More Complementary & Integrative Healthcare Articles
Acupuncture and Stress Relief
Some sort of drama is happening in your life. Initially you respond emotionally with anger or disbelief. You mull it over in your mind and begin to think of all of the reasons you are right and the other person is wrong.
You think about a myriad of solutions until you feel justified and prepared to confront the drama. You even feel lighter, having just worked out a solution, and possibly written a mental monologue, and the situation is looking up.
But then, like a lightbulb, a hypothetical response from the other party to your monologue comes through, and just like that you are back at it, angry again, maybe feeling anxious, eager to engage in order to diffuse this hypothetical response from ever having an opportunity to breech the surface in real life.
In Chinese Medicine, we consider this sort of attachment to mental engagement to be unhealthy, especially if done in excess; we call it rumination.
In Western Medicine, this may be a mental-emotional aspect of anxiety.
Rumination is unhealthy, because it is highly consumptive of one's energy, which can lead to energy depletion and physical ailments if the pattern is not corrected.
Think about the last time you engaged in this pattern; perhaps you recall a physical response to your thoughts, be it a sensation of heat in your face or chest, sweating, clenching your jaw, a rushing sensation from your chest up to your throat where it then becomes trapped, robbing you of your voice.
All of these physical feelings can be classified as manifestations of your energy as it moves around in your body.
The thing about energy as Einstein so wisely pointed out, is that it is matter. It does not simply go away when presenting itself with negative symptoms, and likewise, it does not expand in quantity out of thin air, so when you experience a rush of energy to your face, perceived as a hot flash for example, the energy used to carry that heat upwards came from somewhere, and where it came from is likely now devoid of the energy necessary to carry out its primary functions.
A very common pattern that we see a lot as acupuncturists is that one's digestive energy is consumed via rumination. In other words, energy that should be used to digest your food gets sent upwards in the form of anxiety when your mind is obsessively thinking about something in an unhealthy pattern. People who suffer from this end up having symptoms such as loose stools, constipation, nausea or gas and bloating when they are upset or nervous.
If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense, because your stomach is right below your ribcage, so when your mind is stuck and therefore your brain requires more energy, the first place it is going to come from will very likely be from a nearby neighbor, in this case, the stomach. By simply placing a few acupuncture needles on points we associate with digestion, your body is able to recalibrate and correct this energetic imbalance.
This is one example of an energetic dynamic that commonly plays out in the body that can be responsible for throwing the body out of balance, but there are many dynamics just like this that we treat all the time using acupuncture and herbal medicine. However, when your stress plays out in your body and wreaks havoc, acupuncture is a great mechanism to bring it back into harmony.
