The #1 herb that STOPS heart palpitations fast

About eight years ago I was going through a pretty severe burnout and one of the most scary symptoms that I experienced was one night I woke up in the middle of the night with my heart racing, irregularly beating, stopping and starting, feeling like I was going to have a panic attack with electrical sensations shooting down my arms. Now unfortunately for me that wasn't the only time I experienced what I learned was a heart palpitation. For me it actually became a chronic arrhythmia that I had at a low level for years due to chronic unrelenting stress. Now what I wish I would have known back then is that there are simple herbal formulas in Chinese medicine that work as well as beta blockers which are commonly the medication given for this. But your doctor doesn't know about it, most Chinese medicine practitioners don't know about it and certainly you probably don't know about it in general. So in this video I want to share more about my story here about dealing with this arrhythmia due to stress as well as the really really simple herbal formula that effectively treats this and some research on using Chinese medicine for treating palpitations and arrhythmias. Hey guys I'm Dr. Alex Hein, board licensed doctor of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine and author of the health book Master of the Day. Let's jump in. So in modern medicine palpitations or arrhythmias are often explained in terms of electrical activity in the heart. Maybe extra beats, maybe sensitivity to adrenaline, maybe just a heightened awareness of normal rhythms. And again all of those things can be true. But in Chinese medicine we look at the heart not just as a pump but as something that houses the shen or the spirit, the part of you that basically feels calm, settled and grounded. And for that system to stay stable it relies heavily basically on two things, proper circulation and proper nourishment. Especially what we call from the blood and yin. So there's a classical saying that when the heart is not nourished the spirit becomes restless. So instead of us asking what is the heart doing wrong, we ask what is failing to anchor it. Now this is where one of the simplest and in my opinion most elegant combinations in all of Chinese medicine comes in. A pairing of just two ingredients that shows up again and again in classical formulas. Gui zhi which is medical grade cinnamon twig and da zao which is Chinese red date. If you go back to our classical texts especially formulas like gui zhi tang, cinnamon twig decoction, this combination was not just used for colds or what we call surface conditions when you're battling something. It was used to treat the entire system, to regulate the relationship between the exterior and the interior, between circulation and nourishment and between movement of your nervous system and stability of your nervous system. And what's fascinating is that these two herbs are almost always used together because gui zhi by itself is very moving, it warms, it circulates blood, it pushes outward, while da zao is nourishing, stabilizing and moderating. So when you combine them you get this effect where the system starts to regulate itself instead of swinging too far in one direction. So for example if you imagine the body like a system that's oscillating between too much activation like anxiety and not enough grounding, gui zhi helps move and regulate that flow while da zao the date helps anchor and soften. So together they have a kind of symbiotic balance that's incredibly useful for symptoms like palpitations. Now if you imagine the body like a system that's oscillating between too much activation and not enough grounding like anxiety, gui zhi helps move and regulate that flow while da zao helps soften and anchor and together they create a kind of balance that is incredibly useful for symptoms like palpitations. Now when we translate this into modern science what you're really looking at is modulation of the autonomic nervous system where the balance between sympathetic activity which is your fight or flight response and parasympathetic activity which is your rest and digest state becomes more stable. So for example gui zhi has been shown to promote peripheral circulation and mild vasodilation which can reduce the sense of constriction or tension in the chest while also has a gentle warming effect that will improve your circulation without feeling overstimulated. And da zao interestingly has compounds that appear to have calming effects on the nervous system by influencing neurotransmitters that actually help reduce excessive stress signaling while also supporting what we call blood nourishment and stabilization. So instead of like with a beta blocker forcing the heart to slow down directly what you're doing is creating an environment where the heart no longer needs to overreact because the sympathetic nervous system is calmer which is why the effect can feel surprisingly fast for some people. Now what's fascinating is that when researchers started studying classical formulas like one called which actually contains both gui zhi cinnamon twig and da zao jujube date as core components they found that in clinical studies it was able to significantly reduce arrhythmias things like premature beats, atrial fibrillation, even irregular pulse patterns with effectiveness rates in some studies reaching over 80 percent and in certain cases even outperforming standard meds like beta blockers in terms of symptomatic improvement. You know for example look at my patient Yessi. So Yessi first started coming to me after her mother passed away. It was a very