How Acupuncture Can Help Manage Anxiety & Trauma

Now I know the idea of putting tiny little needles in your body to heal anxiety or trauma sounds a little bit backwards, but I've actually personally found from my own experience that acupuncture and Chinese formulas are one of the best ways to treat anxiety and trauma or even PTSD. Now in this video I want to share exactly why I think that is to be true and how you can get started if this is something you're trying to tackle and you're trying to use these different modalities to heal. Hey it's Alex Hein, author of the health book Master the Day. So I've included down there below the first link is for a free little PDF on five daily rituals that can possibly help you add ten years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. So you can check it out right there at the link below description. So I want to start with this idea that trauma and anxiety are primarily somatic illnesses, meaning they're in your body and not necessarily in your mind. So here are a couple examples to just think a little bit differently. Think outside the box. They are primarily stored in your body and not just your mind. They primarily manifest in your body and not just your mind. And honestly they're more effectively treated what recent recent recent recent research suggests they are more effectively treated through somatic practices, accessing it through the body versus thinking it as some brain or chemical imbalance. So let's talk about this a little bit more. For example if you are with yourself and you're having one of those days where you feel very anxious and you just something feels off, you just feel weird, what helps you feel better? Going for a walk, exercising, hanging out with friends and laughing or convincing yourself oh it's just anxiety or it's just my depression or it's just something going on in my head or I have these thoughts or I'm not sure. Trying to talk yourself off the ledge so to speak. Trying to calm yourself down. What works better? Something that's physical in your body, exercise, swimming, hanging out with friends, laughing or trying to use these cognitive exercises to somehow make yourself feel better. I mean I certainly know undeniably for me what has made me feel better in the past and for many people that I've worked with. And I want to go into this idea that these somatic illnesses should be treated somatically. They should be treated through the body. You know I had a very interesting experience where I was going through my own healing odyssey so to speak and I saw a craniosacral therapist. Now I actually don't know much about craniosacral at all but a lot of the craniosacral, I'm gonna say body worked for lack of a better word, is where they're holding your suboccipital, they're holding the back of your head and your skull and they're resting it there and applying gentle traction or sometimes some gentle like super micro manipulation. Just gently rocking the head. Now when I was going through my own healing journey, my own healing odyssey, I was trying craniosacral body work. So it's a kind of body work where the craniosacral therapist holds different parts of your body to assess this kind of rhythm, this craniosacral rhythm. I don't know much about it but I do know that this woman was working on me and she was holding my head and gently rocking it and then she was working on somewhere in my throat, gently holding these places and I don't remember if she said the thyroid or the cricoid she was working on. Just holding it gently and then she went on to do the other parts of the craniosacral. But as she was holding this, I suddenly had this spontaneous memory of this girl that I'd been dating that after this breakup recently, I basically due to all these other factors in my life and not feeling like I had a lot of close friends, basically ended up developing clinical anxiety slash depression. I had this spontaneous memory of me being with this girl that came up while she was working on my throat and for context that clinical anxiety or depression developed after that breakup. I was burnt out, I was so tired. She was my last real social support, my closest friend. So I had this spontaneous memory come up while she was working on my throat somewhere and about 30 minutes later she said, you know, interesting tidbit, the thyroid or cricoid, whatever she was working on, she says it has a direct anatomical and physiological link to the pericardium. Now in Chinese medicine, the pericardium is kind of like the love and connection or the heartbreak organ. I thought, wow, she was working on this area that had an anatomical link to the pericardium and while she worked on that, I first thought about this girl I hadn't thought about in months after this horrible breakup, the worst time of my life and touching and massaging this area released this memory that I had stored. Since then, even with some of my own patients, I've been massaging them and they've started spontaneously crying or spontaneously laughing, giving acupuncture. If the patients spontaneously cry, spontaneously laugh and everything in between and they're like, I don't know where these emotions are coming from. But it's really unusual and interesting if you've never seen it or experienced it, to see how touching body tissue, nothing to do with the mind, no thinking involved, can cause spontaneous memories to come up. And this has piqued my interest dramatically after that experience myself. So this idea of you can access these experiences through the body and not necessarily through the mind. Now the final piece is that you don't necessarily need to relive these memories or these traumatic experiences in order to heal them this way, through the mind, through talking them out. You know, I saw this awesome article of an interview with a shaman in Africa speaking with this interviewer who's talking about how when the people from your country come to where I am, they deal with traumatic experiences by isolating the person from the tribe, putting them in a brightly lit room and one-to-one reliving that traumatic experience over and over and over by talking about it. The shaman was like, what is this craziness? Because in our culture, when people have these experiences, we bring them into the and we make them dance and have fun and laugh and they're around people and we celebrate and they're moving in the sun and we're having these ceremonies and they're in nature. And what you do is the exact opposite, where you isolate people, you have them relive it, and they're isolated one-to-one talking about this thing over and over. It's almost the exact opposite of what we do to heal. So I thought this was a really interesting, different approach to dealing with especially like depression or anxiety or PTSD. And I think these ancient cultures, these indigenous cultures that have survived until now, this particular aspect of life and medicine, they know far more effectively than the modern person who now we have a depression and anxiety epidemic. So I think these are some really interesting points that have helped me a lot when I was a patient and now help other people. But I hope they give you some ideas as you're going through these experiences. Besides seeing a Chinese medicine doctor or acupuncturist, to think of it as more somatic in the body and trying to treat it through the body and not just through the mind. I hope that helps. Again, the first link below is for a free PDF, 5 daily rituals that can potentially help you add 10 years to your life with Chinese medicine. And then before you go, check out this related video right here.