How stress effects the body according to Traditional Chinese Medicine
Whenever I ask my patients how their stress level are, the common answer I’ve been hearing is, “oh, normal”. I think it is safe to say that we all experience stress on a daily basis, however it shouldn’t be normal to live with an unhealthy level of stress. We needs to consider the long term affects of stress and the toll it takes on our body.
We might not be able to fill in all the blanks, but it’s easy to recognize the effects of stress as we experience them: sleep, appetite, energy levels, circulation, digestion, reproduction, and mood are all vulnerable to ups and downs when we’re stressed. If stress is bad enough, and goes on long enough, we can gain or lose weight, become angry or depressed, develop insomnia, irregular menses or other fertility issues, take up smoking or drinking, and feel exhausted.
Stress explained by Traditional Chinese Medicine
According to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), stress primarily affects your Liver. This Liver is, and is not, the same as your Western biomedical liver. It’s the same organ in your body, but what it is and what it does, are seen in such different terms by Traditional Chinese Medicine. TCM’s ideas about the Liver are good at explaining what stress does to our bodies in terms that relate to our experience. TCM therapies, such as acupuncture and herbal formulas, are excellent at relieving stress, and helping the body resist its effects.
The Liver does many things, but one of its major functions is to regulate all the energy traffic in your body. Just like an air-traffic controller, being your Liver is a high-stress job. When you get stressed, you get an energy traffic jam in your Liver. This in turn readily explains many of the common immediate and long-term effects of stress. Your body feels tired because your energy (or ‘Q'i’ in TCM) isn’t available — it’s stuck in traffic and can’t get to work. Moderate exercise is the best medicine to break up stagnant Qi, allowing your energy to circulate to warm your hands and feet, refresh your mind, and support your body overall.
In TCM, appetite and digestion are often affected by stress as well. This is because the Liver shares the thoracic cavity with the Spleen and Stomach. So when the trapped energy builds up in the Liver, it wants to vent — and the Spleen and Stomach are close neighbours and easy targets. The digestive process can then be slowed or interrupted (accompanied by bloating or constipation, or loss of appetite), or it can cause irritation that moves everything through too quickly (bloating, frequent bowel movements or even loose stools or diarrhea). Some people experience reflux, nausea, or even vomiting with stress, because the Liver’s attack has made the Stomach energy reverse its usual downward course. If the Liver is aggressive and persistent in its attacks, ulcers can form. With ongoing stress, the digestive functions weaken, resulting in lower energy levels, ‘brain fog’, impaired focus or memory, and/or weight loss or gain.
Sometimes the trapped Liver energy vents into a meridian, or energy channel. When this happens, the energy travels up the channel into the jaw, and expresses in grinding or clenching motions. These repeated movements can make neck and jaw muscles ache, cause wear on the temporo-mandibular joint (TMJ), damage teeth, and cause headaches.
What about sleep? The Liver also shares the thoracic cavity with the Heart, which is located higher than the Liver inside the chest. The Heart in TCM is the primary organ associated with sleep and calming the mind. When trapped energy persists long enough, this surge of energy disturbs the Heart. This is most likely to be noticed in the early hours during the night, when we wake up between 1-3 a.m., and have trouble falling back asleep because our thoughts are racing. Besides anxiety and restlessness, the stagnant energy that builds up can cause us to feel frustration, irritability, or anger.
Irregular menses are also an obvious sign of stagnant energy, according to TCM. This is because when energy gets stuck, blood can’t circulate freely. Stress affects reproduction because reproductive organs need a sufficient and consistent supply of energy and blood to maintain normal function. Continual interruption of the smooth flow of energy and blood makes it difficult for the body to carry out the complex routines involved in monthly cycles and can even be the root cause for painful periods.
When it comes to coping with stress, every little bit helps. For more severe forms of stress, however, moderate exercise and eating breakfast can only do so much. Fortunately, acupuncture, herbal therapies, or both together, are all excellent at breaking up the trapped energy caused by stress, and restoring normal circulation to organs that are feeling the effects of chronic fight-or-flight activation. For some people, the original stress is over, but their nervous systems have forgotten how to switch out of high gear. Acupuncture lowers your blood pressure and puts your nervous system in a state of rest-and-digest, which explains why you often feel sleepy and relaxed after a treatment (we call this the “Acu-high”). Acupuncture can help your body remember what ‘normal’ looks like and can help your body withstand the worst of the long-term effects of stress. If you need a reset, book a session and feel the effects of how acupuncture can help.