Detox and drainage pathways are super important topics because toxins are a MAJOR root cause of chronic illness! This is why reducing your exposure to toxins and eliminating accumulated toxins must be part of your strategy if you want to heal your chronic symptoms and optimize your overall health!

Detox vs. Drainage

The word “detox” is typically used to refer to cleansing the body of toxins. However, that’s not actually what detox means!

Detox really refers to the process of making a toxin less toxic, and this happens primarily in your liver. Your liver processes toxins so they become less toxic AND makes those toxins more water soluble so your body has an easier time getting rid of them.

“Drainage,” on the other hand, is the process of actually eliminating toxins from your body. Your drainage pathways are the routes your body uses to dump toxins! Drainage refers to the pathways toxins travel to leave your body.

The Body as a Bucket

When thinking about toxins and their effect on your health, it’s helpful to visualize the body as a bucket. And toxins—from the environment through various sources and also from waste products produced by normal metabolism—fill up your bucket.

Fortunately, you have several pathways that help your body to eliminate toxins and wastes. These pathways collectively act like a spout to help drain the bucket, which is why they are referred to as “drainage pathways.”

But imagine if I close, narrow, or clog that spout. Or if I add toxins to the bucket at a rate the spout can’t keep up with. What do you suppose would happen?

The toxin level would rise, fill the bucket, and begin to spill over, of course! And that rising toxin level and overflow can create and worsen chronic symptoms and disease.

The key takeaway here? Your body’s ability to get rid of toxins depends on your drainage pathways flowing optimally. 

In other words, you are what you can’t get rid of!

Drainage Pathways

Your drainage pathways are the routes your body uses to get stuff out. Men have seven, and women have eight! These pathways are stool, urine, sweat, exhalations, bile, lymph, emotions, and menses.

If any of those pathways are congested, sluggish, burdened, or dysfunctional, then chronic symptoms will develop over time. And these symptoms can show up anywhere! For a list of some common symptoms related to chronic toxin accumulation, check out this article.

It’s worth mentioning that the health of your skin in particular can be affected by sluggish drainage pathways! When there is chronic drainage pathway dysfunction, your skin often becomes a route for elimination. This can lead to chronic skin issues like acne, rashes, eczema, psoriasis, and growths.

Drainage Pathway #1: Stool

Your gut is a MAJOR pathway for getting rid of toxins and metabolic waste products. This is one of many reasons why gut health has such a BIG impact on your health! Learn more about the role a healthy gut plays in your overall health here.

If you aren’t pooping daily, you are NOT dumping toxins at the rate you should be, and this WILL cause chronic disease over time!

There are several reasons you may not have a daily bowel movement. Some common examples include thyroid dysfunction (standard testing can MISS very real issues; learn more here), food sensitivities, stress, gut microbiome disturbances, toxins, sluggish or unhealthy bile, weak digestion, and more!

But even if you’re having daily bowel movements, you can still have trouble dumping toxins via your stool. For example, if you’ve got gut microbiome disturbances, some of the “bugs” in your gut can actually release toxins back into circulation that your body is trying to dump! This can lead to all kinds of chronic symptoms, including hormone imbalances!

From a Chinese medicine perspective, worry, anxiety, excessive thinking, and rumination can weaken digestion and gut health over time. Finding ways to release stress and worry, calm your mind, and stay present can have a significant positive impact on your gut health and its drainage function of “letting go.”

Drainage Pathway #2: Urine

Your kidneys filter your blood around the clock and send toxins and wastes out of your body in your urine. Dehydration, which is very common, slows down your body’s ability to dump toxins via your urine. Which is why you need adequate water on a daily basis for proper kidney function and efficient toxin elimination!

A helpful analogy is to think of a river. When there is adequate water, the river flows well, and the water stays clean and clear. But when water levels drop, the river doesn’t flow as well, and the water gets stagnant and gross in places. 

Adequate hydration helps to keep your “rivers” flowing so they don’t get stagnant and gross, which is why you can support your body’s ability to drain toxins through your kidneys and urine simply by drinking enough water every day!

Beyond staying hydrated, you also want to live in a way that supports the health of your kidneys. Because your kidneys filter your blood, they are exposed to toxins on a regular basis! This means it’s important to show your kidneys love and reduce toxin exposure where possible (learn more here). For example, if you often consume processed meats, sodas, or fast food, then your kidneys are being exposed to excess phosphates that can compromise kidney health and function over time.

From a Chinese medicine perspective, excessive or prolonged fear also damages the kidneys. Working through traumas, processing and releasing past and current fears, and focusing on your mindset are important ways to energetically support the health and drainage function of your kidneys.

Drainage Pathway #3: Sweating

Sweating is a powerful way to eliminate toxins, like heavy metals! If you don’t sweat on a regular basis, you’re missing out on a very effective way to rid your body of toxins—both environmental toxins AND those produced by your body through normal metabolism!

You can induce sweating with exercise, a hot bath, sauna, and activities like yard work or gardening in hotter weather. My favorite way to sweat is in the sun! But a close second is an infrared sauna session, and there are many options available to fit a variety of budgets and needs. Sauna blankets, portable saunas, and full-size saunas in your home or local gym can help you take advantage of this drainage pathway!

If you have trouble sweating (this used to be me!), that’s actually a sign that you need to work on your mitochondria (the organelles inside all of your cells—except red blood cells—that produce the very energy your cells use to function). This is a foundational area of health that I teach all of my patients to support! Learn more about working with me here.

On the other hand, excessive sweating can occur when one or more of your other drainage pathways are sluggish. If you’re someone that sweats a lot, this can be a sign that your body is trying to get rid of stuff and would benefit from detox and drainage pathway support!

