Your Liver and Your Mood
This is a topic I was requested to write about from a friend and coworker. The opening conversation was around how challenging it can be to shift away from drinking alcohol. Many people during the pandemic turned toward alcohol as a way to manage the fear and anxiety of our uncertain futures, but slowly realized it became a bigger habit than intended.
Emotions and alcohol have long been woven together within our society. But here’s the interesting part: your liver has a big role in that exact emotional relationship to alcohol (and drugs). By now most people understand that the liver does a lot of “cleaning house” for the body. But what is overlooked in Western Medicine is the emotional filtering that also occurs in this organ.
Eastern medicine has long referred to the liver as “the emotional liver”. In my practice, I’ve found the liver to be a major part of this deep pathway of emotional expression. Heavy or challenging emotions can get stored in our spleen, pancreas, or duodenum. As they surface, they must travel into the liver for processing then move past the diaphragm into the lungs for exhale and release.
If your liver is overburdened or sluggish from years of toxin exposure, a high fat diet, and the unfortunate inheritance of ancestral toxins, emotions are the least of it’s concern. A toxic liver does not have the capacity to process your grief, your shame, your anger, or your fear.
Drugs and alcohol add to this liver burden, which is why they are the perfect tools for emotional avoidance. That craving for a drink “to take the edge off” is a sign that your body is desperately trying to release a deeper pain. And alcohol only temporarily stifles this.
There is a flip side to this, however. Maybe you are someone who has already started a deep dive into your healing journey. Maybe you’ve already been going to therapy and are in the process of turning up your childhood trauma. But you still feel stuck, like things aren’t shifting for you as you’d hoped.
Here’s the thing about toxins and emotions. Our mind will strongly associate an emotion to the chemical status of our body during any particular time. If you’ve experienced a trauma, your state of health at that time leaves a chemical imprint that is matched with your emotional experience. So as your liver is able to work through those old layers of toxins, the emotions that are connected to them are allowed to surface and ultimately purge from the body. This is the kind of emotional release that I was desperately searching for after doing year’s of talk therapy, I just didn’t know it at the time.
“Stuckness” is almost always a sign of liver burden. As I slowly learned more about the liver, I began to consider my own lifestyle and how the choices I made were not in line with where I was trying to grow. I’ve been healing my liver for the past two years now, and not only have I experienced a major improvement in my acne, brain fog, bladder discomfort, ear itchiness/pain, swollen lymph nodes, restless leg syndrome, congestion, and allergies, but I’ve also grown immensely in my mental health and sense of self.
It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that depression, anxiety, fatigue or procrastination is from our own doing. That we’re somehow responsible for our own suffering. But we aren’t given the guidance around how our inner health is complex and interwoven. Nobody is talking about liver health. Because if our liver was identified as the problem, then people would start looking at our world differently. We’d be more concerned about the chemical use on fruits/vegetables, the frequent prescription of pharmaceuticals, the quality of the air we breath and the water we drink. The liver is responsible for cleaning our bodies of all these chemicals we come into contact with and don’t even realize it.
Your mental health is incredibly important, and it cannot be fully addressed without considering your liver.
