352: Treating Anxiety: Traditional Chinese Medicine Style
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Welcome to the Ancient Health Podcast, where East meets West in the world of medicine. I'm Dr. Chris Motley, and here we explore how modern Western science and traditional Eastern wisdom come together to unlock the body's full healing potential. Each week, we'll dive into powerful tools, techniques, and approaches from both sides of the world to help you optimize your health and live with vitality. Let's bridge the gap between ancient practices and cutting-edge medicine. Let's get started.

Hello, friends. Welcome to the Ancient Health Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Motley. And today we are going to talk about in a Q&A format, the Chinese medicine world and how it pertains to emotions. How does Chinese medicine work with emotional problems?

If you yourself are out there and have suffered with emotional stagnation or problems and you want an alternative view, I hope this Q&A can help you. Now, first of all, I want all of you out there to know that there are different ways to deal with these emotions and there's different ways to approach them. And you know, as well as I do, I'm open to them. And I want you to be able to send me any type of answers or inquiries that pertain to this because I'm always here to learn as well.

But I hope to give you some insight that could be a little simplistic so that it's something that's very applicable to you that you can actually use and go forward and do something with the information. So the first question is, Doc, what can I do to help with anxiety?

Two systems that are associated in my book primarily or heavily with anxiety is going to be the urinary system, which is the bladder and kidney, and also the upper digestive system, which is the stomach and the spleen and the pancreas. So I don't want to be confusing, but let's separate them in a way to describe them. The urinary system, the kidney and bladder, are used for filtration and excretion.

Now they represent the emotions or help process the emotions of fear according to Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine. So these two organs are helping the body with the emotions of fear, any dread, any form of dread, bad past memories, any type of fright, or the fear, not of like something coming at you or trying to harm you, but the fear of losing out, the fear of not being ahead.

The fear of not being first, of being left behind or feeling abandoned. So kidneys are associated with your body trying to process your emotions of some form of fear. Now, if that fear gets out of hand and the program of fear keeps continuously running in your mind, in your body, it could go out of control and lead to chronic anxiety.

fearing of what's ahead, fearing what may occur or fearing what may not occur. So when we look back in our history, I ask the patient, if you're dealing with anxiety, one of the first things I do is look at the physical features of the body. Is there dark circles underneath the eyes? Is there any form of

of breakouts of pimples around the hairline. These are associated with the kidneys and the bladder in Chinese medicine. So if you have a problem or have faced problems with fear or feeling stuck or abandoned, it could create dysfunction within the kidney and bladder leading to chronic UTIs,

bladder infections, kidney infections, kidney stones, bladder stones, chronic pelvic pain, low back pain, tight hip flexors. Yes, tight hip flexors. And this can show itself in the face by having pimples along the hairline. I have a small one right here actually. And dark circles underneath the eyes. If you see that in the mirror, but you don't see the sign or feel the physical symptoms I just mentioned,

such as the tight hip flexors, it still would indicate to me that there is going to be kidney infections and bladder infections lurking below the surface. So if you've had the emotions of fear in the past, it causes the dysfunction in the organ, the kidney and bladder, the urinary system, and it leads to those major problems. So what I ask the patient, when I look at the face and I see these two main signs,

Dark circles underneath the eyes, hairline, pimples. I say, did you ever suffer from the kidney infections or bladder infections, UTIs? And they'll say, I would say, yes, I have. Some people say, I don't even remember. Then I go further and say, is there fear in your past? Well, doc, I don't really remember my past. When I was younger, I don't remember being fearful or afraid. Well, then if I know I can see this in your physical appearance or know that you have the signs and symptoms,

I can see it, but if you can't fully pull it to bring it to awareness, I want you to see if it's one of your genetic ancestors. Was it your parents, your grandparents? Did they ever have any form of fear or being abandoned?

