Anxiety & Chinese Medicine

The modern world is full of stressors, and human beings experience that stress is a variety of ways. Some of us have physical symptoms like chest tightness or shortness of breath, some of us have intensely racing thoughts that distract us or keep us up at night, and some of us don’t feel like we have stress or anxiety, but our bowels don’t move regularly or comfortably. From a Chinese medicine point of view, anxiety is caused by the slowing down and eventual stagnation of qi, blood, and body fluids. While some of those terms may seem unfamiliar, many of us have felt the decline in energy, the lack of motivation, and the sense that our problems are insurmountable that often accompany anxious feelings. Those are physical manifestations of what we call Qi Stagnation. In addition a person might feel like their heart is beating very fast or very powerfully; they might feel like they can’t get a deep and satisfying breath; they might feel twitchy or agitated. These too are manifestations of that same qi stagnation as it works on different organ systems in your body.

Chinese medicine is based on a diagnostic system that is looking at the interconnections between multiple body systems at once. That means that Chinese medicine sees connections between your cold hands and feet, your chest tightness, and your loose stools with your stress levels and subsequent anxiety. Using Chinese medicine tools to help ease anxiety and resolve stress begins with a deep dive into root causes. Is it work? Family life? Relationships? Money? Chinese medicine practitioners are not therapists, but it is important for us to understand your circumstances in order to design a treatment that can help soften the edges.

What might a treatment plan for Anxiety look like?

Once we have an idea of the parameters that lead to your stress and feelings of anxiety or worry, we can design a treatment plan that can help make you feel more balanced and relaxed. It will likely involve some mindfulness practices like intentional breathing, setting up established mealtimes, reducing multitasking, and building systems to help manage the demands of modern living. Then we might prescribe a series of acupuncture treatments to help move some of the stuckness that you are feeling as fast heartbeats, shortness of breath, muscle cramps, or an inability to focus. And lastly we will likely send you home with an herbal formula that can continue the work of relieving that same stagnation that the acupuncture was working on while you were in the clinic.

How long will it take to feel differently?

Of course all people are different and unique so each person will react to treatment in their own way. But usually the potent combination of acupuncture and herbs will show some shift almost immediately. Many patients get up from the treatment table feeling more at ease than when they first lay down and after a week of taking the right formula, that sense of ease tends to follow them throughout their day. Now the root causes of people’s anxieties will continue to poke at that sense of calm and try to force the body and mind back into a state of stress and anxiety which means that addressing those root causes are the only real ways to change the outcome. If we keep doing what we’ve always done, we will keep getting what we’ve always gotten. So learning to remake and rebuild our habits is the long game of managing stress and anxiety. Some days or weeks will be better than others and there will always be an ebb and flow of life’s stressors, but the measure of health from a Chinese medicine point of view is how quickly you are able to return to a state of balance after experiencing disease, trauma, or upset. So the more you work with your practitioner to identify the triggers for your anxiety and then develop strategies to redirect those triggers, the better you will feel. Regular check-ins and regular treatment can help to provide support and parameters for that self-cultivation.