 I want to share some of the lessons here today that I learned being a patient with a chronic illness certainly for more than a decade and some of the lessons I've learned if you yourself are trying to heal yourself of an illness or disease that you have. Hey guys, I'm Alex Heim, current doctoral student in classical or traditional Chinese medicine. Now, the first lesson I learned dealing with a chronic, for me, digestive illness for a very long time is that ultimately you are your own best healer. So at the start of me seeing doctors, it started in the western medical system and I was fortunate in the sense that I had all physicians I liked and nutritionist, dietitian, GI specialist. I liked almost all of them besides the GI specialist. So I wasn't a western or conventional medicine hater. Everyone would suggest these things based on like research or the protocols or whatever, but none of it really worked and that's why I left the conventional medical system. You know, one time the dietitian was recommending, for me, one of my key symptoms was constipation and she recommended adding bran to my oatmeal in the morning. So I added this powdered bran to increase my fiber, right, that's the theory. And I had such bad abdominal pain I couldn't even sleep and I did it for two, three days until finally realizing it was the bran causing that. And it was one of those things where she was doing what she was taught. She was doing what she thought was right and obviously it wasn't working. And I knew that high fiber foods cause problems for me, but I was trusting the expert. And when it comes to healing yourself, you will know better than the expert what your body likes and doesn't like. That doesn't mean you discount their advice. Like since then, the best physicians I've ever seen were Chinese medicine doctors and even if I didn't understand their advice, I took it and that's why my digestion has been great because of the formulas they've given me. But you will know what exacerbates or improves the condition that you have and it's really important to keep track of all those things and be like, you know what, I know you're going to recommend this. I've had a lot of issues with that in the past and that's okay. The second thing that Chinese medicine taught me about my own self healing was to look at the patterns in your life and don't get so focused on individual symptoms. So for example, you may have stuff going on with insomnia or digestive problems or anxiety. And rather than getting fixated on the one symptom, look at all the various symptoms and put them into one pattern. So like let's say for example, you have back pain or jaw pain, insomnia, anxiety, some digestive upset, rather than trying to view them as each one little piece of the puzzle you need to figure out. Chinese medicine is all about looking at the overall pattern. What are the relationships? Why are these things related? Why are they all happening? Because they're all together somehow, because the body is not separate body parts. It's all connected via all these systems, the endocrine system, the nervous system, circulatory system. They're all related. And so it's important to not look at them as separate parts if you want to heal yourself. So in that pattern, you might look at each piece and be like, I'm having heart palpitations. Is that from stress and overwork or something I ate or coffee? And then I have this jaw tightness. It must be from sitting at my desk all day, right? And digestion. It must be from gluten, right? And then insomnia. I must just have a lot going on in my subconscious, right? But you could look at it. What's the big picture? Probably just stress. It's probably just stress. You fix the big picture, all of those symptoms can improve or go away. The third thing is to focus on the overall big levers in your life and not the little things. So we might be tempted to think that like removing coffee is the solution or getting rid of gluten is the solution or adding in this nutrient, you know, taking these screens in my smoothie. But this kind of idea that there's one thing a single cause defector is a very biomedical approach at looking at illness. And sometimes it's true, but a lot of the time it's not true, especially with these complex chronic illnesses that so many people now and so many patients have of digestive or anxiety or dysmenorrhea or menstrual patterns. They're often complex and there's multiple things going on, there's multiple levels and there's multiple patterns going on from a Chinese medicine perspective. So instead of thinking, what is the one thing I do? Look at the big picture, big pattern, like maybe it is a big dietary pattern instead of taking this one supplement, adding L-glutamine and that, look at, what's a big shift? You can make a big lifestyle shift. Overall diet, do a 180 overhaul, try something big that's different. Maybe it's like, for years you've been like the work 70 hours, smoke cigarettes, go out to drink, do a 180. If you can afford to, I've had clients and patients that have done a sabbatical so that they could see if I remove everything in my life that's killing me, what healing can occur. And that honestly will shock them when they see, wow, I remove all those things, my body goes right back to normal and often pretty quick. Focus on the big things, don't get so myopic in focusing on the small thing, one little thing thinking it's going to resolve the whole picture. The fourth thing that helped me realize self-healing was focusing on your beliefs about your ability to self-heal. So the body in most diseases or illnesses will be self-limiting if you remove the barriers to healing. So one of the things that gets complicated is when a patient has had a chronic illness or person. Myself with digestive problems and during around the age of 30 where I burned myself out from overwork and stress, I developed insomnia for several years that it took a long time to recover fully. It went away in about a year, but to be 100% took several years. And the problem was that I'd never had sleep issues in my life, but I started developing these bad beliefs that I couldn't sleep. Like a kid, you talk to them and they're up all night, they're like, oh, I'll fall asleep eventually. But adults when they get these stories going, especially with a prolonged illness, they, if every night you can't sleep, you develop the belief I cannot sleep and that will overpower your body's ability to sleep, which is crazy. You have digestive problems, people wake up expecting to feel like crap all day or chronic pain. If I've been in pain every day for the last six months, there is no day where I'm going to wake up and assume I will not have pain tomorrow. And guess what? That increases the sensitivity to pain and maybe even the frequency. So one of the key things in dealing with a chronic illness is understanding I need to change my beliefs. Now it may not mean like out of the blue, I'm just going to be like, I'm not going to have pain tomorrow. I'm going to sleep tonight. But you analyze, why am I telling myself this story? Is it really true? Has there ever been a day without pain or a day where I slept well? Have I ever overcome this before? Dealing with that is paramount in chronic illness and chronic disease. Because otherwise, you're already sowing the seed for more suffering. Because you're telling yourself you cannot recover. The last thing that helped me self heal is understanding your own unique constitution and what affects it. So this idea of constitutional medicine was very popular in ancient times. It seems to be less popular now. But it's this idea that each person is born with a predisposition towards something or away from something. So some people drinking coffee makes them feel really good. They feel great. It helps their digestion. No problem if they drink a lot of coffee. Other people gives a massive reflux, affects their stomach, can't sleep, get pains all over their digestion in their intestines. Obviously, this is not good for them. And I think the essence of keeping your body strong is constitutional medicine. You understand, I do OK with stress. Or I do really poorly with this kind of stress. This is what really derails me. This is what I handle really well. So for me, it taught me that digestion being something I was born with, digestive issues, really is the thing I have to focus on if I want to feel good every day. And that means I have to make sacrifices that I don't want to make. But I have to if I want to feel good. And then it means these things I should eat, these things I shouldn't eat. This is something I need to regularly take herbal formulas for. Or the main way I get stressed is by sleep deprivation. So for my unique body to be healthy and feel good, I should very closely wash my sleep and my diet. For you, maybe you're great on minimal sleep. Maybe it doesn't unwind you at all. But for me, I get super wired and anxious. And that's something I need to watch out for. So understanding your unique constitution, maybe you're more prone to issues with diet. I'm not really. Well, I cook. Maybe you're prone to being sedentary. Or maybe you're prone to vices, like smoking, drinking, consuming five cups of coffee a day. Understanding where you uniquely derail is very important here. So I hope that helps provide a little bit of insight, especially if you are a patient or a person who's trying to heal themselves of illness over a long period of time. I've been there. I still am there. And I've been a patient for a very, very long. And so it's given me a great perspective on both sides of the spectrum. Now, I hope that video helps. If you feel comfortable, let us know in the comments there below what you are struggling with the most personally. And if you'd like to grab the free guide on how to add 10 years to your life and heal yourself natural with classical or traditional Chinese medicine, go to alexhine.com forward slash free to download that free guide and that email course.