Or never wanted to be second, always wanted to be first because they had to prove everybody else wrong. Now, if they can say yes, I know that they probably were in a situation where they were challenging the kidneys and the bladder primarily. Now, when the kidney and bladder is working overtime to help you handle your fears, help to cope with them, they get worn out. And that's why they get infected. And that's why they can start to have some malfunctions.

This can lead to the anxiety. Now, I know many of you can have this routine in your head where you're already thinking ahead. You're already beating me to the punch. You're saying, yes, I remember that I worked hard all my life to get ahead of individuals, not because I was mad or angry with them. I worked my butt off because I wanted to be showing people that I was worth something, that I had value. That could be that there was a program instilled in you by your parents that

For some reason that made you believe that you needed to show your worth or value. Or it could have happened to your parents and passed to you or to your grandparents and passed throughout the genetic line. So as you start to see that these things are passing down to you, the anxiety builds because you're not able to control or have the energy to control outcomes like you want to. So when the organ gets tired,

When the bladder and the kidney gets tired, that's when the anxiety will start. If you had enough chi, enough energy and blood flow to your kidneys and your bladder, you would not suffer from higher amounts of anxiety. Now, I'm not saying it's the cure to all anxiety. I'm just saying in this particular case, if you healed and nourished or kept the bladder and kidney healthy. Now, write this down with herbs such as uva ursi.

U-V-A-U-R-S-I, uva ursi supreme, dandelion, milk thistle, cranberry, or D-manos. If you used one or two of these herbals to help supply qi to the actual kidneys, and there's a few other Chinese formulas we can talk about, or I could put in the show notes, that

If you cleanse the kidneys of the infections and the bladder infections or the kidney stones, any old UTI, you will supply enough energy to that kidney to help you process your fears. So we're like, you mean it can help with fears? It can help you with maybe handling your higher amounts of stress? Yes. One of the biggest things that we forget is that the adrenal glands sit on top of the kidneys.

And in the Western medicine world, we do separate them. We say the kidneys and the adrenal glands are two separate organs. The Chinese medicine world sees them as one big unit. The kidneys have the adrenal glands sitting right on top of them. The kidneys are a very cooling organ. It's a yin organ, a very cooling, solid organ.

The adrenal glands is a fire organ. It produces a lot of energy. It produces the DHEA. It produces the cortisol and the adrenaline. It helps us produce that fire in our bodies to help us run from a problem, fight from a problem, handle our problems. But the kidney's job is to help maintain balance.

The kidneys rule the night. The heart rules the day. It's a very strong organ. But one of the biggest things that people forget is that when you ground, when you get on the grounding sheets, when you put on the grounding shoes or you put your feet out in the dirt, you're supposed to be pulling those ions up through your feet and up into the body. And where do they travel? Up the kidney meridian, up to your kidneys because they're battery packs.

And your kidneys are battery packs and they're there to send energy up to the heart during the day to give you lots of energy throughout the day. But if your adrenal glands are sitting on top of the kidneys and they are chugging along,

And you and I are just wearing them out every day, producing high amounts of cortisol and adrenaline to fight our problems, going to a job we may not like the best, maybe dealing with some people out there we may not really enjoy to be around. And that wears out the adrenal glands and it eventually wears out the kidneys. The kidneys get tired. They can't filter right. They let the infections come in and the infections start to build up and then it starts to pass down to the bladder.

This is just one aspect of it. Now, I know it's a lot to talk about anxiety, but I want you to know that when you're constantly going through a fear or a stressful situation, you're wearing your kidneys and adrenal glands out. Now, if they're strong enough, you could handle it. If you had super strong adrenal glands, super strong kidneys, and they were really healthy, you could handle a heavy amount of stress.

But if we don't nourish them with the uva ursi or the dandelion or maybe cranberry, if we don't do enough grounding or being outside, that in itself will allow these fears to be processed inefficiently throughout the adrenal glands and the kidneys. This allows you to be in a weakened state and your anxiety will bloom. You will be more anxious.

