Emotional Health

Positive emotional health and emotional support for the mind and body is crucial. Everyday stress and tension are unfortunately a part of our modern lifestyle and can affect nearly every single person at some time in their life, and affect your mental and emotional health. While repetitive stresses are unhealthy, occasional stress is not necessarily a bad thing and can actually help a person to perform at their peak when pressured.

Emotional imbalances in the mind can be caused by underlying feelings of anxiety, depression or continual worry. This can cause you to experience reduced feelings of harmony, peace and well being to the detriment of your physical and emotional health. During times of increased emotional stress the brain sends signals to various systems in the body to help out. When the psychological and physical factors of tension/stress are felt, the body increases its release of certain hormones through the adrenal glands to compensate and protect the body.*

If these hormones continue to be released without sufficient periods of recovery, compromised vitality can result. Our physical body copes with stress in many different ways. A simply upset stomach can actually be caused by not stomaching something going on in your life. To make things worse, people often self-medicate in response to stress by using cigarettes, alcohol and other drugs or become addicted to prescription medications, and it can prove to be a downward spiral of imbalance and disharmony in the body.*

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), practitioners believe that emotional stress reduction can be achieved when the body and mind naturally returns to a state of healthy balance and harmony. It is believed that in order to achieve this, one needs to provide the body and mind with stress reducing activities like detoxification, adequate clean water, effective supplementation, healthy diet, exercise and other healthy and natural techniques that work to support the health of the mind.*

Some of these techniques that you can do right now to support emotional relaxation of the mind and body are: progressive relaxation exercises (like yoga, meditation, tai chi, and guided imagery), sound therapy like nature’s sounds (wind, rain, and ocean), music therapy and breathing exercises. All of these can help your body promote improved emotional health which can lead to an improved physical state of health as well.*