 If you think having energy is just about getting enough sleep, you're wrong. For thousands of years in East Asia, Taoist hermits and mystics and recluses and of course physicians have been looking for the key to both longevity and energy because ancient people knew that the key to a long life was vitality. After all, who wants to live a long life if they don't even feel well? So the focus on energy and vitality and practices that ranged from medicinal herbs to consume like ginseng all the way to esoteric mystical practices for more energy and vitality became one of the focal points of a search of East Asia. Now in this video, let's talk about why you have fatigue and low energy from a traditional Chinese medicine point of view. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hain, board licensed acupuncturist and doctor of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine and author of the health book Master the Day. So let's jump in. Now, paradoxical reason number one is an underlying condition and I will put poor digestion as number one. Now, going back to my early and mid twenties, I was going to all of these specialists, GI specialists, dietitians, nutritionists, GI, all kinds of further specialists in that realm. And I was looking for a solution to my GI problems. Now, what's interesting is that fatigue and energy were secondary complaints for me while I was sleeping fine and I was eating fine. I was noticing resistance to disease was low. I was catching lots of upper respiratory infections and I was easily getting sick. I was behaving basically like a sickly person, but I exercised and I ate well. And so it seemed like there was something underlying going on. Well, in traditional Chinese medicine, there's a diagnosis called spleen chi deficiency. And while it does primarily present with GI symptoms or appetite, digestive food allergies, loose bowel movements, bloating, SIBO like symptoms. It often also presents with other signs and symptoms like fatigue and susceptibility to colds and upper respiratory infections. So it isn't purely just a digestive symptom. It also encompasses other aspects of immunity and the nervous system and maybe even the HPA axis that regulates chronic stress responses in the body. So for example, check out this little research paper here. It's called fatigue and overview. And one of the things that it interestingly talks about is that of course, fatigue can be primary or secondary. It can be secondary to something else like a medical condition or a certain medication you're taking or even a food sensitivity. But one thing was interesting here where they said that men and women differ in the way they describe fatigue. Men typically say they feel tired, whereas women say they feel depressed or anxious. So when we talk about fatigue, it can be very, very multifaceted. It can be because you aren't sleeping enough, of course, or it can be secondary to something else. And even then, how you describe your subjective state varies from person to person. But when we come back to digestion, one thing I've seen hold true. When my patients come in from the holidays and they say they do the latest fad cleanse diet, they always say one thing. I had so much energy. So how is that possible, right? They weren't sleeping more. They weren't exercising more. They were eating differently. And that's very important to keep in mind. So this can be due to things like the changing effects it has on blood sugar or insulin and the current preexisting state of insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance, right? Like people who are diabetic, getting a large crash after their meals versus people who are insulin sensitive and they don't get fatigue with eating. It can be due to myriad other causes, including food allergies and food sensitivities, producing brain fog, heaviness and bloating. Reason number two for fatigue is the nervous system, right? We call this yang chi deficiency. Now I like to think of this as the heart yang, right? The heart in Chinese medicine is not only one of the seats of the spirit, like your actual mood, anxious, depressed, happy. But on top of that, the heart is the mirror of the nervous system. So for example, a diagnosis called heart yang deficiency in my practice really presents with symptoms of nervous system dysregulation, heart palpitations, atrial fibrillation, tachycardia, a racing heart rate, or any irregularities in the heart. They are primarily dealing with the disrupted electrical signals because if you go to get an EKG, you go to your cardiologist, 99% of the time they say nothing's wrong. So this is a result of the stress response. Now, have you ever slept, let's say, six hours a night? But because the next day you were incredibly excited, you were in Costa Rica going to see sloths in the wild, or you were doing a workshop or a trip and you felt great. But another time you slept seven or eight hours and you're tightly rested. But when you show up at work or at this school class, it's just not where you want to be. So you're feeling fatigued. In my mind, it's both mental, emotional, and really nervous system related because excitement has a measurable effect on the nervous system and lack of excitement or depression has also a measurable effect on the nervous system as well. So for example, in states of yang chi deficiency, it's almost like the pressure has been decreased because your battery charge is lower. So of course you're going to feel fatigued. But besides being unrested, you can also tax the nervous system from just general stress or general stimulation in your environment. Reason number three for fatigue, your circadian rhythm has issues. Now, in almost all living beings, there's some aspect of our circadian rhythm that follows light or follows some kind of time that's an internal clock within the actual organism itself. Human beings are obviously no exception. There's all kinds of interesting research on our natural hormonal cycles throughout the day, our mood cycles throughout the day, and even our performance based on those factors during the day. There was one researcher that studied the time of day that Olympians were most likely to win and they found there was actually a correlation based on a natural circadian rhythm. Your circadian rhythm may be that you're either a night owl or an early bird, and that's why you're actually feeling a lot of fatigue at times of the day where you quote shouldn't be. For example, check out this research paper right here. Now, this research paper is called resetting the late timing of night owls has a positive impact on mental health and performance. And the researcher said that individual differences in biological rhythms are influenced by physiological, genetic and behavioral factors. So your actual genetic temperament, behavioral like your choices and physiological like the actual chemicals in your body and chemical processes in your body and electrical. Now these differences allow the categorization of individuals according to their circadian timing with particularly early and late timings often referred to as larks and night owls. Now then they go on to say that this sort of delayed circadian rhythm is often associated with mood disorders like depression. So for you, it may be that you should be going to bed earlier than