TCM Basics 101: Root for illnesses - Joy
It can be surprising to know that the emotion Joy can be an emotion that can lead to illnesses, especially when we have been so used to associating this emotion with the positive.
Joy is associated with the Organ Heart. It is perfectly normal for humans to experience emotions. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being angry, sad, worry, scared and joyful.
It is only when the emotions are experienced in a prolonged and extreme manner, such that you find it hard to get out of the cycle of that emotional experience, then we can consider such scenarios to be imbalanced and sickly state.
So for Joy, indeed, when one is being too joyful, in other words, elated for a long period of time, it can first hurt the Heart.
In TCM, the organ Heart can also encompass the Mind or thinking. There are 2 situations with regards to Heart and Joy.
1. When the Heart is out of balanced (also known as the Mind is running too fast or the thoughts are extreme and heightened) the person can display being in an overly Joyful state, in other words, to the state of maniac.
2. This state of maniac or overjoy will then further imbalance the Heart.
Read more about What Mental Illnesses actually Look Like here.
In actual practice, patients who are hurt in the Heart can appear to be very normal at first and very chatty. Some can even be seen as outgoing. Further interactions will then reveal the actual signs and symptoms of Heart being out of balance. Small talks will be interspersed with frequent bouts of laughter, although the topics are not laughter provoking. The quality of laughter is just simply different from normal, it’s a little more intrusive and absurd but very subtle. The eyes are usually darting and unfocused and the topics of conversation will be rather erratic, skipping from one topic to another totally unrelated out-of-the-blue topic.
When taken to the extreme, Joy can display as maniac or anxiety.