Today I want to talk to you about anxiety, what causes it and foods that might be able to help.

Anxiety affects – well, up until 2019, we had specific statistics. But clinically, these days in the past two years, anxiety affects everybody at one point or another. Every single one of my clients, even if they’re not prone to anxiety and even if they have not tended to experience it previously in life, has had an anxious event in the past two years.

So we’re going to say that most likely this is most of us. But what causes anxiety? What causes this feeling of something not being right, of uncenteredness, of ungroundedness, of our emotions getting away from us?

We’re going to talk about this from the lens of Oriental medicine and the yin and yang. So if you’ve watched my other videos, then you’re familiar with the concepts of yin is fluid. It’s substance. So it might be the ocean or it might be the moisture in the air. Medically in the body this is blood and this is saliva. This is body fluid.

Yang is energy. It’s sunshine. It’s movement. Medically in the body this is cellular metabolism. One of the aspects of the symbol of the yin and yang is – that is often overlooked is the line between them and this has to do with the changing of the energy and their communication between them.

So every night when we go to sleep, it is supposed to be that our yang energy comes and rests inside the yin and every morning that we wake up, our yang energy comes out. So biomedically through Western lab diagnosis, we can do a cortisol test and we can find out if the yang energy, if the cortisol is at the appropriate level upon waking.

If you have difficulty waking up in the morning, then it may be that your cortisol levels aren’t flowing at the right time. It can also mean that possibly your bedtime is a little shifted from what your optimal bedtime really is. But that will be a conversation for another video,

Today, I want to talk about what foods can help with anxiety. We have yin and we have yang. If yin is depleted in the body, then yang will be relatively in excess and that’s going to feel like energy running around, being turbulent, maybe having difficulty focusing, concentrating or being in control of your emotions.

We can also have the situation where we have too much yin and that can feel like depressive energy, heavy, difficult to move. So when we have this kind of imbalance, we have more than one type of anxiety.

Now that bears out both in Oriental medicine where we have the spectrum of yin and yang imbalance. It also bears out in Western medicine when do neurotransmitter tasks. Anxiety can happen when someone’s dopamine is high and their serotonin is low. It can also happen when their serotonin is high and their acetylcholine is low.

By using both lab tests and our Oriental medicine diagnosis, we can get to accurate root cause of anxiety and through the use of acupuncture and herbs, we can help bring you back to center quickly.