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or you recognize you have tight hip flexors or tight hips or cramps on the calves or plantar fasciitis or cramping feet, if you have teeth that are a little bit gray or translucent, they get a little bit clear. Literally, your teeth do, which is another sign of kidney issues. I didn't mean to mention that. If you see that, is it as easy as recognizing that and helping your body clear the kidneys to help you with your anxiety? In my opinion, yes, it's easy.

It's as easy as noticing those things, but taking these steps to help clean out the kidneys, which will help you with your anxiety. In fact, I've seen individuals that have had anxiety clear to almost 60 to 70% just by healing up their kidneys. They had the energy and the chi to actually handle and process their problems. Do I say it clears everything about anxiety? No. But I have had patients that have come in and tell me they had no more anxiety. None. After they cleaned their kidneys out and their

bladder out of infections, literally, of parasitic infections and bacterial infections through testing, through urinalysis, through different types of forms of testing to find out if they had these types of infections and their anxiety leaves. So please, for anxiety, work on clearing old kidney or bladder infections. That's the mechanism. Use those herbs. Check into those herbs. One of the other organs I really want you to look into if you have anxiety is to look for chronic stomach problems.

I'm going to go through this a little quicker so I don't draw it out too much. But the stomach and the spleen and the pancreas are the organs that are right below your sternum. The stomach and the spleen and the pancreas are all sitting together. The stomach catches your food, starts to digest it with the acids. The spleen is sitting on the side of the stomach. It produces certain types of enzymes to help you break down certain types of sugars and some fats.

Your pancreas is sitting right behind the spleen. They're all in one little area, and that pancreas is pumping in pancreatic enzymes into your stomach to help you break down lots of sugars and some fat, some lipase. And these juices are in the stomach churning to create liquid food to go down into your small intestine. So then you can pull all the nutrients out of your liquid food and into your bloodstream down in the small intestine.

I've personally suffered from stomach anxiety because I had a stomach surgery in 2017 and I had a ruptured stomach ulcer without me knowing it. And they said I almost died. And I did. Almost died. I'm not getting sympathy for it. I'm asking you guys to look into your past and look into your stomach and look at anxiety. My stomach was always tight because I was always working towards a goal, but I was always keeping my diaphragm very tight and

where I could not breathe well, and my stomach was pushed up into my diaphragm. Do you guys have that? I want you, don't do it while you're driving, but mentally raise a hand and say, that's what I do. I breathe through my chest, up into my chest. My stomach's always tight. I feel like I'm always very tight on my abdomen, and I just want to be able to stretch my back, let my stomach loose, breathe through my stomach. And if you do that and you're super tight in your stomach right now, you know you have a tight diaphragm and stomach.

You know your stomach is balled up and that spleen and pancreas are balled up too, and they're not going to put acids or digestive juices in your stomach to help you digest food properly. So then, the food that does come down the pipe or any type of micro that's coming down the esophagus in your stomach does not get digested or eaten away properly. Undigested food leads to leaky gut. It also leads to...

like parasites and bacteria, even some viral infections that are passed down through the esophagus to get into the bloodstream easier. So you have a tight stomach. I did. I was taking all the right supplements, but I would have undigested foods in my bowel movements at time, and I'd always had a sour stomach. I had ulcers when I was a kid, but this one basically took the bait in fisherman's terms. But the thing that got me was this. When we talk about anxiety, I had...

certain signs and symptoms. I had the acidic stomach right underneath the sternum, tight stomach like I just talked about, but there are a few signs and symptoms I want you to look at. In the face, the stomach radiance starts right underneath the eye, and that is around the sinus gland. Sometimes people have breakouts or pimples right around their upper cheek. Sometimes they have chronic sinus issues. Do you have chronic sinus issues? Also, around the mouth and

Any chapped lips, chapped skin, breakouts around the mouth, literally around the mouth, or puffy red lips that come up all of a sudden, chapped lips. I've seen it in my patients many times. If you have just some of those common signs and symptoms or even pimples on the corners of the eyes, those are indications that the stomach chi, the spleen chi, the energy around the pancreas, around that whole area is deficient or blocked.

