Did You Know Acupuncture Can Relieve Stress and Anxiety?
Acupuncture is a treatment that’s incredibly effective. It involves extremely fine needles being inserted into skin at particular points. For the most part, it’s known for physical pain relief. However, acupuncture will also do wonders when it comes to relieving anxiety and stress.
Acupuncture for Stress and Anxiety Relief
When you are stressed, it can affect your emotional health. You may also experience insomnia. Acupuncture can help reduce stress, as well as anxiety and depression. Acupuncture affects the part of your brain that regulates emotions, which works to naturally reduce stress. Energy blockages such as blood pressure issues, digestion issues, pain and more are directly addressed.
Energy flows better thanks to acupuncture points, which is also what leads to anxiety and stress being alleviated as a whole. It helps stress to ease considerably through the release of endorphins, natural chemicals that serve to eradicate pain. Acupuncture also has the added bonus of improving the body’s overall blood circulation, which helps tissues to oxygenate, cycling out unwanted chemicals such as cortisol.
Since the process of acupuncture also has a calming nature by default, stress gets decreased in that way too. The moment all of the needles have been stuck into affected areas, a person can simply lay quietly on a comfortable table. More often than not, there’s soft music in the background and the lighting is decidedly low.
Acupuncture: What Are the Advantages?
Over the past few years, studies have shown there are effects of acupuncture on anxiety. For the most part, General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) was the focus of all the studies. Thereby, when it comes to GAD, acupuncture is strongly suggested to be quite helpful.
Back in 2015, a study found people with anxiety symptoms improving thanks to acupuncture considerably. Those same symptoms had not shown as effective a response, if at all, from other treatments like medication and psychotherapy. Particiupants got ten half-hour acupuncture sessions over the course of 3 months (12 weeks). A notable lessening of anxiety was experienced, all the way to 10 weeks after treatment.
Two research reviews on acupuncture, one from 2007 and the other from 2013, examined previous studies to see if they were reliable. The review from 2007 found that many had very few participants; the review from 2013 found that many of the studies were poorly designed. Combined, these reviews suggest that acupuncture does not seem to worsen anxiety.
Side Effects
Like everything else, acupuncture comes with side effects and risks. Seeing a licensed acupuncturist will mitigate practically all of those in one go. Primarily, the side effect people deal with post-acupuncture is soreness right after a session. It tends to dissipate in a matter of hours, but bruising may occur.
It should be noted that people with haemophilia and other blood issues or those that have a pacemaker shouldn’t get acupuncture. Additionally, acupuncture does not substitute for medical advice; one should not stop taking prescribed medications because of it.
Conclusion
Acupuncture is an incredibly helpful treatment known for alleviating physical pain. On top of that, it can relieve stress and anxiety. It’s best to get it from a licensed acupuncturist, however, in order to avoid issues with side effects.
Need to get acupuncture in Dunfermline? Hi, I’m Ruth McWilliam RN, BMAS! After 15 years working in the environmental biology field, I switched careers and became a nurse. I’m the only Registered Nurse in the Forth Valley area with a licence from Healthcare Improvement Scotland to practice acupuncture.