Bags under Eyes? Focus on 12 Things!

What Causes Bags under Eyes?

Three main reasons you have Eye Bags

1. Out of harmony; Kidney Energy mis-function.

You may find this a bit old-fashioned. After all, in the modern 24-hour world, aren’t we all free, or at least more free, than our ancestors?

At night, they mostly lacked good light, so they slept.

They could only travel comparatively short distances in a day, so had no problems with time zone travel.

Thing is, activities which often separate you from these age-old living patterns of behaviour can lead to Kidney problems – eventually.

“Yes, but WHY?” I hear someone at the back of the class keep saying.

Well, time for an analogy, which may satisfy some people and bore others.

Suppose you have an old grandfather clock (OK, it could be a grandmother clock, I really don’t mind!) which has been beautifully serviced, oiled and maintained for hundreds of years and, importantly, keeps good time as long as it’s kept still, in the same corner, out of the way of wayward drafts of cold or hot air. And of course, assume it is wound up correctly every seventh day at the same time.

Now, I’m not a clocksmith but if you look after it properly, there’s little reason why it should fail to keep good time for you and your heirs just as it has for your grandparents  and their forbears.

Photo by Rachael Crowe on Unsplash

Unless:

• you forget to service it properly
• you use rapeseed oil instead of proper clock oil
• it’s on the back of your tractor as you plough the fields
  
• you wind it up twice in one week and not at all the next week
  
• you decide to take it on a round the world trip, correcting the time in each new time zone you cross
  
• carrying it on your back as you go skiing, possibly making a name for yourself but discovering that perversely, the clock doesn’t really like mountain-top freezing temperatures and winds, and not even skiing

So then, perhaps your beautiful old clock will start to misbehave!

You’ll probably need a highly skilled clock smith to persuade it back to normality once you put it back in its comfortable old corner.

So … you could say that your inherited know-how cannot be messed with indefinitely without there being consequences, some of them tiresome.

Signs of Kidney energy misfunction: Eye Bags –

… are your body’s way of showing that you are exceeding its design parameters. Although most people have lots of spare capacity for absorbing bad habits, there comes a point when the system complains, and eye-bags are one way to show you are pushing your luck.

Of course nobody is suggesting that the odd night out or emergency is going to skew your Kidneys or lead straight to bags under the eyes! Probably a million years or so have gone into evolving your Kidney energy, what with the worms, Neanderthals and humans. So the occasional disturbance is probably even good for you.

But not if ongoing, such as:

• Night-shift work, especially when the shift times keep changing, or even where you don’t work nights but are on early shift one day and late shift the next. This disturbs your sleep patterns and stops you ever really recovering.
• Frequent time zone travellers (pilots, cabin staff)
• Thieves and night workers
  
• Actors who can’t turn off after giving a performance and must party for a few hours before they sleep. Often they get bags under the eyes, a problem for their careers.
  
• Some problems under this category slip over into the next category.

2. Energy over-use

Each of us being different, this is harder to diagnose.

But most people know when they’ve overdone it. Whereas a good night’s sleep will put you back together after a big effort, when you’ve overdone it, sleep is not enough: you may need quite a long period of rest and possibly help to recuperate properly.

Unfortunately, many modern drugs, including coffee, can hide this.

Have you looked seriously at your hard coffee-drinking friends who work all hours in a coffee-fuelled ferment?

Image by rawpixel from Pixabay

They could probably work long hours without coffee, but as they know, coffee ‘wires’ them to higher levels of productivity, or so it seems.

From the point of view of Chinese medicine, coffee seems to stimulate yang energy, especially Kidney Yang energy. The problem is that in boosting yang, you use up yin. (Read more about yin and yang here.)

Then you become yin deficient, especially Kidney Yin deficient. That makes it harder to concentrate, to sleep, to relax, to settle.

You become more restless and frazzled, and probably more irritable.

Then you start getting headaches caused by yin deficiency, and so on. But by now you almost certainly have bags under your eyes!

Energy over-use occurs in many ways, even without coffee:

• Working longer hours than you can easily recover from.
  
• Pushing yourself to achieve more and more targets.
  
• Physical over-lifting or over-strain.
  
• Taking too little good sleep for your needs.
  

• Not allowing yourself to ‘switch off’ regularly, to let your mind wander, to take a few hours, a day or the weekend off.
  
• Not taking holidays.
• Trigger-happy responses to everything.
  
• Having allergies that make you sneeze or cough or splutter or breathe asthmatically all the time. There are ways to clear these allergies or over-sensitivities without medication, because medication is basically suppressive which, long-term, is not good for you. But if you must take medication, take the least necessary and do realise that, if you are taking steroids, these put a heavy load on your Kidney energy long-term. So you’ll get bags under the eyes again, one way or another.
• Keeping your smartphone or computer on at all times, so you are woken frequently by message or news chimes.
• Sleep is really important. If you find sleep difficult, read our page on insomnia.
• Not eating enough of the right food, which takes us into the third main category.

3. Poor dietary habits and Eye Bags

Photo by Carles Rabada on Unsplash

This is a big subject, and if you want to know more we cover it all on other pages in this site: Nutrition, Hot foods, Cold foods, Damp-Heat foods to name a few.

But, as a quick summary, poor dietary habits include:

• Eating food that doesn’t suit you
• Not taking sufficient time over eating, to chew and digest food
• Eating food that is unsuitable for your constitution
  
• Eating food that is inappropriate for the weather, the season or your current state of health
• Food that is poor in nutrition
• Food that has additives to keep it longer or make it more tempting (herbicides, fungicides, preservatives, flavouring, artificial colourings, sugars, salt, salts, sweeteners, wrong kind of fats …)
  
• Over-refined food – this matters! Not just because your body has to digest something that isn’t real food any longer, but then has to keep going without proper sustenance. So guess what it does? It uses Kidney energy!
• Eating when you are tired
  
• Over-eating and eating too fast
  
• Under-eating
  
• Inappropriately cooked food
  
• Eating foods without healthy fats, such as from nuts and oily fish. (These healthy oils nourish your skin, making it supple, resilient and glowing.)
  
• Eating when upset, emotionally disturbed, angry, worried

If you do this, eventually your body starts to use up some of the Jing energy mentioned above to compensate for dietary deficiencies. That drains your Kidneys, leading to Kidney syndromes.

Hullo – bags under the eyes!