Things your body needs on emotional level *

Emotional health can be described as a emotional stability and absence of extreme emotions. In Chinese medicine, the five main emotions are each connected to one of the five elements. These are the pairings:

Anger - Wood
Joy (or lack of joy) - Fire
Worry - Earth
Sadness - Metal
Fear - Water

These emotions and their extremes are addressed successfully by removing weaknesses of organs that are associated with each element.

So to address anger and irritability, we start adjusting our lifestyle and our choices to provide Liver and Gallbladder organs with what they need. We provide more sour tasting foods that stimulate Liver and Gallbladder organs, we balance our activity levels (Liver and Gallbladder are in charge of action in life) - if we're too busy, we scale down. If we're living too slowly, we step up.

To continue addressing anger and irritability issues, we provide more connection to Nature, add walks in the park, spend time surounded by greenery (green is the color associated with Wood element), create some solitude if we were socially too busy or were engaging a lot with people at the time when anger and irritability started appearing.

Liver is a filter of blood so it gets to deal with all toxins we put into ourselves: drugs and medications, alcohol, coffee and caffeinated drinks including soda pop. None of these deliver natural ingredients to Liver and when pushed long enough, your Liver will become too weak to process these toxins efficiently. Worse, because many of these compounds are not find in nature, your Liver doesn't know what to do with them so it makes sense that it will store them instead of expelling them. This is one way to explain the "fatty Liver" disease.

Wood is a Yang element (compared to Earth, Metal or Water) so it is naturally on an aggressive side, providing qualities of action and self motivation. But modern life is already filled with reasons to act, be busy, go faster, better, bigger... so most of the time, your Liver Gallbladder pair actually need the opposite of action to balance themselves: some solitude, down time, a "nothing to accomplish" day.

Other four elements (and their organs) are the same in the sense that they govern and exaggerate the emotion associated with them. So addressing emotional problems is a process of providing physical "officials" with what they need.

When it comes to Western diagnosis of depression, in Chinese medicine it is treated by addressing Kidney and Bladder weaknesses and deficiencies. These two organs are usually associated with depression. Kidney is body's battery and when any battery gets low, statements like "i can't go on", "what's the point?" or "I give up" make a lot of sense.

Water organs need good (quality) sleep, low-sodium diet, daily aerobic activity and remembering to keep the soles of one's feet from getting cold. Practicing flexibility helps, mirroring water's ability to accommodate the shape of the vessel that holds it, choosing to be open to different outcomes and solutions rather then seeing things like "my way or the highway"...

While Depression could be seen as Yin condition with suicidal depression as it's extreme, anxiety and panic attacks are seen as a extreme Yang on the emotion scale. Like all Yang pathology, those are addressed by bringing comfort, slowing down activity and adjusting the goals and efforts to a more natural, more reasonable levels to give the body a chance to recover and recharge.

In both Yin and Yang emotional pathology (and all emotional issues), it is important to consider that none of our emotions can exist without the body - they all arise from the physical body and therefore can and should be addressed by improving physical body's health.

Finally, when dealing with extreme emotions, especially ones of a chronic nature, there are treatments and protocols in Five Element acupuncture that specifically address these conditions. These treatments are safe, have no side effects and should be considered as a (as close to a natural) option for treatment.