How Emotions Can Make You Sick

I think in the new age space there's often this idea that your thoughts will make you sick or that your thoughts will heal you and I thought in this video here today I would share a little bit of contrarian advice because I don't really inherently believe that to be true and I don't believe that for a lot of people doing positive affirmations or just focusing on positive thinking is gonna produce substantial healing. I just don't. Sorry. But I thought I would share something useful instead rather than just trashing this idea that's common in alternative medicine. I thought I would share something useful that I think is really tangible and concrete regarding how our emotions make us sick. Hey guys Dr. Alex Hine, doctor of Chinese medicine and licensed acupuncturist. 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. The contact info for my private practice is right below this video and there's also a free guide for daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine. So a thought by itself doesn't necessarily make you sick right. I don't believe in this idea that if you just think about some disease that's obscure and rare that you're gonna get it. I don't and I hear it from time to time from people in the alternative medicine field or people who are deeply impacted by Louise Hay's work and I think like all things they are an element of the truth right but they are just a piece of the truth. Do I really believe every case of constipation is people holding on to whatever? Obviously not. I think in the context of America and the standard American diet it's probably because we are eating too many doughnuts and not enough whole natural real foods. But I think some people get carried away with this idea of your thoughts making you sick. If I just sit here and I think about you know going swimming in the ocean and a shark is swimming near me. If I just think that that thought oh there's a shark in the ocean I don't actually feel anything. But if I think back to an experience I had which is that I have been scuba diving in Fiji in the Pacific where there are man-eating sharks and I actually ran out of oxygen on a shark dive at 65 feet below. If I think back through that experience now I will start to have sweaty hands and feet. I will start to feel my heartbeat. I will start to feel a little queasiness in my stomach and I'll start to feel adrenaline. Now that will make you sick if that keeps happening over time. That will absolutely make you sick but that is the junction the intersection of where a thought meets an emotion right and emotions are what affect your physiology. So the way I think about this conceptually is that you know we have these thoughts but it is emotion is what really begins to offset and change things in your chemistry. And one of the ways we think about this in Chinese medicine is this idea of the Qi dynamic. The Qi dynamic is really just how your body meets the external environment right your genetics your body the environment and how it all interacts in your physiology in the functioning of what Chinese medicine calls Qi. Maybe a more tangible term it's just proper physiological function. And just like my scuba dive example if I just think oh you know shark in the ocean next to me whatever but if I really go into it and I think about an experience I had where I actually ran out of oxygen on a scuba dive with massive sharks around me I am now generating a physiological response that can lead to illness. And I think some of us give too much power to our thoughts and not enough power to the things affecting our physiology the Qi dynamic in Chinese medicine. So different organs have different let's just call them susceptibilities and tendencies in Chinese medicine right so we say for example the spleen pancreas the tendency is towards anxiety that's kind of the pathological emotion. And in the same way you know I think everyone has had the experience of having something on their mind or something really bothering them whether it's heartbreak or financial or someone's sick and you try to eat a meal and you're just horribly indigested or you just have no appetite at all and you have to force yourself to eat. That is in one way the spleen having a problem. In our perspective because really really low appetite is often a sign of what we call spleen Qi deficiency which is probably pancreatic enzyme deficiency something like that biochemically. So when we're talking about this the varying organs having varying kinds of emotions they have a tendency to as well as pathological emotions that they have a tendency to when they're imbalanced. So in the same way that in Chinese medicine we say you know overthinking or rumination or anxiety affects the spleen spleen pancreas I think it's really important just to understand how not only that it is primarily emotions that affects physiology and not thoughts and also to understand how certain emotions affect physiology. You know for example in ancient times like when we try to conceptualize emotions and explain them everyone has had the experience of feeling angry and seeing what someone angry does right. Anger obviously we consider it a more yang emotion because what it does is it generates activity. Usually depressed people are not fighting right but angry people fight. You get in traffic that person cuts you off you want to get out of the window and punch him in the throat because they just cut you off. Anger makes you do things. Usually sadness and depression don't. So anger has this kind of trajectory. Sadness and depression have this trajectory. So understanding how certain emotions affect your physiology is really a game of almost retraining how you feel. It's almost like a perfect somatic exercise where you sit down and there's a ancient Taoist exercise for emotional cleansing where what you try to do is generate anger, feel really really angry and then feel really really sad. Go up, go down and then try to make yourself actually cry. Actually generate a tear from feeling sadness and then laugh as hard as you can. And so what you're doing is you're trying to basically get all this stuckness out of the channels from the Chinese medicine point of view but it's all this stuff that just gets stored in the body and by utilizing a you could recognize emotions are what affect your body, two how certain emotions affect your body, where in your body and three by understanding when I feel that way what do I need to do personally to move that and make it make it get out of my body in other words. So I think the point of this video was just to share that I don't really believe in this idea of if you're thinking something you're gonna manifest some kind of sickness or illness. I don't really believe that but understanding tangibly that when you generate an emotion or an emotion that's a response to a thought then you can set into play something that can affect your physiology and make you sick and the converse is true too. So just paying attention to when I feel something when I feel an emotion where is it and what does it make me feel like is a really really useful exercise in your own self healing and that's also Chinese medicine is being able to recognize what this inner weather is as emotions were often called in ancient times or compared to what is this inner weather doing and what is affecting it. So just think about that today. It's not thoughts that'll necessarily make you sick it's more emotions because those have a clear effect on physiology and we can even measure that. So that's what I for today before you go check out these two other related videos there's also some on the different organs and the certain emotions they're correlated to so you can check out that as well.