For holiday feasts and the BIG millennial bash, you binged and ended up feeling a little run down. Intent on a fresh start, you made resolutions for a brighter and better you. Now, you can’t figure out how to be perky and vibrant for all of the important things you need to do this year.

That sluggish feeling isn’t all hibernation syndrome (nice try, by the way). It’s the after-effects of rich living that slow your circulation and make you feel like building a soft nest, curling up with a warm animal, and snoozing the day away. So, why would your circulation make you tired? Isn’t it supposed to slow down during short days and cold snaps?

The Circulatory System: Your Life’s Flow

If you didn’t have a circulatory system, you’d be a little pile of minerals, or just a rock.

Networked with arteries, veins and capillaries, your circulatory system is constantly active, picking up nutrients, transporting those goodies to organs and tissues, and carrying off minute cellular wastes. Starve yourself of nutrients or eat too many fats or starches, and your blood gets thicker and more difficult to move. You feel unenergetic, with some muscle aches, irritable headaches, and some intestinal complaints. (No, it isn’t the flu; nice try, again.)

The systems of your body aren’t self-encapsulated. Each has parts and assisting organs to keep it functioning well. The circulatory system is no exception, containing the arterial-venal-capillary network, serum blood and a mighty pumping organ, the heart. Assisting it are the purifying liver, the scavenging spleen, and refreshing lungs.

Discovering Your Circulatory Health With Astrology

Ancient healers used astrology to discover the body’s ability to accept and use energy. When placements were good, they expected sustained health. If placements showed difficulties, physicians looked to organs for weaknesses and dysfunctions. Eventually, astrological signs were assigned to designated systems, creating a full health image. With still more knowledge about the body, astrology refined into a health diagnostic. From astrological portraits, we know when a part is suffering long before the system breaks down.

Aquarius, a sign that enjoys networking and interrelationship, rules, or is associated with, your circulatory system. Consequently, a good Aquarian expression in your horoscope fortifies healthy arteries and veins.

The parts of the circulatory system align themselves fairly easily:

• Blood, a continually shifting nutrient flow, is associated with Uranus, which reinvents blood serum to meet your needs.

• The heart, which causes circulation, is associated with the Sun, the most generative placement in your horoscope.

• Capillaries, which exchange de-oxygenated arterial blood to the veins, and pulmonary connections, which introduce oxygen into the blood, are associated with Chiron, which enjoys transmutation or a change from within.

Assisting the circulatory system are powerful organs, with equally powerful rulers and associations.

• The liver, which purifies, is associated with Jupiter, capable of the Herculean task of cleansing one and a half liters of blood each minute.

• The spleen, which removes aged blood cells, is associated with Saturn, a planet sometimes correlated with the Grim Reaper.

• The lungs, the only organs to receive oxygen, are associated with Uranus, which understands the utilization of air.

Keeping Your Circulation Healthy

Understanding the astrological signatures of your circulatory system, you can strengthen it with some excellent habits.

• Any movement forces the heart to pump. Thus, if you want good circulation, circulate! Use your entire body in paced, prolonged activity, such as walking and swimming. If periods of sitting or standing limit you, clench your calves and force veins to move blood upward.

• Continual tiredness results from under-oxygenated blood. Your lungs extract oxygen from air and cannot manufacture it. Revitalize yourself in fresh air for fifteen minutes, before and after work, and during your lunch break. In offices, oxygen in filtered air steadily dissipates throughout the work shift.

• For your liver to purify, keep it clean. Frequently eating saturated fats, starches and sugars prolong and hamper its gargantuan chore.

• Eat nutritious whole foods for healthy blood. Prepared foods have reduced nutrients, inhibiting tissue repair (you’ll age more rapidly). Preservatives, such as ionized salt, nitrates and sulfates enhance taste, but are rejected by other body systems (you feel ill).

• If you thought iron supplements counteract poor eating, dispel this falsehood. Only food, with its full complement of nutrients, builds blood. Besides, most people don’t suffer iron anemia, and elemental iron wreaks havoc on the serum blood balance and disturbs the spleen.

So, how do you keep good circulation and enjoy festivities? During the basketball playoffs, pep dance for exercise, whoop and holler for more oxygen, and cook munchies from scratch. On St. Patrick’s Day, chase the leprechaun. As for any other day, try a walk with a loved one rather than an evening on the couch in front of the TV.