Understanding Depression and Anxiety From a Traditional Chinese Medicine Point of View

Anxiety and depression, along with insomnia and gut problems, are really some of the epidemic illnesses of modern times. I mean, more than anything, I can expect that the five most common things that walk in my door are gut problems, anxiety, depression, insomnia. So it's undeniable that we have this unusual pathological trifecta of social dynamics, our culture, of biological factors, physiological factors, genetic factors, as well as psychological factors that come together in this realm of anxiety and depression very often. What people call mental illness, I disagree with the term, but this concept and these symptoms are very, very, very common in today's world. So I thought I would take this video to talk about two that have a shared root but manifest a little bit differently, anxiety and depression, and what they are in Chinese medicine and where they come from. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hein, author of the health book, Master of the Day, and doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Now, before we jump into this video, there are 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 as a contact info. There's also a free download, which is four daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine. Now, I like to think of anxiety and depression as almost a yin and yang pair, the binary of ones and zeros, the opposite ends of the spectrum. Because in many ways, if you think of the archetype of the anxious person, the anxious person, the nervous system is like this, right? The heart rate can be rapid. The resting heart rate can be 80, 90 beats per minute. The person feels like they're trembling, right? Severe anxiety, a shot of adrenaline because you get scared. The body's like this, right? It startles. And so it's an up and outward physics vector. It's an ungrounding, but that goes up and outward. This kind of chaotic frenetic motion needs to be mirrored by something that helps descend and calm the person in the nervous system, right? To calm down. Now, depression is on the other side of the spectrum, right? Anxious people will be so damn anxious, they can't sleep all night. And then rather than sleeping well the next night, they can't sleep even more the next night because their nervous system just gets so wound up. You know, anxious people may even be sleeping on a few hours of sleep, maybe shaky, right? So there's still a lot of chaotic movement. And depressed people, on the other hand, are more on the other side of the spectrum, which is, you know, anxiety, let's say is the daytime and depression is more of the nighttime. It's calm squared, right? It's calm to a pathological degree. It's downward energy to a pathological degree. Can't get out of bed, sleep 14 hours and still not rested. Can't get motivated. My brain can't think, won't turn on, either eats too much or eats too little. Now, depression is this complete, almost lack of energy that needs this push. And anxiety is this frenetic, shaky energy that you need to calm down. So let's start with anxiety. And I want to talk about five key aspects of each of these, which is the overall quality of it, whether you want to call it the psychological quality, the somatic or body quality, you can call it the energetic quality, whatever term you like. But either way, it's the general observation of the objective quality of anxiety. So when we first talk about the overall vector of it from a physics perspective, it is this kind of uncontained movement, right? Is this buzzing, the success of this up and the person needs more down. So very often for this kind of pattern, what helps people relax is whatever helps with the downward. The downward can be literally, we say like uppers and downers from a pharmacological perspective, right? Lay people taking uppers, taking downers. It can be more sleep, right? People who are prone to anxiety will often feel more anxious if they sleep less. It can be certain foods for certain people. It can be avoidance of certain things like coffee, whatever makes the person feel too activated, too turned on. Now, the second thing is anxiety is more the yang quality while depression is more the yin quality. Yang and yin are these relative concepts that are not real things, right? They're frameworks of which you can see the world or view things. And even with an anxiety, there's a more yang and a more yin. But because it is more yang, these people need more yin things in their life. Yin things range from sleep, nighttime, calm, less work, whatever's the opposite of coffee in terms of substances to drink. Yin is what's going to benefit this person. So yin in this case really means anything that calms down the nervous system, anything that decreases activity. So these people need more yin time in their life, literally. So if you're experiencing anxiety and you're working 80 hours a week and you cut that to 40, you've introduced a lot more yin time, if that makes sense. Now, the third thing is the primary quality that a person with clinical anxiety should focus on is whatever helps with, let's just call this feeling of descent and consolidation, this feeling of almost hibernation. You can do an experiment on yourself just by seeing what increases anxiety and why is that, what decreases anxiety and why is that. So what things make you feel, in layman's terms, calm? Maybe you feel that when you go for a walk with your dog in the woods for an hour, you feel a lot calmer than you do when you're at work. Maybe you feel like at night when I decide to go to bed earlier and I sleep as much as possible, my anxiety is way less likely to get triggered when I'm at work. Thinking about what aspects, what habits, foods, people I'm around, my work, what