394: Anger & Your Liver: A TCM Guide to Emotional Clarity
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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 where East meets West. I'm your host Dr. Chris Motley and today I want to talk about the liver and anger. Do you suffer from getting angry too quick? Do you get a little frustrated? Do you find yourself snapping at people and you ask yourself, why did I do that? Why am I so angry? Well, it could be the time of year. Why? Because in Chinese medicine...

The springtime is associated with the element of the woods because they're growing, the trees are blooming. It's associated with the color chlorophyll, the color of bile, which is green. So this in turn is related to the organs of the liver and the gallbladder. This is the time of year when the liver and the gallbladder are having the highest amount of energy and chi flow set apart from the other organs.

to help with its metabolic functions. Why? Because the liver helps you grow and get stronger. It produces tendons and ligaments. It uses creatine to create better muscles. It helps you with new cholesterol development, new hormones. It helps you with connective tissue. It also is highly related to the eyes in Chinese medicine. It's there to help your eyes feel better, function better. All this is happening within your liver

And it's transferred down to the gallbladder in the form of bile. So this is a season. This is why in Chinese medicine, they recommend that you do diets or certain types of food that have more greenery. Like I suggest enzymatic juices, green juices, because they can help with the function of the liver. Now, the reason I wanted to talk about this is because I have patients that

Tell me that as I get older, they'll say things such as, Doc, I find myself getting a little more cranky. And I never would have told anybody this, but in my life, I find myself as I get older saying,

I don't really want to mince words. Does anybody out there feel the same way? I always say this, don't do this while you're driving, but you can raise your hand and go, at times I find myself just want to get directly to the point. I don't want to mince words. I am a little too tired. I don't feel like being around too many people. I'm getting a little angry, cranky, feisty, stubborn. Do you find yourself like that?

I do. And I'm not going to hide it. And I'm glad I'm like that. Why? Because look at my face. I'm a wood element. I'm straight. I'm thin. I have that tree root appearance. However, all of us have a portion of the wood element within them. This is a season where everybody in the world feels the chi and the energy within their liver. And what that means is we need to nourish the liver and the gallbladder during especially the spring season.

Why? Let's reiterate. Because it helps you with all your major metabolic functions. If your liver is not clean, if it's dirty and toxic, you're going to feel angry. The Chinese medicine overview is that the liver governs the smooth flow of qi. It helps with the movement of qi within the blood. Now, the liver, if you guys can imagine this, just remember this, your liver is a huge sponge. It stores blood.

That's what happens at night. Imagine that you're going through your day, running, gunning, doing your thing. And at night, your body will store the blood in your liver like a huge sponge. Sponge, you hear that? Sponge. And your body will clean up your blood while you sleep. Your blood goes into your liver. So it pulls it away from your extremities and it pulls it away from everything else to get into your liver to clean it so that it can be distributed the next day so you have clean blood running through your system.

Now, when this is occurring, this is happening nightly. But all organ systems have a special amount of energy going to them at particular times of year. So this is that time of year for the springtime, the liver, the wood element. Now, many of us, when I talk and tease about us being angry or emotional or getting frustrated or resentful, I know we can laugh about that and we can joke about it.

But what that means is in Chinese medicine is that your liver qi, your liver qi is stagnated. So you remember I just told you that the liver stores blood. The blood in Western medicine and in Chinese medicine has easily been identified to transmit electrical signals through your blood. That's what hemoglobin do. That's what blood cells do. It's been shown that they carry electrical polarity. Literally electricity is running through your blood.

It's transferring down through the blood. So whenever your blood is flowing smoothly, your electrical chi is flowing. They say that blood is the physical form of chi in your body because it has electricity running through it. Your red blood cells have a north and south pole. They run like a battery. I'm not trying to sound fancy. I just want you guys to know that there is energy within your liver.

And if your liver is working smoothly, then your blood is smooth. It's clean. It's transferring electricity. That's why it says it governs smooth qi. Now, they say in Chinese medicine, if your liver is stagnated, which means congested and gunky, it's like an oil filter that has a caked up oil on the inside, it will create irritability and mood swings. It will create PMS symptoms, make them worse in women.

