Are you feeling the impacts of stress in your life?
Are difficulties at your job, with your family, or in your home causing you to lose sleep, have digestive problems, feel overwhelmed or lost, have difficulty catching your breath, feel heaviness in your chest, or other symptoms?
Before these symptoms create major health problems, you may be interested to seek help from acupuncture and herbal medicine, which can regulate your body’s stress response and enable you to manage difficult situations with ease.
Chinese herbs that support restful sleep
My personal struggle with overwhelming stress led me to my first experience with acupuncture many years ago. Reeling from a divorce and my mother’s losing battle with cancer, my digestive system was a mess. I was constantly enormously bloated, all of my digestion felt uncomfortable, and I had terrible body odor. I struggled with pains in my hips from the emotional toll and generally felt both on high alert and miserable.
Receiving no help from my doctor, naturopath, and gastroenterologist, I entered the world of acupuncture and Chinese herbs. My relief was immediate – the smell of stress disappeared from my pores, my digestive system calmed down, and I felt profoundly relaxed for the first time in many months. I was hooked on this medicine and sought weekly treatment for a period of months to help me through this immensely difficult phase of my life.
Many of my patients come to me with similar conditions. It may be an overly demanding boss or work schedule, or the struggle of being a parent and raising children while trying to earn money and keep the house together, but any variety of stresses can wreak havoc on the body. Once the body is triggered into its “fight or flight” mode, stress hormones are released and digestion and deep breathing are shut down. There are a variety of ways to release from this stressed state, including conscious deep breathing, visualization, and a variety of forms of bodywork. Acupuncture and herbal medicine work to reset the body’s hormonal systems to enable digestion, breathing, and the proper relaxed “rest and digest” mode for the body.
While the acupuncture needles release energy that is tightly bound and causing pain or digestive limitation, they also trigger a neurochemical cascade that helps to re-regulate the hormonal imbalances that chronic stress has caused. Chinese herbal medicine serves a variety of functions: it can treat symptoms such as poor digestion, insomnia, agitation, and more; and it can help the body adjust the root issue of stress through the herbs’ anti-anxiety and sedative properties.
If you’re curious about whether acupuncture and/or herbal medicine are right for you, give me a call and we can discuss your healing. I look forward to hearing from you!
