One Qigong Practice to Strengthen Your Nervous System

If you've ever dealt with anxiety, depression, or insomnia, it feels like there's not really much you can do personally besides, for example, take an antidepressant. But in this video, I want to introduce a practice that you can do today that very often helps people get back into their body and help calm that feeling of anxiety or worry. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hine, author of the health book Master of the Day and doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. So before we jump into this video, two very important links right below the video. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, you can reach out to my private practice right below this video with the link there. And the second is for a free guide I've put together, which is four daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine. So we need to talk about this epidemic of nervous system dysfunction in modern times. Now I know that anxiety and depression, for example, don't necessarily just mean nervous system, but I like to think of them as that from one particular lens. What's interesting is that when you look at the history of these disorders today, what today's called mental health, back in the day it was called neurasthenia. So neurasthenia was thought to be caused by frayed nerves or an exhausted nervous system, right? So it was often called nervous system exhaustion or neurasthenia, as if there were these nerves that were innervated and weakened by modern life, particularly people who were overworking or people who were living too remotely and they had no work to do. For example, it was observed in two populations. One was these busy men going to work in the city and the city was viewed as a major cause of neurasthenia. Paradoxically, the other population was housewives that were at home alone and they didn't have a whole lot to do at that particular time. And they were viewed as particularly prone and susceptible to neurasthenia. But in the modern world, it seems like this neurasthenia has only increased. Anxiety and depression rates have only increased. And in my opinion, this is one of the most disappointing specialties in conventional medicine. One of the most truly disappointing is the way we treat anxiety and depression. Now, one thing I think is really important is that the demands on the nervous system today, on the physiology are so much more than they have ever been before. I mean, you look at the average person's rest time. I remember reading this research paper that people who are eating meals and even just listening to a radio secrete fewer digestive enzymes than people who are just eating a meal, you know, and looking out the window, for example. So even the information coming in from listening to a radio is enough to affect your digestion. Well, imagine what happens when we live in this culture where people think resting is sitting on their couch, flipping through Instagram while watching a TV show in the background, and maybe even using their computer. And that's considered rest for the modern person. But in reality, what this is, is this is sapping and utilizing your yang chi from a Chinese medicine perspective. This is not the nervous system rest that comes when you're laying out in a field, looking at the clouds, and just maybe playing fetch with your dog. This is not the same rest as going for a walk in the woods for an hour or having a nice meal with friends and family and a glass of wine and just talking and laughing for three hours with no rush, nowhere to be, right? These are not the same because you're still requiring this nervous system activity. And this is still sapping the batteries from our point of view in Chinese medicine. The modern world just has so many excessive demands on the nervous system. And that's just one piece of that is using technology. The other pieces are, you know, the constant noise, the stress, the pace of life, staying up late because we have electronics, we have lighting that can keep you up all night, etc. But in general, there are excessive demands on the nervous system, which is on the physiology. Now, in my opinion, one of the best ways to calm down the nervous system is by using physical somatic practices. If a patient comes to me and says, I want to know how to work on anxiety or depression, what can I do without a medication? I will always say, find somatic practices like physical exercise or yoga, qigong, trauma release exercises, therapies like that that can help. But there's one in particular that I recommend that is a physical exercise you can do that you tend to find in all kinds of yogic and qigong lineages all around the world. And it's based on two different practices. The first practice that is often a warm up in a lot of qigong forms is called tapping. So tapping is very often used in qigong to increase circulation and increase blood flow. And it was very common when I was living in China to see, for example, in the morning, you'll see an elderly Chinese person just tapping like this, tapping, slapping themselves. And, you know, as a foreigner, I didn't understand why people were slapping themselves, you know, slapping their hands. Remember, this one guy would walk around a lake that I used to do tai chi at, and he would just do this. He would just do that for an hour, just clapping his hands. And I thought he was a crazy person, but my instructor said no, he's doing a kind of qigong. So tapping, almost like a woman putting a heating pad in her stomach when she's having abdominal cramps, is a very similar method of introducing circulation. So the first exercise is if you're having, for example, sleeping problems or anxiety, and you're feeling that discomfort in the chest, you can do a number of things. The first is just tapping. So you can do just gentle tapping. And what that does is when the mind begins to get too active, and you start to get anxious and scared, and then you notice your heart rate getting a little elevated. I don't know if you've ever felt that when you're trying to sleep. But what you can do is begin tapping on the body. And you'll notice that it takes your attention away from the sensation in your chest. So all you can do is just tap, use your fingers, or like a beak, and just tap all over the chest, pat yourself down. Or alternatively, you can literally take your hands like this and just rub clockwise. You could do three minutes clockwise, and then three minutes counterclockwise. And you'll notice that if you do this for about five or ten minutes, you'll notice that you don't notice that sensation in the heart anymore. That sense of anxiety is not quite as bad. And certainly your mind is distracted from that sensation and that discomfort you were noticing in your chest that was building up because you're this insomnia or this anxiety about sleep. For me, the periods of my life where I've had the most sleep problems, very often, if I'm having onset problems, I will utilize that tapping, or I'll use this kind of rubbing technique to help calm down the nervous system. And you'll notice very often that'll be the thing that helps you fall asleep when historically maybe you needed substances or an audio book or something like that. But it can often help you acutely when your nervous system is too much going on. Those are my two cents for helping to manage this nervous system epidemic that we have today, where everyone seems to have anxiety or depression or insomnia. And so many people, the length of life has gone up, but the quality of life has gone down. And it seems like we live longer, but the desire to live a long life maybe is not quite there at the same time. So those are my two cents. Try those two practices and check out these related videos right there.