Acupuncture can lower baseline anxiety levels
When I say that acupuncture can help with anxiety, I’m actually saying two different things. A patient helped me realise last week that I should be more specific, so here goes: Acupuncture can give short-term and long-term relief from anxiety.
Acupuncture is relaxing for most people, most of the time. That’s obviously going to help with anxiety in the moment – you arrive for your treatment vibrating with anxiety, you leave feeling calm, with your shoulders no longer around your ears and your jaw unclenched, experiencing (at least) short term relief.
But the other thing that I often neglect to mention is that regular acupuncture can lower your baseline anxiety levels. Meaning that, over time, people who are accustomed to having moderate-to-high daily anxiety start to notice that they are now a person with low anxiety. I have seen this happen many times. Someone goes from multiple panic attacks per week to one panic attack per month—or no panic attacks at all, as a direct result of regular acupuncture treatments. By “regular” I mean once or twice a week, depending on symptoms. If you’re curious about how acupuncture can help you with anxiety, please get in touch.
(Why is acupuncture relaxing? By what mechanism(s) can acupuncture change someone’s experience of anxiety over time? 20 years ago I would have answered in terms of acupuncture theory. These days my attention is more on neuroplasticity and nervous system states. More on that soon.)