When you take a note of that, maybe you have some sinus congestion, the throat congestion, because that stomach one point right here is basically blocked. And you start to correlate it saying, well, yeah, I do have some anxiety and I have a tight stomach and I have a tight abdomen. Those are the signs and symptoms I probably wanted to pay attention more to before I had my surgery.

And my doctor said that all your blood work looks great, Chris. Everything looks really tip-top shape because you're taking the right supplements. But he says, do you work too much or do you push yourself too hard, almost like a type A? Yes. And he goes, you worry too much. And the emotions of the spleen and stomach in Chinese medicine are dealing with worry and pensiveness. It's dissociated with the color yellow.

Now, when I say worry and pensiveness, one of the main jobs of the spleen and stomach is its association with earth element energy. And earth element energy is just what it sounds like. It's earthy. It's something you put your feet in, something you put your roots in. It's the energy of the body. The earth element energy of the body is what you sink your feet into to feel stable and feel secure. It's where all other elements reside.

The fire element, the mountains, which are the metal, the water, which is the sea. It's in the earth. You have the wood elements, which are the trees. Dig themselves into the earth. The earth element aspect of you is to be a comfort and a strength and a support to everybody else. Do you worry or have anxiety or fear that you cannot be the stability or the comfort or the support of somebody else?

At all times. Do you feel that you have to be on all the time? That you have to be there for somebody all the time and always be supportive? That's what I was doing. I was pushing myself to keep going so I could be there for everybody else, especially some of my family members. And I worked and I worked and I worked to consistently always be there for somebody or even at work and always be there for the patient or always be there for the client and always do my best to never let anybody down. But that instinctively told my stomach that

and my spleen certain messages. And the messages were reduce acid, don't dissolve food properly because we're going to put them into the brain. The blood's going to the brain at the extremities to run from the problem or fight or think about it. So the digestive tract starts to get a little slower, get moving a little bit sluggish.

You start having digestive issues. You start having these infections build up in the stomach. You start to have this belief and chronic belief that I had to be there for everybody else and never there for myself. And then it actually tells your immune system to decrease its activity in the body because everybody else and what they think is more important than what I feel. So anxiety develops when I stop taking care of myself. And when you start taking care – stop taking care of yourself.

Your body will respond with anxiety because you have to survive in order to help other people. So the main thing you want to do, which is take care of other people, is threatened because of what you're doing. So one of the main ways in the stomach meridian is to pay attention to digestive issues that are in the upper area. You want to nourish the stomach and spleen and pancreas.

To send a signal back through your spinal cord up to your brain saying, hey, this area is nourished. So I want the brain to take full attention to the stomach and spleen. Full attention. Start mending it so that the brain will recognize what's going on. And that is a very cool thing, right? We train our bodies through programming, through literal programming.

Everyday life being there for other people always working hard working late going full force Running all these errands while doing a full-time job taking care of your family You do teach your body through your actions and laid down new neural networks and neurology and nerves in your brain Because you're living that life so your brain gets used to this program and runs on automatic and we literally adapt to that programming we literally forget

Or this is how I'd like to say it this way. We are telling our stomachs to shut down, our spleen to shut down because we have a program running by. So we want to nourish that organ that's been cold and not been communicating with the brain and saying, hey, we do have some life down here. And the brain goes, OK, OK, there's something going on down there. Oh, yeah, we do need to be nourished. We do need to eat. We need to sit down and have a meal.