Do you get PMS symptoms? Do you feel like you have cramps? Do you have bloating when you have your cycle? If you do, liver stagnation is something you have to look at. Do you have digestive issues? Chronic bloating, diarrhea, constipation. Many of us do. The liver is always going to be involved. Here's another one for you. Do you get tension headaches, tight neck and shoulders? If you say yes with all these other symptoms,

types of signals then if you're looking here on the video the gallbladder meridian runs right on the corner of the eye around the ear and it goes right down the back or the side of the neck through the upper trap down into the front shoulder into the front peg and it goes down into the side through the hip down through the knee all the way down the side of the leg into the ankle and foot it will create tension headaches neck pain shoulder pain TMJ issues

Knee pain, ankle popping, foot cramps on the outside of the edge of the foot. You can get migraines, red eyes, hazy vision, dizziness. It could even lead to high blood pressure. My whole family has that because we have liver and gallbladder issues. And at night, between the hours of 11 to 1 a.m.,

That's the time of the gallbladder restoration. And then between the hours of 1 a.m. to 3 a.m., your liver has got that blood pulling up to cleaning out and helping it to break down, helping to rebalance your blood sugar, helping you make better cortisol for the next day. So you could have sleepless nights and insomnia. Now this sounds like a lot, but it's an amazing thing that our bodies, one organ, can do so much. Now, why am I telling you all this? I want you to know that all these...

are signs and symptoms that the liver has some stagnation. But I also want to talk about not only these signs and symptoms because of dirty blood, but when we talk about irritability, I want us to go into, first of all, let's talk about the Western medicine aspect. One of the fancy terms you're going to hear about people talking about, you hear a lot of people online, you hear like Dr. Gary Brekka, there's a few other docs always talk about methylation.

And I've been studying methylation for a long time, and I'm so impressed with this whole process. My friend Dr. Jay Dunn, we're going to do a podcast with her actually today, later on, and she is a wizard at methylation. And when she first talked to me about this, she would discuss how the small cellular cycles in your body have such precise cycles and systems that they make big effects on the body. And small...

deviations or deficiencies in certain minerals and vitamins can alter the cell cycles and cause the problems that we see ADHD ADD OCD hyperthyroidism diabetes type 1 type 2 the list goes on and on all by learning methylation cycles how do your cells cycles work with nutrients with vitamins with herbs and with environmental stress why is this important when we talk about anger

Your liver is primarily one of the main organs that helps you with this methylation. Listen to me. The liver is one of the main organs that helps you with methylation. Methylation has to do with a carbon and three hydrogens. It's carbon and hydrogen combination called methyl groups. But what that means is one of the main things that this whole area of the body does is help you produce a little molecule known as SAMe. SAMe is...

is a result of the MTHFR and the MTRR genes working properly. Do you know if you have MTHFR? If you do and you say, yes, I know I have it, what does it really mean? One of the main things it helps you do is produce SAMe. It's a methyl donor. It gives a carbon and hydrogen to certain pathways and cycles in your body so it works perfectly. So it contributes a methyl group, carbon and three hydrogens. Okay, so follow me. So that's what your liver is doing. It's producing SAMe.

Methyl groups are vital to your overall detoxification, your muscle building, your body building, your tendons, your ligaments, your vision, your brain. Methyl groups give your body a lot to work with. They are building blocks. Okay. Liver is producing the SAMe. SAMe then helps activate a little enzyme known as HNMT. HNMT. What does that mean? It helps you break down histamine.

Do you have high histamine in your body? And if so, what does histamine do? It helps wake you up in the morning. That's what it's supposed to do. But histamine signals to certain cells to create, like mast cells, to release certain chemicals that bring in the red blood cells to help heal and eat up old tissue and eat up any type of toxin or debris. It also calls in certain white blood cells. Histamine does.

But if histamine is always active in your blood, what is it consistently doing? It's sending a telephone call out to all your red blood cells to come clean up some foreign object or invader in some of your white blood cells. Does that make sense? It's always pulling them in. It's always keeping them active. Your histamine, if it's broken down properly, will eventually be urinated out.

But if you have high histamine in your blood, I always get seasonal allergies in the springtime. You guys hearing this? I get high allergy reaction. I keep having stuffy nose, congestion, itchy eyes, itchy ears, congestion in the throat. That means your histamine is staying on high alert. It's not being broken down, which means, i.e., your liver is not processing it out.

Which means if you're always in a high histamine state, that means your body's always irritated. It's always agitated. It's always going to be frustrated because you are in a high inflammatory state. That's why Chinese medicine says that the liver has to do with anger because you're in a high histamine inflammatory agitated state.

