Balancing the Racing Mind: Acupuncture’s Ancient Solution for Anxiety
By: Logan Maguire, R. Acu
A racing mind, sweaty palms, poor sleep, feeling your heartbeat; these symptoms may be familiar to those of us who deal with anxiety. Anxiety has become more and more common in our culture but such a condition is nothing new to humanity. The ancient medical practitioners of China dealt with this condition and have honed the diagnoses into the approach to treatment used by modern day acupuncturists.
While things like overwork, exhaustion and diet all play a role in the manifestation of anxiety, there are two aspects that an acupuncturist may focus on: the mind and the spleen. Now you may be asking yourself why the spleen is showing up in this discussion. It’s not typically an organ we hear much about; I mean, if we can keep going without one, surely it can’t be that important, right? Within Traditional Chinese Medicine it and its related systems play a more important role.
From this perspective the spleen is responsible for both the energy we gather from food and the ’emotion’ of overthinking. Both the stomach and spleen are considered paired in Chinese medicine: a bit of a dynamic duo. When we don’t fuel this duo with the nutrition they need and overtax the fuel we do put in, then we may run out of ‘spleen energy’. Physically overworking ourselves taxes our muscles, which are energized by the spleen, and mental overwork saps that same energy too. When we get to a point of burn out, we tend to be stretching both our mental and physical limits and it’s our spleens that take the brunt of that.
The other half of this anxious struggle is the mind itself. Through means such as exercise and mindfulness we can help calm and organize our minds, but through acupuncture you can alter your internal balance more directly. When the mind is out of balance it can be seen as a balloon carried on the wind: ungrounded and affected by any breeze and event. Acupuncture, though you may not want to picture it around balloons, has a means of anchoring an untethered mind. The mind, in Traditional Chinese Medicine, is contained within the blood. And wouldn’t you know, the spleen plays an integral role in building the blood from the foods we eat. Activating the spleen’s acupoints via acupuncture, the energy of the spleen can regenerate and blood can be produced. Creating blood builds a place for the mind to rest internally, so you can think more clearly and sleep more soundly.
Acupuncture is a modality developed over many generations. Through questioning, observation and iteration an acupuncturist can discern the imbalances causing your anxious feelings and aid you in your journey back to peace of mind one point at a time.