Traditional Chinese Medicine World Foundation

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Anxiety

There is a distinct difference in the treatment approaches to anxiety in terms of Western and Eastern medicine. In the West, one approach is to medicate the person so they do not feel the anxiety; another is to "talk it through" in order to gain some kind of psychological understanding for the basis of the emotion. From the perspective of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), anxiety is the mind creating "wrong" thinking. Your mind receives information from the external world and then you process it, based on what you know from your past. You try to analyze what will happen in the future and your limited knowledge and narrowed vision cause you to see something you don't want to see. You create this anxiety because your vision of the future does not match your wish. There's a difference between how you want to see things and what actually is. In essence, all religions try to teach you how to see things differently. Yet it is difficult because we cannot understand the new; our understanding is based on the old, the past, what we already know—the old "databanks." This is the basic Eastern concept of what causes anxiety.

There are fundamentally two approaches to treating anxiety. One treats the symptoms; one treats the root cause of the problem. When you treat just the symptoms, the person suffering anxiety doesn't have to change. There's a traditional Chinese saying that captures this approach: "You still walk your old path, constantly buying new shoes!" The individual still retains his or her old way of thinking.

Anxiety, itself, is invisible. It is something we create. Each person who has anxiety creates it and has it in a different way. The basic cause is not the same because each person receives information differently, their body processes information differently, and therefore, the response to the information is different and the outcome is different. In one way you can't really treat anxiety because it is of the mind—it's nothing, it's not tangible. Anxiety only shows up in the symptoms, so in a certain sense we can only treat the symptoms. For instance, high blood pressure or hypertension is a possible outcome of anxiety, it is not anxiety itself. It's just like bad weather: we cannot "treat" bad weather; we can only treat the side effects of damage caused by weather—by nature—like the body aches and congested head of a person who has been out in the freezing winter and has come down with a cold. Essentially, anxiety is just a concept. What anxiety really is, you cannot say. It's a person's "feeling," and this feeling will respond with different physical symptoms in each person.

It is important to know that from the TCM perspective every condition reveals which organ or organs is/are vulnerable. Each organ has related energy pathways called meridians, a related emotion, an associated taste and so on. From these "clues" the TCM practitioner can trace the path and progression of the health disturbance. In the case of anxiety, fear is generally a very strong component. This emotion is linked by Five-Element theory to the Kidney organ network. So the function of this organ needs to be restored to balance. Remember, a person with strong Kidney energy or Qi would never suffer anxiety.

So the first level of TCM treatment is to support the physical body so the body can process the symptoms caused by anxiety. Treatment should make the person stronger, because in order for the body to deal with the problem, you need energy. Making the body strong helps the individual feel calmer, because with anxiety the nervous system is affected. According to TCM, the Liver processes the flow of energy and emotion in the body. Therefore, TCM treats the Liver to allow it to function in a balanced way and to deal with the emotions more smoothly, so that the emotions and energy can flow freely. The Spleen function is also supported because the Spleen, in terms of Five-Element theory, is related to anxiety or worry. By treating these three organs together, the body is strengthened and it can then more easily deal with anxiety symptoms.

In terms of treating the root cause of anxiety, the answer rests with the person suffering the anxiety. He or she has to meditate—there has to be a spiritual effort. That's the second level of treatment. To really treat the root cause of the problem the person has to be willing to change from inside out instead of the outside in. All the treatment up to this point is from the outside in. And treatment from the outside in is never going to treat the root cause of the problem; it has to be from the inside out. This means the person has to change the way they see things, the way they react to things. That requires meditation; that requires a vision change—a change in perspective, so that they can see things in a different way. You come to see that good things are not always good; bad things are not always bad. Nothing's all black or white. Unless the person can change in this way, he or she will most likely always suffer anxiety.

TCM Tips for Healing

Throughout the ages, TCM practitioners have used a variety of healing modalities to address anxiety.