 So, having been through pretty serious burnout myself and having gone through all of these various stages of seeing various organs get involved from my stomach to what you'd probably call your adrenals to seeing symptoms that I never ever had before in my entire life that frankly at that time freaked me out. Now despite these symptoms being weird, if I had spotted them earlier on and recognized them as symptoms of stress and working too much and not sleeping enough, if I recognized that sooner, my recovery might have been quicker. So I thought in this video I would share what I see as the three levels of physiological burnout and how they apply in Chinese medicine. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hein, author of the health book Master of the Day on Amazon. So I've included a link right below this video, which is for a free PDF worksheet, which is four daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. You can check that out right below this video here. So I'm going to describe three levels, the Qi level, the Yin level and the Yan level of burnout, just very, very briefly. So the way I think about it is the Qi level is where you've been again experiencing symptoms that are not yet material. So for example, you've been working a lot, maybe you have a short term deadline at work or some project going on, you have something going on with your family or something personal that's really causing you to experience stress. And you begin experiencing maybe one day in the afternoon, you're kind of doing these deep breaths, these sighs, you're just working and you're like, where you're noticing your breath feels a little restricted, you may even be getting some symptoms of anxiety or possibly you've even been having panic attacks, right? Intermittent, not every day, not every week, but you've been having panic attacks. That on some level is, you could describe it as a Qi level pathology and one simple way that I think of it on one level is that it's an emotional, sometimes level pathology. So it's not easily measured by any current biomedical test, which is why almost always patients that come to me with a history of anxiety or panic attacks, they always say I went to the ER, they didn't find anything, right? And I experienced that myself, palpitations, the beginnings of these little panic attacks, went to the ER, they never found anything. It's a story I hear on a weekly basis because from a Chinese medicine perspective, this is still Qi level. It's affecting your physiology, maybe has not gone structural yet. Level of exhaustion, number two is Yin level. So let's say in this scenario, you've been working really hard, same thing. But this time, what you notice is around evening and sunset, you start to get hot. You feel warm. You feel very thirsty. Maybe you start getting night sweats for the first time, or maybe you even start getting this restless sleep. Your sleep feels incomplete. You don't feel like you're fully rested. You wake up a lot, you have vivid dreaming. But the distinct aspect of Yin level burnout, as I call it, is heat symptoms. So you can have dryness symptoms, dry skin, heat in the hands and feet, low grade fever, specifically, usually my patients experience this at nighttime. Night sweats, very, very common. The reason for this in Chinese medicine is you're basically burning off the oil. It's like you're driving a car when you should have had an oil change. And now it's beginning to generate all this heat. And the oil change, the Yin, the moistening comes from rest, usually good sleep. Now that that has been burnt off, now you're experiencing dryness and heat symptoms, the moisture in your body has been fried off effectively. The third level of burnout is Yang level burnout. So let's say now we have the same scenario, but now it's a 50 year old dude. He starts to wake up for the first time at night to urinate, maybe even two, three times, not getting great sleep, maybe has a little bit of lower back pain. Maybe his knee or his hip is bothering him, having problems with libido or erectile dysfunction. Now what we're looking at is a Yang deficiency level burnout. And these are progressively deeper states. And at the Yang level, what that means is that effectively the fire, the primordial fire of life, like we call it burnout, right? The candle has been snuffed. It's an everyday colloquial saying in our culture. But at this stage now, the person has a more severe level of depletion where what we call is the Yang is weak. And so they experience these symptoms of cold. Usually this is the age where people say they want to move down to Florida because they hate winters again. It's extremely common. So in this case, usually we consider it the kidney fire has gotten weak. And now they're experiencing these symptoms of cold, frequent urination, erectile dysfunction, decreased circulatory, often have heart problems around this time, or maybe if it's gone long enough, now they have truly structural problems like they have kidney failure due to long term diabetes and their own dialysis, the most severe, right? Or cancer or something else, more structural where a tumor will grow. So these three stages are very important to recognize because they're progressive, they are progressive levels of depletion. And at each state, we've talked in these videos about Yang Qi, which is the state of, we could call it immunity for a very low level explanation or vitality. These are progressive levels of depletion of your Yang Qi of your vitality. And they're important to recognize because they're different grades of severity. So if you can recognize, this is Qi level still, I got to watch it. This is Yin level, got to be extra careful, Yang level, I need to chill for a while, indefinitely focus on my health. They can help you and prevent you from going into much more severe pathology, all right? Helpful exercise to go through, very, very useful to know. Maybe I'll shoot more videos on this in the future. But if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally or online via telemedicine, there's a link right below this video to my clinic. And you can email or call me through that and get an appointment booked up. All right, you guys, that's all I have for today. There's two related videos over here as well.