When your body is always in awareness, does that make sense? You are always on high alert like we talked about. Then if you associate it with the emotions and high alert is a key word I want you to focus in on. That means there's so many options. You're always looking over your shoulder. You're always on the lookout, right?

So there's lots of things going on. You're looking around everywhere. Your body is doing it internally in the blood and that's what will happen on in your psychological brain too according to Chinese medicine. The liver and gallbladder have to do with having too many options, too many things going on and then you get resentful and frustrated and irritated because there's too many things going on at the same time. Why? Because it's happening in your blood.

When you break it down that way, it's not that complicated, is it? It's not even that far-fetched. You're like, yep, I keep getting seasonal allergies. I keep getting this issue. I'm really feeling agitated all the time. My doctor does say that I have high histamine in my blood, and I've noticed that I snap at the kids quicker. I know that my partner gets the brunt of it because I'm so irritated. The littlest thing that they do just gets on my everlasting nerve, and I'm just going to be like, yo, stop it.

It's because there's irritation inside. You know why? I don't pick on you. I pick it on myself. It happens to me. I'm getting very, very adamant about this because when you get the red face, eye issues, the dizziness, we're looking at stagnated, dirty blood. It's no fault of our own. So when we look at the way that your liver does not mean to, but it's creating basically all this irritation,

It is a call for us in the springtime season and every season is to continue to work on cleansing our liver. We have to move the liver cheat. Now, I'm not saying that you have to go out and do a liver cleanse consistently. Some people love to do them. What I am saying is we have to make sure that we get the electricity and the blood to consistently move properly throughout the liver daily. Daily. Here are a few examples.

of what could stagnate your liver. High sugar intake, high refined sugars. Rancid oils in your food, seed oils. They're very popular, but they've been talking about them for years. Rancid seed oils, refined sugars, grains that are in high amounts because they can actually cause stickiness within your liver if you eat too many processed grains. I allergy

environments. Yes. Can high pollen areas, high mold areas, moldy houses cause it? Yes. Chronic diseases that infect the liver, i.e. a Lyme infection, hepatitis viruses, Epstein-Barr virus, herpetic viruses. These are what can get into the liver. So it's consistent for us to think that we have to keep our liver, chi, and blood flowing properly.

If you start to work on just basically cleaning the liver. Now, I'm not talking about going to this really deep, complicated methylation process. What I am saying is that we need to work on just simple cleansing mechanisms of the liver. This will help you, I promise you, with liver anger. You won't snap back as quickly. You won't get as irritated or agitated. You'll stay calm longer. When you go to...

You know, when you're on the plane and a kid's crying, nothing against kids crying in the plane, but you won't get as agitated as easily. Watch, I'm telling you, it's what I get told in the office all the time. But there are certain lifestyle practices that we want to look into. Now, there's a few things that I would say we should start off on. Simple practice such as acupressure. Now, I will say with acupressure, there's a couple areas I really love.

On your toe between, if you can see here, between in the big toe, between the big toe and the second toe, in that little webbing right there, it's called liver three. If you press on each toe between those, do it for 30 to 40 seconds. I want you guys to do that tonight when you're sitting at home, if you're watching TV or some YouTube, press that area between your big toe and the second toe in the web. The next spot's going up to your thumb, between the webbing of your thumb and your index finger, in the web on the outside, right here, it's called LI4, large intestine four.

And one of my favorite points that I use is called gallbladder 34. And it's right on the outside of the knee, right below the knee, like on the outside edge, like right on the outside of the knee. If you can imagine just reaching right below the outside portion of your knee and just rubbing around the joint of the knee, you're going to find a little pressure point called the gallbladder 34. Both sides, two times a day.

45 seconds, 30 to 45 seconds at a time. You do that enough, you're going to stimulate electricity through your liver and your gallbladder. You'll start noticing that your bowel movements will get more frequent. You'll have more mucus coming out and more bile coming out. But eventually you're going to start cleaning out the liver and gallbladder just by using acupressure.

I love doing it. Don't go crazy on it though. I'm going to let you listen to me. If you start saying, I'll rub the points out for five minutes, you're going to have a gallbladder and liver flush and you're not going to like it. So don't go crazy. Just, just follow what I ask. Please just be gentle and kind to your body. Um, I think that, and my next thing is doing things to help with suppressed emotions. These are things you can do at home. I would do breath work.

