Looking for stress management on the Gold Coast?
First, lets take a look at what stress looks like.
Good Stress
Stress can be good, it can motivate you. It can create feelings of happiness or accomplishment and may help propel you forward in certain situations leading to greater fulfilment or success. This ‘good’ stress is commonly known as ‘eustress’. Eustress usually doesn’t last long and you can typically recover and relax once it’s over e.g. meeting a deadline or sitting an exam.
Bad Stress
Commonly known as ‘Negative stress’ is stress that creates concern, worry or hopelessness due to a lack of control over a particular situation. If this negative stress is ongoing or has been present for a long time it may be detrimental to your health. In fact, this type of stress can be a silent burden until physical symptoms begin to appear.
Some symptoms associated with stress may include (1):
The list of symptoms might sound overwhelming. Clinically we often notice some of the mentioned symptoms among people who experience high levels of stress, frequently. Whether the stress started out as ‘eustress’ or ‘negative stress’, if it doesn’t go away, it may inhibit your body and lead to stress induced long term health conditions or diseases (i.e. cardiovascular disease, stroke, high blood pressure etc.)
In order to effectively understand your stress levels and aim to enhance relaxation, your Acupuncturist will do a thorough health screen on your current and previous health history. Inspect your tongue and palpate different locations on your abdomen or limbs in order to determine the aetiology (causes) of your presenting symptoms from a Chinese Medicine perspective. Your pulses on each wrist will be felt to define how your body is functioning to help confirm a correct diagnosis. Other methods like moxibustion, cupping or deep breathing techniques may be implemented into your treatment.
Our treatments are 60-minutes long. This allows for plenty of “you time” allowing your body to slow down and unwind. By doing so may greatly enhance your wellbeing in the future and allow you to regain some balance - mentally and physically by being still in a space of calm, and not rushed in a day of chaos.
Sleep, Anxiety, Digestion and Depression
The inability to sleep properly can be one of the worst ways to suffer. Particularly if you are prone to feeling stressed, experience chronic pain or depression. An inability to have good quality sleep can make everything feel much worse. From an overactive mind to the way we experience pain, feel symptoms of anxiety or experience digestive discomfort. These symptoms may be exacerbated by both stress and a lack of sleep contributing to an additional stress within our lives affecting our daily functioning and emotional wellbeing.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine Insomnia is often a disharmony of a particular organ. Whether there is an imbalance with the heart, stomach, liver or gallbladder, qi or blood – these aetiologies (causes) of disharmonies will be determined by your Acupuncturist with the use of pulse diagnosis and palpation skills in order to help restore balance.
Although the effectiveness of acupuncture on some conditions in still unclear and research is ongoing. Findings have revealed that acupuncture may be able to help individuals with depression, through improvements in quality of life, sleep and moods (3) and by assisting chronic pain may also help with the reduction of depression symptoms. With this knowledge, it is always important to contact your practitioner for a conversation to confirm how and wether acupuncture can help your symptoms.
It is paramount at our Gold Coast Acupuncture Clinic that we understand the nature of your symptoms, and how they started. This way your Acupuncturist is better able to provide care, i.e. refer you to counselling or to a psychologist or psychiatrist to help implement strategies if the nature of your symptoms are derived from stress and time management. By understanding you better, we can tailor treatments to help you more effectively, and this is our priority.
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