Category: Health

Hormones are the usual explanation for why women experience insomnia more than men — true, but downstream. Korean medicine offers an upstream, more actionable reading in terms of Qi and Blood: where men tend toward Qi deficiency that still sleeps well, women tend toward stagnant Qi and deficient Blood, the very pattern that keeps a mind turning at night.

Ask what to eat for better sleep and the honest answer is a paradox: enough that hunger does not nag, yet a stomach kept as light as possible. Korean medicine ties sleep to the stomach so tightly that the classics say it plainly — when the stomach is not at peace, lying down is not peaceful.

A doctor who studies health every day has never had perfect sleep himself. His long acquaintance with insomnia taught him something more useful than any cure: that meeting sleeplessness with curiosity instead of dread is itself part of getting better.

You cannot flip sleep on like a switch, and straining to force it at night often makes insomnia worse. Korean medicine — and modern chronobiology — put the real levers in the day: movement, light, diet, and mental rest, which together set the rhythm by which sleep arrives.

The Korean word for depression, ueul, is built from “worry” and “stagnation” — worry and sorrow that have stalled the body’s Qi. Read that way, the single most important move in lifting low mood is, almost literally, to move. Here is why running breaks the loop, and how to begin — alongside, not instead of, proper care.

The Stoics read emotion as Event, Judgement, Reaction — and Korean medicine maps almost the same sequence onto three organs. The Heart feels the first instinctive surge, the Gallbladder inserts judgment, and the Liver carries out the response. Knowing this is a quietly practical tool for staying calm under pressure.

Korean medicine counts not only overwork but its opposite — harm from idleness — among the causes of disease. Once an affliction of leisured aristocrats, the “disease of idleness” has become common in our abundant, sedentary age, and it weighs on the gut above all. This is why digestive disorders keep rising.

Whatever your constitution, two plain things matter most to the stomach and intestine: a stretch of empty time, and moving your body. Korean medicine ties the gut to the limbs so closely that a sedentary life reads, to the body, as famine — which is much of why digestive and metabolic disease keep rising.

A bad bout of indigestion can bring on a fierce headache — frightening, but usually it eases the moment digestion resumes. Korean medicine reads it as stomach heat rising to the head, and modern science as the gut–brain axis. Here is why it happens, why a painkiller can settle both at once, and why not to lean on one.

Korean medicine speaks of people with a “cold, weak stomach” — yet their stomach acid is just as strong as anyone’s. So “cold” cannot mean the acid has cooled. It means the stomach’s vitality has dropped — and, confusingly, such a stomach can run cold or hot.