Acupuncture for Stress & Anxiety
Are you experiencing high stress or anxiety? Are you looking for a drug-free alternative? Acupuncture is a powerful medical modality that we utilize effectively to reduce stress and anxiety in the body, and it’s being utilized more and more by the professional medical community.
Specifically, the modality called biomedical acupuncture successfully reduces stress and anxiety! But before we focus in on that, let’s take a step back and give you a brief premise of human physiology so that you have a strong foundation that will let you understand why and how biomedical is so effective.
The stress and anxiety that you may be experiencing is an expression of a “lifesaving system” called the sympathetic fight-or-flight response. This system is what will literally save your life when you’re under threat. Think of it this way: You’re walking off the curb and all of a sudden you see a car coming right at you. The fight-or-flight response senses danger and turns on immediately, increasing your heart rate and pumping blood flow into your legs so that you can jump out of the way of the oncoming car.
The fight-or-flight response can also give you superhuman strength. We’ve all heard the story of the child who gets stuck under a car and the mother lifts the car just enough to get that child out from underneath. You could bring that same mother into gym the next day and she can’t even budge one-tenth of the weight of that car. Why? Because there was no threat to her survival or to the child’s survival. So this is a powerful life-saving system.
Now, when this system goes beyond the circumstance, or goes beyond the situation and into chronic mode, this is where we develop the problems. This is because the flight-or-flight response gets habituated and goes into automatic pilot.
However, the body has an antidote to this fight-or-flight response. It’s the flip side of the system called parasympathetic rest and digest. This system uses one nerve to help override that stress response: the vagus nerve. Any time you’re in chronic stress or anxiety, your body is telling you that the vagus nerve is not engaged and therefore not working properly. It’s not turned on and the system is stuck in that stress pattern.
This is where biomedical acupuncture may have a profound effect on reducing stress and anxiety conditions. Why? Because this modality has a direct effect on this one nerve, and by stimulating the vagus nerve, we override that fight-or-flight response.
Now remember, these chronic stress and anxiety conditions are habituated vicious patterns AND are highly sensitive conditions. This means that they can be set off with the slightest triggers.
The sensitivity of these conditions are no different than that annoying car alarm that goes off when the wind blows, or if you happen to lightly brush up against the car while walking by. Highly sensitive!
So what we need to do, and what we generally see in our center, is that we have to go through a period of treatments to continue to interrupt and calm this pattern down.
If you continue to interrupt the pattern, it no longer results in chronic stress and anxiety, which is simply a neurological pattern that’s stuck in a vicious cycle. Our goal here at the center is to interrupt that pattern enough times so that the body has now gone back into balance or what we called homeostasis.
We also teach patients principles, strategies, and techniques to capture that state they experience from treatment and how to recreate it in their own lives. The outcome: they become more empowered, and get back in the front seat of their own health! That is our primary mission here at the Center for Integrative Care.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can assist you with your specific health concern and how we can best integrate the use of biomedical acupuncture along with your current health care in a safe and effective way, call (619) 287-4005 to schedule a free consultation with one of our functional medicine specialists.