According to the website Anxiety.org, anxiety disorders are characterized by a general feature of excessive fear (i.e. emotional response to perceived or real threat) and/or anxiety (i.e. worrying about a future threat) and can have negative behavioral and emotional consequences.
Anxiety manifests in different ways for different people.
Do you:
- Often have a sense of dread,
- Have butterflies in your midsection,
- Have trouble sleeping,
- Start to hyperventilate,
- Have increased heart rate or
- Break out in a sweat?
However anxiety manifests for you, acupuncture and massage have known benefits to helping reduce your anxiety and help you feel calm and normal again.
In addition to the studies listed below, we have our own case studies of patients who have come in for anxiety and panic attacks with great results from acupuncture. One female, age 35, had been put on heart medications to stop her racing heart and sense of panic. After several treatments, she was able to get off the heart meds and live her life like a normal mother and business owner. Consistent treatments over time helped her and after she was better, doing follow up treatments as part of her self care routine made a tremendous difference in her quality of life.
Although the research isn’t the strongest on the acupuncture side, mostly due to the difficulties of collecting the studies from around the world, our personal experience with helping patients speaks for itself. There is nothing better than helping someone who has come in and feels like they’re going to lose it, then, when they leave they are so calm and chill they feel like they took medication but they didn't!
But, don’t take our word on it, below I”ve included some more information from the research. We look forward to helping you overcome your mental distress.
Call us at 910.262.1122. JJ will help you get a consultation scheduled to help you get your life back!
According to Acupuncture for Anxiety: Benefits, Side Effects, and What to Expect (healthline.com), there have been several studies done about the effects of acupuncture on anxiety. These studies have focused mostly on generalized anxiety disorder and suggest that acupuncture is helpful in treating general anxiety. One promising study from 2015, for example, found that acupuncture improved symptoms in people with anxiety that didn’t respond to other treatments, including psychotherapy and medication. Participants received ten 30-minute sessions of acupuncture over the course of 12 weeks. They experienced a significant reduction in their anxiety, even 10 weeks after treatment.
In another study about the effectiveness of massage for anxiety, Massage Therapy Research Review (nih.gov) found that moderate pressure massage has increased weight gain in preterm infants, reduced pain in different syndromes including fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis, enhanced attentiveness, reduced depression and improved immune function (increased natural killer cells and natural killer cell activity). When moderate and light pressure massage have been compared, moderate pressure massage reduced depression, anxiety and heart rate, altered EEG patterns and increased vagal activity, as in a relaxation response. Increased vagal activity has also been associated with decreased cortisol following massage. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data have suggested that moderate pressure massage was represented in several brain regions including the amygdala, the hypothalamus and the anterior cingulate cortex, all areas involved in stress and emotion regulation.