More Complementary & Integrative Healthcare Articles
Acupuncture For Stress Relief
Stress is the body's natural response to internal and external stressors. There are two types of stress, unhealthy stress and healthy stress. The difference between these two types of stress is how it affects the body.
Unhealthy stress includes negative emotions and thinking, overexertion, poor eating habits, lack of sleep, and environmental pollutants. Conversely, healthy stress is what you use when you are under pressure, whether on the job, during an athletic event, or needing to make a quick split-second decision in traffic.
Chronic stress can cause a plethora of physical and emotional problems. Chronic stress can cause pain sensitivity, irritability, anxiety, and digestive disorders. If the chronic stress is not relieved, more serious health conditions like high blood pressure, ulcers, depression, and migraines can occur. These conditions may interfere with your quality of life, compelling you to seek out interventions like pharmaceutical medications, which may cause serious adverse side effects.
You may be able to relieve chronic stress without prescription medications using traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). TCM can help alleviate stress and teach you new techniques for dealing with the most common stressors.
According to TCM, the emotions you experience can affect different parts of your body. The seven emotions are joy, grief, anxiety, anger, fear, fright and pensiveness. Joy, for instance, affects the heart, while grief and anxiety influences the lungs. The liver is affected by anger, while fear affects the kidneys and fright influences both the kidneys and the heart. Finally, worry has been shown to affect the spleen.
Emotions are a normal part of life. It is the physiological response to stimuli. However, when emotions become so powerful that they become uncontrollable and overwhelm or possess a person, then they can cause serious injury to the internal organs and open the door to disease.
How Acupuncture Can
Help Relieve Stress
Most people report that after an acupuncture treatment they feel peaceful and relaxed. Additionally, a study published in the Journal of Endocrinology in March 2013 reported that rats treated with acupuncture exhibited lower stress hormone levels, including cortisol and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), than rats that received no acupuncture.
During periods of stress, the adrenal glands increase the production of stress hormones. Over time, this increased stress can cause a plethora of symptoms including anxiety, sleep disorders, depression, fatigue, and weight gain. Furthermore, many stressed out individuals report an increased occurrence of infections, pain and digestive disorders, such as acid reflux and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
Additionally, a study conducted in 2013 by the University of York found that in treating cases of mild depression, acupuncture was successful in a higher percentage of cases than using antidepressant prescription medications. The researchers reported that one-third of the patients who received counseling or acupuncture were no longer depressed. However, only one-fifth of the patients receiving antidepressants were no longer depressed.
Schedule an appointment today to learn firsthand how acupuncture or TCM can help alleviate your unhealthy stress.
