, you know, everyone in the West is obsessed with these longevity tonics, right? You just throw a bunch of ginseng at everyone. They're just going to have more energy and live forever. But that's not actually how it happens. A lot of people will experience an increase in fatigue. Why is that? Because a lot of modern people have so much rich caloric foods. We are overeating all the time. We have issues with our gallbladder and our liver and our spleen pancreas and he said, you know, a perfect example was I gave this one patient complaining of fatigue, a formula you would consider a purgative, right? A mild laxative and that was based on his abdominal findings and his abdominal palpation and he said, you know, you would expect that this would have no relation to the fatigue. But the more he gave her this purgative, effectively this laxative, the more energized she felt and he was doing the opposite of giving her, for example, ginseng, a tonic herb or goji berries or whatever the latest superfood is people are obsessed with because this was the pattern, right? This was the pattern of disharmony as we call it in Chinese medicine. So the more he purged her, the better she felt and the more energy she had. So this is a clear example of digestive excess where the person has just been eating a standard American diet for a long period of time and has had irregular bowel movements and in reality would probably feel much better with fasting and eating very light, maybe for a week or a couple weeks until their appetite came back. Now on the other side, you see people who have a lot of indigestion or acid reflux and this can often interfere with sleep and can be a factor for fatigue as well within Chinese medicine. The last factor that's the most common I see is what we call yang deficiency. Yang deficiency basically is exhaustion, for lack of a better word, but you also see yang deficiency in certain conditions like anxiety, depression or insomnia where even though people have good sleep hygiene, for example, they can't sleep, right? So there are medical conditions where people are predisposed to insomnia besides just I drank coffee too late or I watch TV till 3 a.m. There are medical conditions that regularly interfere with sleep, even if the person has good habits. And so in these states where people are chronically ill, chronically overworked or sometimes chronically ill, chronically overworked becomes another kind of illness. We call deficiency taxation. Eventually what happens is people become in a chronic state of yang deficiency where they are chronically exhausted. They're chronically sleep-deprived and after a while chronic sleep deprivation leads to a chronic state of exhaustion because your body doesn't have time to rest and restore itself. So in these states of deficiency taxation as we call it, what happens is with yang deficiency, the person is actually exhausted. You know, when I feel the pulse of someone who's had depression for 10 years, you know, Chinese medicine used pulse and abdominal diagnosis. Very often they have no pulse. I can literally push the radial artery to the bone before I feel any sort of pulsation of the artery. So that's a state of intense exhaustion and it's pretty common to feel when people have been chronically ill for a long period of time. So yang deficiency, which is really exhaustion, is the final primary cause that I see of being tired all the time. So those are the three most common causes I see within Chinese medicine. Very often they are very, very treatable with Chinese formulas, but that's been my experience so far. And before you guys go, I have two other related videos on the topic of fatigue, exhaustion, and sleep right over here. And check out those links right below this video.