We do need to send out white blood cells to the rest of the body to help heal. We do need to create red blood cells. We do need to have proper blood sugar by supporting the pancreas. It's a reminder. So if you're anxious, we want to wake up and nourish the stomach and spleen. All that to say, that's what we need to do. So I always say, look for any upper digestive issues, such as E. coli, H. pylori, salmonella, chronic old strep in the throat that sunk down into your stomach, old staph,

You can look at chronic Lyme. You can have chronic parasites. Yes, parasites like flukes. I had one patient who had chronic anxiety after her husband passed, unfortunately. And she had it for eight years. And I'm not tapping myself on the back or patting myself on the back. She had it for eight years. We found chronic, in my opinion, just from her blood work and through some of the Chinese medicine pulse points.

Through blood work and fecal testing, I found heavy amounts of evidence of E. coli and some salmonella. And I think that housed a lot of infections in the gallbladder and spleen and around the stomach. So we started to flush those and she had a small rash that broke out. But after she got done with that, she says, man, 70% of my anxiety went away when I cleared out the old E. coli and salmonella. We couldn't find any more signals that way. So we started flushing with herbs.

The kicker was this. She told me after we started to do that, I said, we're softening the body up. I think there's some parasites in there. It's only upper digestive area around your gallbladder, your spleen, your stomach. Let's clean it out. So I started giving her some heavier herbs gently and cleansed her. And she said, man, about a week, two weeks ago, you would not believe this. I was in and I forgot. I think she was traveling, maybe California. She goes, I was having a meal and I

I felt this urge that I had to go to the bathroom. So she goes, I had to hurry up and get going. I went back to the hotel, I believe, and my stomach was just bugging me. I felt the cramping. I felt something moving through me. I knew something was going to come out. And she told me that she released the longest parasite. She said it was along the whole length of the bowl, the water in the bowl. And of course, she took a picture of it. And she says, you know what? She goes, I was surprised, but I wasn't. I almost got so grossed out. But she goes,

It was a relief to see it out. And she says, but one of the craziest things was this. I've had no anxiety since that time. None. And I've had it. I had less when we got rid of the E. coli and salmonella. She goes, but I've had none since we got rid of that. The infections build themselves up in certain areas. And it's because those organs can get damaged and they get tired and the organs need to speak to the body and they need to be nourished with the body. So we had to wake them up.

So cleansing her upper digestion helped with her anxiety. For stomach, there's a few herbs I really like. I think some, I'll give you the most common. I really do like Malia. Malia Supreme is Neem, N-E-E-M, Malia Supreme. I really do love Morinda. Morinda Supreme is one of my favorites. It is Noni. Those two are my top two I really do love with digestion. And if we want to get soothing, we can look at Slippery Elm.

aloe vera, chlorophyll, and licorice root. Marshmallow root is really good too. You can look at all of these. These are really good alternatives to help nourish and heal the stomach. And I'm guaranteed there's good Western European and even Native American remedies to help with the stomach. But if you find herbals and combinations that help heal the stomach lining and help nourish it, wake that area up. And then we use things like the malia,

or the Morinda Supreme from Supreme Nutrition Products, and start nourishing the stomach and cleaning those infections out, you'll start to see your anxiety start to release. You'll start to see that the emotional work, the counseling, the therapy, and the word therapy you do actually does really well, and even your EMDR. So I want all of you guys out there, if you have a chronic anxiety, this could possibly be a podcast that's just about anxiety, but I want you guys to delve deep and to take this seriously.

So guys, if you have any questions or extra questions or comments, please send them in the comment section. I hope this helps you guys out. I'm really glad I got to spend time with you guys. I hope that you guys have a blessed day. Wherever you're at, we're thankful for you. So I'm Dr. Chris Motley here with the Ancient Health Podcast. Until the next time, have a great day. Be well.

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Remember, true health is about balance, mind, body, and spirit. So stay tuned for more episodes where we continue to explore how ancient wisdom and modern science can work together to help you thrive. Here's to your health, balance, and well-being. I'm Dr. Chris Motley, and I look forward to our next episode together.