difficult relationship, very stressful, she felt complex emotions and the main symptoms she was coming to me for was insane heart palpitations, dozens all day long and only be able to sleep three to five hours per day. Now the very first herbal formula I gave Yessi had some of these ingredients and in two weeks her palpitations were 90 percent reduced and her sleep went from three to five hours to maybe four to six hours and with several more months of treatment eventually the palpitations became a thing of the past and she was able to sleep through the night. But that's something that she would be on heavy heavy pharmaceuticals for. Beta blockers, antidepressants, sleeping medication that we were able to do with traditional Chinese medicine formulas. Now if we take this one step further and translate it into how this is often managed in modern medicine what you'll see is that a lot of these patients especially when palpitations are persistent or uncomfortable they end up being given medications like beta blockers and what those drugs are doing is essentially dampening your sympathetic nervous system which is really the part of your nervous system responsible for the fight-or-flight response. The same system that increases heart rate, increases contractility and makes you more aware of your heart. So in other words they're not necessarily fixing a structural issue with the heart itself, they're reducing the signal that's telling the heart to beat harder or faster which is why people feel immediate relief because the heightened sensitivity and the over activation starts to come down. But here's what's interesting if you look at what we just talked about with Guajir and Dazao they're working on a very similar level not by blocking receptors in the same way as a drug does but by regulating that autonomic balance helping the system shift out of that over activated sympathetic state and back towards a more stable parasympathetic tone while at the same time improving circulation and nourishing the system so that the heart doesn't feel like it needs to overcompensate. So instead of us forcing the heart back down to calm you're guiding it back into balance which is why for the right person this can feel not just like symptomatic relief but like the entire system is calming down at once. Now this is something that can actually be used in a very simple way at home right I always want to talk about practical advice because even outside of full formulas a basic tea made from Guajir and Dazao can have a noticeable effect for the right person. A typical approach might be something like three to six grams of Guajir and three to five pieces of Dazao. You could simmer them gently in water for about between 20 and 30 minutes basically bring it to a boil then let it at a low simmer for 30 minutes and then drink it warm especially in the evening when these symptoms tend to show up for people. Now this of course is not for every single kind of palpitation and if there are underlying medical issues that need to be addressed but for the very common pattern of stress-related nervous system driven palpitations this combination is extremely effective. Now what's also interesting is that not all palpitations come from the same root cause because for some people it's more of a deficiency pattern where the body is undernourished and the heart doesn't feel anchored. For others it's more of an excess pattern where there's tension heat stagnation or stress driving the system but from the outside they can look almost similar. So if you're thinking this sounds like me but I have no clue which type I have I actually put together a free short root cause quiz right below this video so you can figure out which pattern your body is leaning towards. You can go to dralexhine.com forward slash quiz to download it or we pinned it right below the video in a comment here for you. Now one final helpful way to think about palpitations is to separate them into a few core patterns because once you see this it becomes much easier to know what direction to go. There's the type where the heart feels fast anxious and restless usually tied to stress and the nervous system. There's the type where the heart feels weak fluttery or irregular often tied to deficiency of what we call blood or yin. And there's a third pattern which is always misdiagnosed where there's fullness pressure or even digestive involvement from the stomach where phlegm or stagnation is interfering with the normal rhythm. And what's interesting is that tend to work best in the first category the nervous system where the system is dysregulated slightly overactive and not fully anchored because it helps bring that oscillation of the nervous system back into balance. So when you zoom out the idea here is not that there's just like one herb that magically shuts off palpitations and arrhythmias but that your heart is part of a larger system and when that system becomes unbalanced whether from stress depletion or dysregulation you feel it as these symptoms that can be unsettling but are often reversible once you address the root. And combinations like gwager, cinnamon twig, and dadzao date are powerful not because they force the body into a state but because they help it return to a state it already knows how to maintain. Now if you want to go deeper into fixing this problem watch this other related video if you're curious what exact formulas entire formulas we use for anxiety, insomnia, and heart palpitations because once you know how to calm the system at the root everything else falls into place. So I shot a related video right here on the exact formulas to use for palpitations.