 One thing I see clinically very often is that you only can understand your own character and what you have, what it takes and who you are, as well as the character of other people. You could only ever see that in times of difficulty and adversity. We all have this idea of who we think we are. And then when the breakdown hits us or the loss or the failure or the crisis hits us, we learn who we really are. And sometimes it's exactly who we thought we were. And sometimes we're a little bit weaker than who we thought we were. There's a great quote that character introduces a man to himself, as in you learn who you really are when you start to be really scared if you can make it through this trial or tribulation. Now in this video though, I thought I would share a very profound lesson that I had learned through one of the most difficult times of my life and something that I hope will help many of you. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hein, Doctor of Chinese Medicine and Licensed Acupuncturist. So for me, one of the most profound and scary experiences was developing severe, severe, severe anxiety to the point where I could only sleep three hours per day in one duration. I would wake up with my heart racing, sweating, heart palpitations all night long, electrical sensations in my chest, and just severe insomnia that goes on for a long enough period of time that you're not sure if you can even live from that or how long you can live from that before something bad happens, like something catastrophic happens. I mean at what point do you check yourself into a hospital and just say tranquilize me for a month, right? I mean, there's a lot of people who go to the hospital because they haven't slept for days. And for me, during that time, I would say one of the reasons I never touched any kind of pharmaceutical intervention or never took a sleeping pill or didn't become an alcoholic was for me that I deeply believe, not just as a philosophy, but based on evidence that I see that the body is giving you symptoms because it wants you to understand something. It wants you to understand why you're sick. Everything about being sick contradicts an animal's ability to survive. If you are bedridden, how are you going to eat? How are you going to reproduce? And how are you going to survive? I mean, you can't. You can't protect yourself. You can't protect your tribe. You can't protect your family. So nature does not want you to be sick. So then why would sickness like anxiety or depression or insomnia, why would that happen outside of the influence of a predator or eating some poisonous food? And I find that very few people end up going through these experiences because we medicate it away. And I think in many cases too soon we medicate it away. But because I vehemently believe that all symptoms are signals that are a breadcrumb, right? It's a paper trail and it wants to show you what has to change to feel well. Just like you put your hand on a stove and when your skin burns, your nerves are telling you stop doing that because you're going to do irreversible damage to your hand, which you need for your life. If you couldn't feel that pain of the burn, then you would have irreparable irreversible damage to your hands. And I find that so often what we do usually with medications, sometimes with lesser things like a lot of people smoke joints or they smoke cannabis to dull symptoms. A lot of people use alcohol and alcoholism is very common worldwide to deal with anxiety, depression and sleep problems, to deal with trauma, soldiers coming back from war. And I think what happens most of the time is that in the short run it helps because it dulls the symptom, dulls the noise, right? Because we've made the signal a little bit quieter. And so the noise, the static in the field is a little bit less. And so we can we get a little bit of sleep enough to function five, six hours or, you know, the pain is a little bit less or the headaches are a little bit less or the anxieties a little bit, you know, it's calm down. But the problem is that inevitably a year later, it's still there because we haven't listened to the signal. And I think all of these are designed to push us on a quest for healing. They're designed to make you suffer until you listen and go on your hero's journey to figure out what has gone wrong. And very few people let it get to that stage where they're willing to listen and feel how bad it hurts, how uncomfortable and threatening and scary that is, so that they can properly heal permanently. And it's in these experiences where the thesis of this video comes into play where in adversity, you either go to sleep or you wake up. We see this in all parts of our life in relationships. You may be the person that just got dumped or you were the nice girl or the nice guy and you get dumped. This person was your everything. And afterwards you're like, screw love. I'm done with dating. I don't want to have anything to do with it. I'm tired of being Mr. Nice guy, Mrs. Nice girl, I'm done. That's going to sleep. It's choosing to be jaded and therefore not learned from the lesson and how you can get better. And maybe what did I contribute to that relationship? Maybe I was too nice. You see this in finances. Maybe you started the cupcake business or the craft business. You're a trainer and you saw that you're amazing little country deli that an amazing high quality food went out of business. But McDonald's next door stayed in business, making people fat sick and diabetic. And you're like, this is so stupid. I'm never, this is, this is so unfair. I'm never going into business all about money. It's all about marketing. I'm so jaded. That's going to sleep. Because it's not understanding the factors that might have gone into building a more successful enterprise going forward or what factors led to your other competitors being successful. Right. Going to sleep means stop listening. Stop paying attention. It means I'm not going to pay attention to the signs and the signals. I'm not going to listen. I'm not going to reflect and understand how I could have done things better. And an illness, whether it is anxiety or depression or digestive problems or whatever the personal issue is, going to sleep sometimes is just medicating away symptoms. Sometimes it's just avoiding tracking your weight, avoiding tracking what you eat, avoiding stepping on the scale, avoiding, you know you're accumulating debt, but God forbid you look at your bank statements. Right. Avoidance is one of the ways we go back to sleep. And in my experience, if you want healing, permanent progress to happen, you have to wake up with adversity. You have to step on the scale and look at the weight. You have to open your bank statement and look at what you spent and look at what you've saved. You have to look at what you have contributed to create the life that you're in, even if you don't want to believe you contributed anything. And you have to deal with the symptoms that are making you suffer and understand where they're coming from. And let that pain that is derailing your life push you on a deeper quest for answers and not medicated to sleep. I'll be honest, sometimes I am disappointed by how quickly people throw in the towel. I don't want this to be a judgmental or a hateful video. I don't want to shame anybody. I don't think there's anything wrong with antidepressants or medications or pharmaceuticals. But sometimes if I'm being candid, I am a little disappointed with how quickly I see people I know throw in the towel. A few months of adversity when a family member or a friend dies or gets sick, grieving is normal to experience insomnia and anxiety and depression. That is normal. That is healing. And so many people just choose to go to sleep during that time and not feel. Your body wants you to feel that. That is the healing process. It is feeling that discomfort and the pain. Because in this case, for a lot of it, it's emotional pain. It's nervous system pain. Your body wants you to deal with that because the pain, the symptom is the healing. It's salutogenic. It's trying to point you back towards yourself but only if you listen to it and only if you take those hints from your body and from what's going on within. So I don't want you to leave this video feeling negative. I want you to feel inspired that there always is a way and that your body is not doing that because it makes you want to feel bad. It's doing that because it wants you to heal. But if you view it a symptom only as an impasse or an obstacle to you living, then of course you just take whatever makes you feel less. But if you view it as an important messenger as a guardian angel that wants to say, hey, Alex, this is what's going on. You should probably listen to this because it's gonna be a bigger problem in six months. But hey, what do I know? I mean, I am just your body after all. If you listen to that and you treat it as an important message than a year from now, you may be 90% better or you may not need anything to help you cope because that's healing after all. The dependency on nothing going forward. And I just see that a lot of people have a dependency on staying sick because going to sleep during times of adversity is always easier than waking up. All right, I'm gonna leave you there. I am passionate rant for today. And I want you to comment below at the end of this video and let me know for you, what is something you are going to pay closer attention to down the line because you know it's gonna help you heal even though it's hard to do right now. All right, tell me right down there below this video.