How does my emotion and stress affect my digestive health?
Based on the traditional Chinese medicine, emotional stress has a direct effect on your digestive health.
Based in the Five Element Theory of Chinese medicine, excessive or depletion of an element has an effect on its preceding and proceeding element. For the intent and purpose of focusing on stress and digestive health issues, focus on the wood and earth element in the diagram.
The Wood Element
Wood is an element that represents the organ system of liver and gallbladder. It has an emotional association of anger and the functionality of this element is associated with discoursing and moving outwards. Impairment in it can lead to outburst of over expansion, think short fused and easily angered and irritable. It can also have the opposing effect of stagnation and lacking movement; therefore, a sensation of feeling stuck, knots, aches and pain.
The Earth Element
The earth element represents the organ system of stomach and spleen. It has an emotional association of pensiveness, rumination, and worry. It has the functionality of digesting, churning, breaking things down. Impairment in it can lead to the reverse of breaking things down to things moving upwards like heart burn, vomiting, nausea. Feeling slow, brain fog, confused, and heavy are also attributed to impairment in this element. Functionally, poor digestion exhibiting constipation, loose stools, diarrhea, sticky stools, vomiting, nausea, bloatness are associated when impaired.
Wood-Earth Disharmony
Over time, uncontrolled wood element may lead to excess fire or heat, think inflammation in your system. This can lead to dryness, thirst, feeling hot. Uncontrolled earth can lead into accumulation of turbidity and dampness, think feeling heavy and for lack of a better word, feeling gross.
The controllers of the wood and earth element are the metal and wood respectively. Sometimes, an impaired wood element may be due to the poor controlling attributes of the metal element. This may be due to traumatic experiences that exhibit extreme grief weakening the metal power to control the wood element. Therefore, the wood element goes out of control exhibiting the signs and symptoms aforementioned. Added into this is the stressors of daily life that provokes the wood element.
Because the wood element controls earth, an overactive wood is likely to over control the earth element and therefore affects the functionality of the earth element.
What does treatment look like?
Treatment based on this paradigm requires both life experience to understand what the patient may be experiencing and which knowledge to access the right acupuncture points indicated to abate the symptoms. Length of care varies based on the patients ability to do introspective work. This is when psychotherapy and behavioral health with acupuncture are essential. Herbal supplements to help ease the functionality of the organ systems described are also recommended.
Food Therapy
If you’re feeling a clenching sensation in your abdomen and having nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea - I highly recommend adding sliced ginger into your diet routine. This is especially crucial for those who have smoothies and salads. Having a balanced diet isn’t just about eating the right macro and micronutrients. From a TCM perspective, food has temperature properties that must be considered. Hence, add a soup with your salad or ginger and cinnamon into your smoothies in the morning.
Future Workshops
The Five Element Theory is a powerful tool in managing psychoemotional and psychosomatic treatments. It has been an effective tool in treatment my diverse patient population and I hope this provides insight to why you are feeling what you are experiencing.
I’m hoping to better education the general public regarding psychoemotional and psychosomatic health and wellness through traditional Chinese medicine and how it can help you heal. This edu-series is made available for free in partnership with my colleague, Dr. Ricky Chang, MD from UCLA Center of East West Medicine. I look forward to seeing you in the near future.
