Written by Chelsey
These days it feels like we are STRESSED! You’re stressed out about everything from covid, your workload, politics or why your jeans are fitting tighter than yesterday. Now more than ever, managing stress is extremely important. Research shows that stress can do significant damage to your health. Continuous stress can:
Erode health - physical pain, infertility, weight gain, insomnia, headaches, etc.
Eat away at self esteem - stress tends to make skin conditions flare up, leaves us feeling overwhelmed and incapable of coping, under stress we tend to make unhealthy eating choices.
Damage relationships - losing your temper, not having patience, pushing people away.
YES you’re saying! I experience so much of that! So how can acupuncture help?
When you’re stressed, your sympathetic nervous system takes over. The sympathetic system is responsible for fight or flight! Cortisol is the stress hormone in the body. If your body is having any amount of stress, this hormone is sending messages to the body to be on hyper alert; ready to jump into action at a second’s notice. It’s exhausting!
The opposite system is the parasympathetic, rest and digest! This function is needed for the body to process nutrients from the diet, relax, sleep and heal.
Acupuncture regulates the nervous system and balances out both the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. It’s through this homeostasis that the body operates at it’s optimal state.
Your Acupuncture treatment will also include lifestyle coaching, so here are a few common habits that perpetuate stress and tips for feeling better!
Scrolling through your phone before bed - as soon as you try to go to sleep it’s very common for your brain to start running through everything you need to worry about. In an effort to drown out the busy mind, scrolling through news and social media temporarily distracts it. Challenge yourself to leave your smartphone outside of the bedroom for one week - you will feel much better!
Trying to control your situation - it seems like a reasonable solution to the stress is life, just change it. But most of the stress of daily life cannot be changed. This week, every time you feel yourself getting stressed remember - focus on what you can control, leave what you can’t.
Ordering take out (too often!) - yes, we want to support our favorite local businesses more than ever and not dealing with the prep and clean up of a home cooked meal sounds so amazingly stress free! But, most convenient food is guilty of being over processed and full of hidden sugars. Blood sugar has a very intimate relationship with cortisol (what puts you in a fight or flight state!) and these foods can yank at that fine balance. Consume take out in moderation and focus on a diet with less processed sugar, and more lean protein, fruits, vegetables and healthy fats such as avocado, nuts and seeds.