generates that feeling of descent and consolidation. The fourth point, anxiety is like the spring phase of life. Ancient, ancient, ancient Chinese doctors, all ancient medicine, modern medicine, western medicine, Persian medicine, all ancient physicians had a deep connection to nature because first of all, the medicines primarily came from nature and second of all, because it was obvious to ancient people that diseases and illnesses had cyclical patterns like seasons. Anxiety is correlated with spring very often, spring or summer. That is the peak of young energy when there's growth and there's movement, right? We just talked about anxiety being chaotic movement, excessive movement. So just like in the springtime, leaves bloom, things are sprouting, bunnies are procreating and there's 20 little bunnies everywhere. This is a lot of activity, right? Activity, nervous system activity, movement, a lot of doing. For people with anxiety, they need more winter. So this is sometimes a helpful analogy for my patients. If you're in the spring phase all day long, that's five alarm fire mode as one of my mentors Jacques used to say. It's like the fire alarm has gone off and you're like, all day. But you could have a relatively calm life, but just drink five cups of coffee and induce that. So think about what creates the winter quality in your life. Finally, for this person, they need the quality of hibernation to heal. So in extreme anxiety, not only do people need pharmacological help, whether that's conventional medicine or that's very high dose Chinese formulas, but very often they need to go deep into the quality of hibernation. Now, extreme hibernation is, for example, when someone is so ill, they have to take a leave and go on disability for their job because they're so ill that either that's what they need to heal or they're literally too ill to even get out of bed. So for many people, trying to figure out how much you can maximally hibernate will help decrease anxiety. Maybe that means decreasing your work hours or stop having multiple cups of coffee per day. Or maybe you notice that you sleep better if you just eat less or it's certain people you're overcommitting to certain things at work or with your friends. Think about hibernation as the mantra. Now for depression, when we talk about depression, depression is an excessive descending movement or no movement. So with depression, of course, we can't just say, well, just introduce movement because that's kind of the point of depression where you can't get out of bed sometimes for years. So it's not as easy as to just say, just do more movement, because obviously if people could, then they would. But in general, the quality of depression is this excess downward energy. And what we need is more up. We need to introduce more energy into the system. Now, in my opinion, the best way, honestly, is pharmacologically. So using Chinese formulas. And, you know, many people sometimes with the help of antidepressants or other, whatever the standard of care is at the moment. But in general, introducing something pharmacologically often is a very helpful help for depression because I view it as a deep state of resource exhaustion that predisposes people to depression to begin with is one of the causes. So depression is more Yin. Depression is too much contraction, too much decrease in activity, too much hibernation. And so what we need is more Yang. What we need is, for example, when you look at some studies that suggest that exercise in many cases has the same efficacy, maybe even longer lived than some antidepressants for some people. When you look at that, that's introducing Yang to a very Yin pathology. Now, of course, it's hard to exercise for anyone, especially someone depressed, but it is often one of the best things that's able to introduce that kind of movement needed. So for a maximal Yin condition, it's the deep, dark depths of night, pitch night. Then you need to introduce some sunlight, if that makes sense. The fourth thing is this is winter. Severe depression is winter. It's hibernation. It's sleeping 14 hours and having no energy. Winter, quality winter needs spring, whatever that is. Think about the bedroom of someone that's depressed. Dark colors, dark shades, close the windows all the time. I once lived with a man that was around the age of 40 who was severely depressed. When I moved in to his house, I was a renter. He let me use the main bedroom because he was sleeping elsewhere and he had painted the whole bedroom walls black, which I thought was horrifying. But I understand because it was mirroring his state, how he felt. So you think about someone who closed the shades all the time. They don't want to get out of bed. They don't want the sunshine. For these people, you need to introduce sunlight, literal and metaphorical sunlight. Winter needs spring. Spring is movement. It's novelty. It's new things. It's fresh air. It's going for walks. It's spring cleaning. It's cutting your hair. It's grooming. Whatever it is, it needs that quality. So try your best to introduce some of that quality. And the last thing is for this kind of person, I say introduce movement to heal. Movement can be pharmaceuticals. Movement can be Chinese formulas or acupuncture. It can be body work. It can be physical exercise is one of the best. Time and nature and hikes. Introduce movement to heal. That's my personal opinion, in two cents, for what you can do on your own. So anxiety, depression, yin-yang pair, very common, can be very difficult to treat, can be very easy to treat sometimes, sometimes in the same person. But I think these qualities will help you view it a little bit differently. Check out the links before you go. And I have two other related videos on these topics that I think can help you right there.