you really want to because that is your natural rhythm. And that in the morning, that is where you should be having high energy but you might be doing something that is the opposite. Or you may be the unfortunate night owl where you need to be somewhere early in the morning and you just don't feel tired until midnight or two a.m. And you'll have to figure out a way to do your best work and when. Maybe it means being self-employed so you control your time. Reason number four is that you have anxiety or depression. So a lot of the reasons I'm giving here are the non-obvious reasons, right? Of course, if you're living an overall unconscious life you're eating terribly so your insulin is all out of whack and you're not sleeping enough or not sleeping well and you don't move, of course you're gonna be tired. But let's tackle non-obvious causes. You know anxiety and TCM is often an issue with the heart because for a lot of patients that come to see me they have palpitations, elevated heart rate or tightness in their chest. Now the way I like to categorize this is that every heartbeat above a normal heart rate is taxing your batteries. So when your heart rate is 90 or 100 beats per minute at rest, your heart is basically that rabbit that is saying, when am I gonna die, when am I gonna die, when am I gonna die? Because it's waiting for a hawk to come scoop it out of the air and kill it. So it is like your body's in fight or flight. It is preparing for the impact. It's preparing for the bad thing to happen. And so your heart going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom is not a sign of your nervous system being in the parasympathetic, rest and digest. And every extra beat is taxing your batteries more. So we find that for people with this, once we actually treat the heart rate by treating the nervous system or the stress response as the heart rate goes down, the person's energy goes up. Now for depression it's the opposite. It's almost like the batteries are operating at 30% versus 100%. So when we utilize formulas or even for example antidepressants can improve people's energy sometimes by improving the physiological process regulating that. Sometimes it's serotonin, sometimes it's more stress hormones. That actually will improve the symptoms of fatigue or depression. So there can be underlying conditions like this and by treating those conditions, the fatigue will improve. Reason number five, you're fatigued. You are a highly sensitive person. So when we talk about people who have weak heart young like we just talked about, these are people who have sensitive nervous systems that is not necessarily a one-to-one correlate but it often is. So these are people who typically are sensitive to not only foods, sensitive to bloating and food allergies but they're sensitive to non-material things, noise, stimulation, too much going on in their environment, stress, too many demands. Their nervous system is not only hypervigilant. There's thousands of guards in the watch tower looking for the Trojans coming but there's really only a rabbit in the bushes and they don't need to have that much vigilance going on. But at the same time these people have a hypervigilant nervous system meaning that it is constantly on the lookout for threats but that energy and those resources have to come from somewhere, right? You cannot be so on edge and be so rested at the same time. And so the way I like to describe this to highly sensitive people is that their body is mobilizing all the resources for the fight that is going to come but it's not coming and it does not have the resources to sit down and hunker down and put a log in the fire or put a blanket on you and just relax. So your body's in fight or flight all of the time and for highly sensitive people they have to not only organize their life, their life has to be their medicine and even their physical environment has to be stress free for them as much as possible to get them out of fight or flight mode and that will produce a lot less fatigue. One final thing about this is that children born into dangerous home environments, traumatic, stressful, worrisome, they're often kids that develop chronic fatigue from childhood. So when patients come to me and they say I've had chronic fatigue since childhood, almost guarantee there's been trauma and as a result I asked that and almost every single time a person says yes that's been true. They're from a war zone, they're from an abusive family, father was an alcoholic, so that puts the body in fight or flight sometimes permanently like PTSD. It's like a heart shock where the body is just frozen for years afterwards as opposed to going back to a coherent balance state. Now when we talk about like highly sensitive people and healing, I've actually put together a four part guide, four daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. It's the first link right below this video there and it elaborates on some of these healing principles if fatigue is a major issue of yours. In addition to that, you have info below if you'd like to contact me to become a patient of mine in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine. Now reason number seven is the obvious bucket. You just aren't sleeping well. Now if you know you're not sleeping well then you have the mission for you ahead. Figure out what that is. But for some people, there are factors that aren't quite clear. For example, they have chronic nervous system issues so they can't fall asleep or they wake up in the night. That should be treated medically, right? Or it can be that, you know what? You notice that you're in the habit of eating a little bit too late or you're having alcohol and so as a result, your body is still digesting. For my clinical practice, the two most common reasons are number one, core digestion, mostly upward GI issues like reflux and the number one fix is eat a Mediterranean diet five hours before you go to bed. Number two is people with chronic nervous system issues. They are in fight or flight sympathetic dominance all day long. And as a result, when they go to bed the nervous system saying, oh no, you're not going to bed now. You've been pushing me all day long. We've put all the guards on the watch tower. I'm staying up to watch for all the threats. And so it does that and it keeps waking you up or you can't fall asleep. So that is a long-term healing process. Without treatment can take months and with can be a couple of weeks to feeling better. We use formulas in my practice to do that. So these practices are some of those inherent to traditional Chinese medicine. And I'm actually incredibly excited because I just launched my first online program, introduction to healing with traditional Chinese medicine, the original science of longevity. So I've included a link below to enroll in this online program. If it's appealing to you, it will help keep this channel sponsor and ad free and basically helps us be able to afford to keep producing these videos every single week. So if that's something that's appealing you guys can check out the link for the course right below this video. There's a launch special for the holidays because it actually just came out. So you can check it out and before you go, don't forget, I have a related video on this topic of fatigue right up here.