I'm not an expert at breathwork. I know many people who do it, but I say learn breathwork. You go on YouTube, you can learn about breathwork, how to release the liver and gallbladder because that liver is right below your diaphragm. You need to pump your diaphragm. Breathe through your stomach so you stimulate the liver and the gallbladder. Breathwork is awesome. You can even do journaling. Write out your suppressed anger. Write out why you're angry. Don't be afraid to feel your anger.

Ask your body at night. This is so – you guys are thinking I'm woo anyway probably. But if at night you're sitting there and you're contemplating, if you're going to a breath work, talk to your organs. This is a big thing in Chinese medicine. Connect to your liver and your gallbladder and then try to see if you can find out why you're angry and see what pops into your head. Journal about it. Write it down. Not to perpetuate or increase the anger.

But to bring to awareness while you're angry and then be open and surrendering to the fact that your body needs to process it. What needs to be done is it needs to be processed so I heal. How do you process it? That's why you have to do the journaling. You don't have to do journaling, but you can do journaling and help talk to your organs. Because once it comes to the forefront of your brain, you're going to find ways like what could I do to help with this? Now, one of the best ways I like to do is to use certain herbs.

One of my favorites is Xiaoyosan. I can't say it that well, but it's X-I-A-O-S-A-N. And it's a formula that's there for mood, for stress, for PMS, for liver. Also, I love Milk Thistle. Dandelion's really good. Those are the basic ones for the physical liver issues. Dandelion Milk Thistle.

And I love from Supreme Nutrition products, Mimosa Pudica. Mimosa will help clean the liver. Kamu, which is like a berry. It's a powdered berry that helps with lots of vitamin C and antioxidants and also Japanese knotweed. It cleans the mucus. So Japanese knotweed or Kamu or Mimosa Pudica.

These are the ways that you can help stimulate. So we're going to do it about the emotions. Now, let me not forget, you can try EFT tapping too. Look into EFT, emotional freedom technique tapping, to help with tapping techniques on acupressure points for your anger. Do you do all these? No. Pick one thing that resonates with you and do it. But I'm going to tell you, if you can, tapping helped me tremendously. Breath work, just talking to my body and asking what was going on with my anger was helping. And then I added the herbs in.

The food selection, though, in Chinese medicine is that you would add in bitter, sour types of foods in the spring. So the bitter, sour foods can be like the leafy green vegetables. I would steam them.

Anything that has a green color, they even say green sour apples are really good, things with a green tint to them. But you want to find the foods or even some good green juices that can go in there and match the color of the green to go flush. So you always find a good food source or vegetable or fruit that has a green in color and that has a very detoxive characteristic about it. Remember, you want to reduce your alcohol. You want to reduce greasy foods.

You want to reduce those fatty, creamy foods. Like, I mean, who doesn't like to go to a Mexican restaurant and get queso? I mean, who doesn't? I mean, it's delicious. It's scrumptious. You hear my word scrumptious? But some of you guys are saying maybe you don't like it. But now I think about it, I can't do it. My body, my liver is like, don't do that. It's too hard on it. So if you have rich, creamy foods, you got to reduce it, okay? One of the other things I would suggest too is that as you start to reduce these foods...

and you start to take the herbs, is that you can also use red light therapy. I would say red light sauna are really good if you have one or find a place. I love sunlight sauna. You know, I love sunlight and they didn't shout out to them. They have great saunas, but red light saunas, infrared saunas are really good for the liver. And I want you guys to see this because

I do. I really do. I do. I do a red infrared sauna every single day. I take things to help with my liver methylation. I'm literally going to go fly down to see my friend, Dr. Miller, down in Dallas. And she does my methylation check. She checks all the nutrients I need in a combination to help my liver to flush properly. And I'm going to say this. If I didn't have my liver pathways cleaned out, it would have been very hard for me to get rid of Lyme disease. It would have been really hard for me to get rid of parasites and excessive mold.

So you don't have to do every single thing I say or anything. I just want you to find these simple processes. Go through them and then study liver methylation.

Study that. Study genetics. I'm serious. It's really fascinating. I'm not saying you have to go do all of it. I'm saying, but liver cheese stagnation. Learn about your liver. How many processes it helps you with in your body. Look into like MaxGen, M-A-X-G-E-N, or MyHappyGenes. These are products they tell you about. They have good information on the website. It tells you about how your body is supposed to process the nutrients to help with your liver. But these basic things I told you are some simple things you can do.

