Your emotions can affect your circulation.
In Chinese Medicine, this idea goes back thousands of years and honestly, the more I see it in practice, the more it makes sense.
Every intense emotion has the potential to get “stuck” in specific organs.
Here are a few classics:
Fear → kidneys and adrenals
Worry → digestion
Anger, frustration → liver
Long-standing grief → lungs
Anxiety, emotional masking → heart
This is why feeling emotions all the way through rather than shoving them down matters for your health.
Gabor Maté and trauma researchers have long shown how unresolved emotions stay wired in the body.
One strong emotional memory can keep your nervous system on alert for years. Wild, right?
When I work with clients in person, I use pulse and tongue readings from Chinese Medicine to get a deeper picture.
Each wrist has three pulse positions: the heart, liver, kidney on the left; lung, digestion, kidney on the right.
I feel them superficially, then deeper, then all the way to the bone.
When something feels off, I’ll ask about symptoms and emotions.
The tongue tells its own story too:
Tip → heart + lung
Middle → digestion
Back → kidneys + pelvis
Sides → liver + gallbladder
Red means heat or inflammation.
A red tip often shows anxiety.
Purple, scalloped sides? That’s stagnant liver energy, usually tied to frustration or anger.
Purple in the middle of the tongue hints at sluggish movement through the digestive system.
Deep purple at the back often shows long-term kidney stress, which ties back to fear.
Clients sometimes raise an eyebrow when I connect emotions to what I find but time and time again, these patterns match their stories.
The more I integrate this, the better I understand someone’s whole picture.
Now that you know this, take a look at your tongue in the mirror and feel your pulses.
Notice anything?
Check back to this email and see what resonates emotionally.
It’s never too late to process emotions differently or rewire how you move through the world.
If you’re open to sharing, hit reply, I’d love to hear what you find.
Here’s to assessing health from the inside out,
Dr. J
