You become angry and frustrated easily? You experience delayed, irregular, or heavy periods? You find yourself tired and fatigued with no good reasons? In the world of TCM (traditional Chinese medicine), these are signs you suffer from Liver Qi Stagnation (a root cause of your IBS). To solve the problem, you need to ‘soothe’ your Liver (a term used in TCM) and manage negative feelings so that it will help you manage your IBS.
For some of you it works to talk to a friend. However, in this post and the next one you will read three-level solutions (ranging from simple to complicated), ones that combine and mix methods of experts from East and West, solutions that are built on an idea by Sigmund Freud.
Experts in this post
- Chade-Meng Tan, author of ‘Search Inside Yourself’ and Founding Patron of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE)
- Ryan Holiday, one of the world’s bestselling living philosophers, author of the number 1 New York Times bestseller ‘Stillness Is the Key’
- Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis
- Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap, with over a million copies sold worldwide
The starting point: negative is normal
But before talking about how to soothe your Liver and manage your negative emotions, there is a starting point. All negative feelings tell you one thing, important and essential. Negative or painful feelings are not signs of weakness, but signs saying that you are a normal person, living a normal life (Harris, 2021).
In other words, people, with IBS or not, do not live in a happily-ever-after world in which everything ends perfectly and everyone lives in perpetual joy. Real life, instead, is a world in which ups and downs are like sunrise and sunset and not everything goes according to plan.
Level I: Don’t run away
Level I is a strange level. It is a level in which you don’t have to do anything.
To explain what I mean by doing nothing. Let me start with my experience. When I feel sad I will play my favourite sport, tennis. And for some of you, it may be shopping, eating a tub of ice cream, taking a hot bath, or a gym workout. Whatever we do, we try our best to escape from the feeling. For me, running away from the feeling works, but only sometimes.
Doesn’t it all depends on what the issue is and how deep we feel about the issue? Simply put, when the feeling is too strong, and when the person who hurts you really means a lot to you, it seems like running away is not a solution. Why? We simply can’t ‘escape’ from it. And there is a reason for it. According to Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, a problem not solved is still a problem: it only gets down to the lower layers of our mind. Sooner or later, something or someone may trigger its coming back.
Level II: text yourself
So how to ‘soothe’ your Liver (and yourself) when there is a problem you cannot run away from it.
Simpily open a file, using whatever app you have, and text yourself to talk about your feelings. What to talk about? Well, you may ask the feeling a few questions:
- What exactly are you feeling right now?
- Yes, you may give the negative feeling a name such as anger or sadness.
- How is this feeling affecting you?
- Think about its impact on your thoughts, actions, and overall well-being.
- What triggered this feeling?
- Identify the situation, person, or thought that led to it.
- Is there any reason deep down behind this feeling?
- Explore any deeper causes or past experiences tied to it.
A word of caution: When you talk to negative feeling, do not judge. As suggested by Tan, you simply experience it without judging it to be good or bad. Image that you are listening to a friend’s voice, a close friend of ‘yours’. So, don’t ever judge.
What is the point of text yourself?
It might seem weird to text, talk to, and ask yourself questions. It was weird for me too the first time I did it.
However, texting yourself helps you stay away from yourself by splitting yourself into two different persons. On the one hand you are still the one who feels angry or frustrated. On the other hand, you are a person who observe (or listen to) that negative person. In this process of splitting, you distance yourself from the emotion, a distance that helps you stay cool, a process that enables you to see yourself as an outsider, the outsider that soothes your Liver.
Moreover, texting yourself also helps you unload a feeling, however negative it is, and unloading a feeling makes it easier to handle it. In other words, when you feel angry jot down a few sentences (or more); when you are upset, write down something. Unloading your negative feeling onto a device (or a piece of paper) frees space for your brain, which makes you feel less angry, if not happier.
More importantly, such an outsider perspective gives you a real physical benefit (Harris, 2021). Texting yourself activates part of prefrontal cortex, and when this part of the brain is stimulated, your mind will be clear and focused as functions such as reasoning and self-regulation are simulated. With the simulation, you see the problem in a different perspective, a perspective that might helps you work out how to ‘soothe’ your liver and handle the feeling.
