The Power of Acupuncture for Mental Health

More people are seeking help for mental health challenges than ever before as we continue to experience layers of difficult stress every day- personal stress, family stress, work stress, and the ever-expanding country and world stressors.  That is a lot to manage on a good day and now it’s time to pile holiday stress on top!  We know it is surprising to people that acupuncture has such a powerful effect on mood.  Just a few tiny needles and an hour of your time can equal some pretty dramatic shifts in how you feel and cope with all of the different stressors in your life.       

Advantages of Acupuncture for Mental Health:

There are few side effects.  This makes acupuncture a safe alternative when patients want to reduce their prescription medications as in during pregnancy.  Acupuncture can also work alongside medications to help treat their side effects like insomnia, nausea, and fatigue.  

The results are immediate.  Acupuncture increases endorphin release and reduces inflammatory markers.  These two effects alone mean that you will feel better when you get off the table vs. how you felt when you came into the clinic.  In between treatments, life stressors tend to accumulate again and cause symptoms to come back.  This is why some consistency in treatments is best to maintain lasting effects when treating mental health.  Some find that every other week works for them, others come once/month, it really depends on your particular mental health challenges.

Acupuncture can treat multiple things at once.  You can come to an acupuncture treatment and get help for low back pain, upset digestion, and depression all in the same session.  This is why we check in with you before putting in the needles, to find out the list of things that don’t feel good.  How we feel physically and how we feel mentally are always intertwined, and we don’t have to pick either treating the mind or the body when we do acupuncture.  It is always both!