As 2024 comes to an end, it is important to take a pause and inventory the past year into the following categories: health (physical and mental), movement, and emotional well-being. Have you been able to reap the benefits of any changes you may have implemented this last year? Is your life moving in the direction you intended?
I know that for me, emotional well-being was the focus. With all the adjustments and loss of loved ones, my emotions needed front-and-center care.
I speak and teach on the importance of self-care. I give suggestions and outline daily eating plans to guide people to better physical health, but just as important is emotional health.
Emotional health care means taking the time to go inward and feel. We are taught in school to stop, drop, and roll if we are ever caught in a fire situation. In the same way, we need to stop, feel, and self-regulate when it comes to emotional health care. Identifying emotions vs anxiety is an important place to begin. They are related but are two distinct concepts.
Emotions are a broad spectrum of feelings, while anxiety is a specific type of emotional response focused on worry or fear about the future. Emotions can be triggered by a variety of events (positive or negative), while anxiety is almost always tied to perceived threats or uncertainty.
While both emotions and anxiety can trigger physical reactions, anxiety often includes more intense physical symptoms related to stress, for example, rapid heartbeat and shallow breathing.
Anxiety is a specific emotional experience often rooted in fear or uncertainty of things appearing real, while emotions encompass a much broader range of feelings that can arise from many different sources, usually triggered by past experiences. Anxiety can be a part of the broader emotional landscape but is typically more focused on future threats or worries.
Unfortunately, anxiety has become a syndrome in today’s society. Anxiety became a diagnosis in 1980 when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) introduced generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).
Both emotional reactions and anxiety attacks, can be stifling and keep you from living your best life. Macrobiotic living and lifestyle teach that the inner environment determines one’s outer expression. When pathology is out of balance and disease is present, we balance the imbalance. The physical imbalance will affect how one can calibrate emotions and anxiety. Emotions have been dealt with in talk therapy as far back as Freud, and today, we have more tools available to help settle the nervous system when emotions are triggered. Lifestyle and food choices can influence both dramatically.
It is interesting to observe that anxiety became more prominent around the same time high fructose corn syrup was allowed as a food additive. Just taking this one example of HFCS contaminating our food system, and there are many, including processed foods and gmos…(dont get me started)… that influence our physical and mental state negatively.
John Robbins’s 2001 book The Food Revolution depicts the steady decline of our food system. In my book, Controlling Crohn’s Disease: the Natural Way, published in 2002, I outline my health issues, mainly due to poor food quality, and how, by changing my food choices, I was able to reestablish my physical and emotional health.
Macrobiotics, the study of food energetics and eating to balance one’s health, emphasizes the importance of conscious eating and taking responsibility for choosing quality foods to support the best body functions.
This philosophy teaches awareness of how your inner self responds to the outer environment.Eating quality food and when and how you eat it becomes just as necessary for ultimate body function.In Chinese medicine, we learn that specific organ systems are activated during certain seasons.
In winter, the kidneys, adrenals, bladder, and sexual reproductive organs are activated to reboot and reset.Paying attention and respecting this process allows one to flow from one season to another without much physical and mental drama.
Kidney energy encompasses our daily vitality. It filters body fluids, regulates blood pressure, and produces urine.Finally, the kidney rules our determination for life or confidence to carry out dreams, creating confidence in the future.
Adrenals help turn food into energy and help the body respond to stress. When kidneys and adrenals are weak, congested, or stagnant they express fear adding to the feeling of anxiety and worry. Therefore, fortifying one’s kidneys and adrenals with the proper foods this time of year can dramatically change how the body responds to emotions and anxiety. I have worked with many people who have been able to get over GAD by guiding them through lifestyle changes.
For this month’s cooking, I will focus on kidney and adrenal health and how to maintain them during the holiday season. For example, which foods are the superfoods that nourish these two organ systems and should be eaten more frequently?
Come and join us on Saturday the 14th at 9:30 CST for a healthy holiday meal.
Wishing you a happy and healthy holiday season
~ Virginia
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