Author name: Angela Zeng

Ask someone where they feel grief and they will almost always touch their chest. Grief tightens the throat, makes the breath catch, and pulls the shoulders forward over the lungs. We sigh without meaning to. Chinese medicine noticed this long ago and filed grief under the Lung, the organ of autumn. The question I want

Every year around this time, many of us notice the same three things at once. Skin that feels tight after a shower. A nose that is dry or bleeds a little in the morning. And bowels that have slowed down for no obvious reason. Most people treat these as three separate problems. Chinese medicine has

Walk through a Chinese kitchen in autumn and you will notice the change before anyone explains it. The quick summer dishes disappear. A clay pot comes down from the shelf. And something sour starts showing up at every meal: pickled mustard greens, a dish of black vinegar, a bowl of plums. That habit follows a

Ask ten people how vividly they remember last night’s dream and most of them will pause, look slightly embarrassed, and tell you they don’t really dream anymore.  They do. Everybody does. You spend something close to two hours a night in REM sleep, and the dreaming happens whether or not any of it comes back

Search “foods that help you sleep” and you’ll get the same list every time. Kiwifruit. Tart cherry juice. Magnesium. Warm milk. Turkey. I went and read the actual studies behind that list, and I came back with a more complicated answer than I expected. Some of it holds up. Some of it is one small

There is a chapter in the Huangdi Neijing, the foundational text of Chinese medicine, that is entirely about dreams. Not as omens. Not as messages from ancestors. As clinical information. The chapter is Ling Shu 43, 淫邪发梦 (Yín Xié Fā Mèng), usually rendered as something like “Pathogenic Excess Generating Dreams,” and it reads like a

“I dream all night long. Every night. Full movies. And I wake up like I never went to bed.” I hear a version of this constantly, and almost always with a note of confusion in it, because the person saying it has usually been told that vivid dreaming is a sign of good, deep sleep.

You know the meal. Lunch was supposed to be at noon. Then came fruit, because someone insisted. Then tea, because you can’t have fruit without tea. Then something sweet. It’s four o’clock and nobody has technically stopped eating since you arrived. Or the weekday version: dinner at eight-thirty because that’s when you got home, something

Every morning, millions of people look at a number on their wrist that claims to summarize how well their body recovered overnight. Most have no idea what it’s measuring. A surprising number let it decide what kind of day they’re going to have. This series began with a Chinese medicine physician who started paying attention

It’s the most reasonable-sounding habit in wellness. You don’t want to take a sleeping pill. You’d rather not lie awake for an hour. So you have a glass of wine, you feel yourself soften, and you go to bed. It works – you fall asleep. Then you wake at 3am, or you wake at seven