Drainage Pathway #4: Exhalations

Every time you exhale, you let go of toxins! But if you’re like most people, you spend your days taking shallow breaths, which means you’re not using this drainage pathway as effectively as you could be.

Deep breathing is a helpful way to increase the release of toxins, and it’s also WONDERFUL for your nervous system, mental health + wellbeing, and mind-body connection!

Deep breathing also has the added benefit of “wringing out” your abdominal organs. As you inhale, your diaphragm contracts and your lungs expand. This pushes down on your abdominal organs—like squeezing the dirty water from a sponge. When you exhale and your diaphragm relaxes, your abdominal organs “refill”—like releasing the squeeze and allowing the sponge to take in fresh water. This means that deep breathing ALSO benefits the role your abdominal organs play in drainage!

One of my favorite deep breathing exercises is to simply set a timer for 5 minutes, close your eyes, clear your mind, and focus ONLY on your inhale and your exhale.

Drainage Pathway #5: Bile

Bile is made in your liver, stored and concentrated in your gallbladder, and released into your small intestine to help with the digestion of fats and to move toxins out of your body. Bile is actually what gives your stool its brown color—which is why bile issues lead to pale or clay colored stools.

Bile acts like a river to move processed toxins from your liver to your intestines to eventually leave your body with your stool. If your bile gets sluggish, this crucial step in moving toxins out slows down.

If you have gallbladder sludge, gallstones, a history of gallbladder attacks, or your gallbladder was removed, these are clues you need to support detox and work on the health of your bile! From a Chinese medicine perspective, gallbladder issues can show up in the mental-emotional realm as a lack of courage to take action or difficulty making decisions.

Even if you don’t have any known gallbladder issues, you STILL need to pay attention to the health of your bile! Without healthy bile, your body can’t move toxins from your liver to your gut (so they can leave) at the rate it needs to, and chronic symptoms will develop over time!

So what messes with bile quality? Lots of things! Liver health (you can have normal labs and still have a struggling liver), toxins, thyroid dysfunction, estrogen dominance, the Standard American Diet (the acronym isn’t SAD for no reason…), unchecked or chronic anger, poor food hygiene, stress, and chronic infections in the liver, bile ducts or gallbladder to name a few.

Drainage Pathway #6: Lymph

Did you know your body has a sewer system? It’s called your lymphatics! You have lymph vessels all over your body, and that lymph carries waste products away from your individual cells so they can be filtered and eventually leave your body through stool, urine, sweat, and exhalations.

Which is why when your lymph gets sluggish and congested, chronic symptoms and disease happens!

What can cause sluggish and congested lymph? Some examples include dehydration, being too sedentary, chronic infections, toxin exposure, or sluggish drainage pathways resulting in toxin accumulation over time.

What’s the best way to support this drainage pathway? MOVE YOUR LYMPH! What’s the best way to move your lymph? Stay hydrated, and MOVE YOUR BODY!

Drainage Pathway #7: Emotions

I’ve talked about several routes your body uses to drain toxins, and they all had to do with the physical body getting rid of physical toxins.

You can also carry mental and emotional toxins! These are just different energy states, but no less real or impactful than physical toxins.

Expressing emotions (in a healthy way) is a VERY important route for releasing mental, emotional, and energetic toxins—all of which can show up as physical symptoms! If you’ve ever experienced physical symptoms in response to stress and worry, or if you’ve ever felt better, lighter, or more balanced after a good cry, then you know what I’m talking about!

Many people struggle to use this drainage pathway effectively, in part because our society is all about quick fixes and numbing out. You feel sad? Take an anti-depressant. You feel anxious? Take an anti-anxiety medication. You’re stressed? Drink alcohol. You’re angry? Stuff it down because anger equates to being crazy—especially if you’re a woman. There’s something you don’t want to feel or think about? Distract yourself with time sucks like TV and social media.

But emotions are information! Feelings aren’t facts, but they ARE messengers! Recognizing, processing and releasing emotions is NECESSARY if you want to be physically healthy! Feelings buried alive never die…

Bonus? The physical routes I talk about actually help to drain mental, emotional and energetic toxins too because it’s ALL connected!!

Drainage Pathway #8: Menses

Your periods are an opportunity to dump toxins (here’s a research article showing that we can excrete PFAS—a type of toxic “forever chemical”—in menstrual blood). This function of acting as a drainage pathway can be part of the reason why you are more emotional or experience other symptoms before or during your periods. Some women may even deal with heavy bleeding due to an increased toxic load!

Interestingly, disease rates in women are generally lower than men until we go through menopause. Some of that will of course have to do with our changing hormone levels (estrogen has antioxidant activity, for example), but I believe this is in part due to losing our monthly opportunity to dump toxins!

Your period is important intel when it comes to your overall physical and mental-emotional health! If you have period problems—like missing periods, heavy periods, or painful periods—that’s an indication that this drainage pathway needs some love! (Keep in mind that bleeds while you’re on hormonal birth control are not real periods, so they cannot be used as a barometer of hormone health. Birth control does NOT fix hormones! It only masks hormone imbalances…)

Support Your Drainage Pathways to Heal Chronic Symptoms!

Toxins are a HUGE contributing factor to many chronic symptoms and conditions! Supporting your drainage pathways is an effective and necessary way to reduce your toxic load so you can resolve chronic symptoms and optimize your health!

There are so many lifestyle strategies that help to support your drainage pathways, and this is something I teach to ALL of my patients and clients. Learn more about my unique approach to health here.

I also share some of the most effective options for supporting your drainage pathways in my eBook Top 5 Strategies to Optimize Health.