 you can turn off your anxiety with this video. So let's say you're just sitting at your computer working and it's a stressful day or a stressful work project and you're just typing away, working away and you notice that little creeping dread sensation. You're noticing a little bit of that pressure in your chest or a little bit of that tension in your neck or the back of your skull or somewhere else in your body and you know you're stressed out and as this anxiety sensation goes on and on and on you feel like you are about to pop. Congratulations, you have anxiety but what do you actually do about it? Now in this video, I'm going to share some of the best tips that I've learned as a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine on how to approach anxiety. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hine, board licensed acupuncturist and doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, author of the health book, Master of the Day. So let's jump in. I had a very interesting and scary experience about eight years ago. I was in the process of narrating my second book. So we were doing an audio book and I was in a sound studio and I was feeling really, really, really tired as I was narrating this book over and over and over again for hours a day. Now in one particular day, I was narrating the book and I noticed a little bit of a heart flutter, palpitation. I didn't think it was really anything because I had had them from time to time during stressful phases of my life but then the palpitation happened again and again and again and by the end of the recording of this audio book I was having these persistent heart palpitations and I was feeling exhausted and extremely anxious. So I thought, okay, maybe I should just go outside, walk around, get some fresh air and just breathe, right? It was really tiring work to narrate this book. As I was walking around, I got into my car and after about five minutes of driving I noticed a tingling, aching sensation going up my left arm towards my chest. So now I'm starting to get a little bit worried thinking that something is happening with my heart and being in the middle of my medical program at the very free first term I was pretty certain that I was having an heart attack as every medical student with medical student syndrome can be like. So as I was driving, the sensation increased and over the next 10 or 15 minutes the sensation of tingling in my left arm with chest pain and shortness of breath began setting in more and more and more. So I decided maybe there's a very small chance I'm having an actual heart attack. So I call my dad and I drive right on the way to urgent care. Now when I got to urgent care they confirmed that I didn't really have any signs of a heart attack or stroke or any cardiovascular event but likely it was a panic attack due to stress and due to working too many hours. Now what they recommended was of course like what most medical professionals recommend. Maybe you need anti-anxiety medication and antidepressant. Maybe you need Xanax. Now I pushed all of those things aside but it clearly went to show. I ate healthy every day. I exercised. I never gained a pound of body fat from living poorly. I didn't drink coffee every day. How could I have such a severe health symptom despite the fact that I was living an overall healthy life but the one thing was working long hours and having too much stress. Now there are lots of other healing rituals that you guys can do to treat anxiety and approach anxiety, combat it from a traditional Chinese medicine point of view. I've put together four others in the first link below this video. It's just a free guide on four daily healing rituals you can use to add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. Now I also take on a limited number of new patients in my practice in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine. So you guys can look below this video if there's a link to contact my practice or just call us right away. Now when we talk about anxiety and traditional Chinese medicine we always do what's called a pattern differentiation. So just because you have anxiety doesn't mean we treat anxiety. We treat what's called the pattern. So the pattern for example is very often an anxiety pattern with digestive problems. So there's a pattern that's called spleen chi and heart blood deficiency. This pattern is typically someone who experiences lots of digestive problems like bloating, SIBO and issues with distention and getting a food baby and also has a significant amount of anxiety or palpitations. That was a lot like one of my patterns and it's fascinating because there's a very distinct link between the gut and neurotransmitter production for the body. So for example, you guys might have heard of SSRIs one of the main classes of antidepressants. Now these relate to one of the neurotransmitters called serotonin. Now serotonin, fascinatingly, is heavily produced in the gut. So check out this one research paper here. This one research paper is called serotonin in the gut, blessing or curse. And it says serotonin or 5-HT, once most extensively studied as a neurotransmitter of the central nervous system is seen to be predominantly secreted in the gut. About 95% of it is estimated to be found in the gut mainly within a certain cell type whereas only 5% is found in the brain. So lots of conventional medicine will lead you to believe that anxiety and depression clinical ones are a brain issue, right? We call it mental health, but this is garbage. It's nonsense. It is only a sliver one view of the truth. In reality, it's the mind-body help, right? If that much of the serotonin production is in the gut itself, yes, it interfaces with the brain and with the whole nervous system. But think about that. It's really quite interesting with how many people have gut issues today. Now there's another kind of anxiety that