It'll help your liver clean up on its own just by taking some of these herbs and following these steps. And one of the biggest things you can notice is that your histamine will reduce and your emotions will get less angry. There's one other one I can talk about. Dehist is one. There's histazine. They're histamine-reducing herbs. You can look into those as well. But you know what they're trying to do is that they are using the herbs and the combinations to help with histamine breakdown, HNMT. That's what they're designed to do. The people who formulate it know it.

That's why it's important to help you with your anger. So if you follow some of these basic procedures, I want you to check out if you can do some of them without overloading yourself. And why this is so important, and I'll wrap up with this, is that I've had patients that have had really bad allergies before.

allergies to the point where they dreaded going out in the springtime and even towards the summer times and even late fall because they had such bad allergies. It would break out in skin eruptions, some hives, some forms of, you know, eczema. Some of them would say it was dermatitis. And they in themselves, the patient would not even feel that they had anger issues. Now this is important. But when I analyzed them, the first thing that I would check is that

the energy and the qi around the liver was very stagnated. And when I check, they call it in frequency medicine, you check the biofield, you check the distance that the biofield off the liver has a distress signal. You can literally check the distress signal off the biofield on the body. And when I was checking it, doing some of the pulse points, checking Chinese medicine, it was events that occurred seven to eight years ago, more than likely. That was my estimation.

And the patient's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, this happened. This little event happened in my life seven years ago. The funny thing was they remembered exactly right when I said seven years. They knew it. They didn't even have to guess. This happened. Why? They were storing it. And many of you out there know when something made you angry. Now, I don't like to focus on one trauma and saying this is the only thing that made you angry. What I am saying is it created a program at that particular time in their life.

That's stored. And it was overwhelming to their system. And it made them angry. Or they felt the anger and the resentment and frustration. And it trapped in their liver. And their liver's function reduced, causing high histamine. That's what it does. Causing all the red itchy skin, the eyes and stuff. So then, I will use herbs and acupressure points. But the attempt is this. To get the liver chi to flow.

So that it brings more awareness to the person internally. And they go back to seven years ago. And they talk to themselves seven years ago. And they try to resolve. That's why I like EFT tapping. Or EMDR. Or neurofeedback. You go and find additional therapies if you need it. To help bring to awareness. Why? Because any emotion that gets brought to awareness. And you guys know this.

will be processed through the prefrontal cortex. You want it to process out of your body. If you process it, your body says, I'm in a safe spot now. I'm not there anymore. In other words, then your liver will stop cramming up the histamine. It'll stop clogging up with histamine. It'll let it process out because it's functioning properly now. That's the importance of knowing this. I hope this wasn't overwhelming. Probably was. But I want it to be very, you know, just easy to, you know, access. So in the show notes, remember,

We want you to know that anger isn't bad. It's a messenger. And when you understand the link it has to the liver, you can transform it. Instead of it being something that you're upset about, it's not bad. It's literally going to be there to give you more clarity, more flow. It helps you have more action in your life, helps with more growth. So the faster you identify your anger...

and accept that there's anger and start to resolve it, the quicker you're going to get clarity, growth, and more action. That's the key. We want you to grow. It's the wood element. It's springtime. Grow. Get stronger. Get bigger. I want you guys to make sure that you listen and talk with your liver and your gallbladder. It sounds a bit out there, but I'm telling you, please learn how to stay quiet and talk to your organs.

Okay, I want you guys to check out the resources on drmotley.com. I want you to also like and subscribe if you like this kind of information. Like and subscribe to the podcast. If you have anybody that has anger issues, send this to them. Forward it over to them. Hit the bell so that you get reminded anytime a new podcast comes out. And you're going to have in the show notes, we're going to talk about a few of the herbs we talked about today. We're going to talk about some of the therapies, so check it out. And guys, we're really thankful that you guys listened to our podcast today.

We're going to discuss this on the membership. A lot of times what we do is we take the information from here and we deep dive into it at the membership. We do it every single week. We do a live Q&A.

And it's a membership that I really love doing. It's a small knit community. It grows, but we want it to be where people are really, really in like community, where people around each other that really have like-mindedness. And it's a good place of just healing and happiness, in my opinion. We have a great time. All right, guys. Okay. So let's clean out that liver. Let's get rid of some of this anger. Let's process it out. So until the next time, from all of us here at the Angel Health Podcast, hope you have a great day. Take it easy. Talk soon.

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Thank you for joining us today on the Ancient Health Podcast. We hope you've gained valuable insights into the harmony between Eastern and Western medicine. If you've enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe, share, and leave us a review.

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.