we call heart and kidney not communicating. This is more of like your classic adrenal type anxiety where people are wired but tired, right? Tired but wired. They may be exhausted and not sleeping enough, but the next night they go to bed, their heart rates elevated, they're noticing their heart skipping beats or having palpitations and arrhythmia, and in general, this is what's like the traditional adrenal fatigue sort of pattern. These kinds of people generally are prone to a lot of heart rate variability issues, elevated heart rate in particular or skipping beats, that sort of thing. But in general, we say this relates more to the heart and kidney, as opposed to what we call the spleen and the heart. So a GI and a anxiety picture versus more of like the adrenal anxiety picture. And often the patient's prior history is very indicative of what is the reason they're having these sort of symptoms. Now we say that the heart is the emperor, the emperor of all the other organs. And one of the reasons people have anxiety is when the emperor feels like he's losing control over the kingdom, there's something going wrong there, something going wrong there, something going wrong there. The emperor is panicking because now he has to exert martial law on his people and get everything under control. So when the borders have been breached, then the panic begins, the emperor has to rein things in, right? All of us know the subjective feeling of having, let's say, overwhelmed, feeling we're so stressed that we're on ground. That is the land in the kingdom being breached. Now the emperor is worried, freaking out, which is the nervous system. So what can we do to get anxiety under control? From a TCM point of view, the first is really on the biological side, the physiological side is doing more yin activities that help build your kidney reserves. So let me explain. The yang is the active doing phase of your day, right? It's about 16 hours. Yin is the resting and gathering phase of your day, which is about eight hours. If you disrupt the balance of yin and yang in that way, you're spending too many hours doing or too much doing or too hard doing, you make it too hard for the body to go in the state of rest later. We all know the feeling of working a crushing 16 hour a day and then we can't fall asleep or working for long periods of time and then you're waking in the middle of the night. But when we say do more things that anchor the yin, these are things like more sleep, more time in bed resting, more time reading, walking your dog, going for walks in the woods, time in nature, whatever generates that feeling of yin and rest for you. Yin is gathering, right? So yin is basically anything that makes you feel grounded and gathered. There are lots of things that are generic like sleep and there are lots that may be unique to you, right? Like maybe going for a moderate gym workout makes you feel really rested and grounded after. The second thing is by strengthening the kidney energy and TCM, the kidney is almost like your adrenal reserves if we could generalize it. And what that means is that anything that requires willpower, pushing, exhaust the kidney battery, exhaust your batteries in general. So if you're going through a phase of quote unquote, adrenal fatigue as people like to call it, what that means is that you need to do the opposite for a while. What got you in that scenario? Was it working too many hours? Was it stressing about too many things? Was it trying to do too much? All of that taxes the nervous system. So doing the opposite, whatever helps you feel the most rested, the most gathered in your resources will help on a physiological side, temper that anxiety. On a psychological side, a lot of the teachings from Taoism can be really useful. For example, when I was going through the peak of these sort of panic attacks, one thing that I noticed is that on a medical and a psychological point of view, flowing like the way Taoists would recommend and telling myself, nothing worse will happen. This is the worst it will get, just ride this wave. And sure enough, 20 minutes later, the panicky sensations would subside. So telling yourself, nothing worse will happen. I just need to ride this wave is a very surrendered and yielded way that you can let go and allow these uncomfortable sensations internally to pass. And one final tip from a social point of view, there was a fascinating study done that found that the people who experienced the most awakenings during the night, micro-awakenings, were typically the people that were the least socially connected. So they found that this might be an evolutionary response as a social animal. We are not designed to be alone or to live alone really. So if you are separated from the tribe, the nervous system is making you have micro-awakenings to perceive threats in the environment, to be safe. And when people are with people, around people, they generally end up sleeping much, much better unless there's stimulation waking them up. So with people with clinical depression or clinical anxiety, being around people is often very grounding to the nervous system and can be very healing. So working on social ties and social connections as well. And finally, I put together a brand new online program, Introduction to Healing with Traditional Chinese Medicine. We go in depth into some of these key healing practices that you can implement in your life. And again, one of the best ways for me to try to keep this channel ad and sponsor free as much as possible, instead of promoting some supplement or some greens juice or something that I don't really know what you want or will help you. I've launched a series of online programs on healing certain conditions with traditional Chinese medicine. So you can check out the link below or the pinned comment below this video. And one final thing, I have a great related video on anxiety right here.