The holidays are almost here! It is amazing how fast time flies. This is a joyful time of the year for most people, but if you’re hosting or entertaining this season, you might feel a bit of holiday stress and anxiety with all the preparations that come along with it. In this guide, we explore how to use acupuncture to reduce and manage your stress this busy holiday season rather than drowning your worries in eggnog.

How to Use Acupuncture to Reduce Your Stress this Holiday Season

Acupuncture offers you a way to escape the chaos of your home for a few hours and enjoy some rejuvenating therapy that drains the busy holiday stress from your body, leaving you feeling refreshed.

Relieve Anxiety & Stress with Acupuncture

Are you cooking for the family this holiday season? Maybe your in-laws are arriving soon, and you’re preparing for the verbal battle between yourself and your mother-in-law. Taking some slow deep breaths can be an effective way to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, promoting relaxation when you feel stressed.

How Acupuncture Works

The holiday season can be a stressful time of the year, but you can relieve the pressure by going for an acupuncture session. Acupuncture treatments can stimulate the release of endorphins. Endorphins are natural pain-relieving and mood-boosting chemicals in the body.

Acupuncture soothes the sympathetic nervous system, reducing levels of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline. If you don’t do anything to manage these hormones, they activate the fight-or-flight response, leaving you feeling anxious. Acupuncture is a great way to soothe the body’s stress response, keeping you relaxed during the holiday season.

Improve Digestion

The gut-brain axis is subject to a stress response when you feel overwhelmed during the holiday season. Plus, overeating isn’t doing it any favors, either. Acupuncture releases tension and stress in the GI tract, resulting in improved digestion – which will be useful after Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner.

Acupuncture treatment can assist with providing relief from constipation, bloating, acid reflux, diarrhea, and chronic GI inflammation.

Headache Relief

Kids running, screaming, and listening to music while you try to cook for family and friends is a recipe for a headache. Instead of popping pills to relieve the stress and pain, try an acupuncture session as a preventative measure. The needles release tension in your head, neck, and shoulders, providing relief from the causes of tension headaches and brain fog. You’ll think clearly and brush off the stress without a hitch.

Acupuncture for Recovery

The holiday season means running around the mall to find the perfect gift, driving distances to see friends, and playing with the kids.

All this activity leads to a build-up of tension in the body and plenty of muscle and joint stiffness. Acupuncture helps relax muscles and bones, aiding in recovery from physical symptoms caused by the busy holiday season.

Improve Sleep

After a busy day with family members and kids, your adrenaline and cortisol levels are at their peak. All of this excitement might make it hard to fall asleep.

An acupuncture session helps to relieve the tension in your body. This allows you to fall asleep faster and toss and turn less at night. Getting enough sleep is an important factor in your overall mental health.

Acupuncture also improves your sleep quality, helping you get more deep and REM sleep during your time between the sheets.

Whether it’s holiday stress or chronic stress, acupuncture can help improve your overall well-being. Schedule an appointment and prepare yourself for the holiday season that is upon us.

Southlake Natural Family Wellness

Our mission is to support the health and well-being of our patients.

We offer individualized, comprehensive holistic care including acupuncture, herbal recommendations, customized nutritional counseling, allergy elimination (NAET), whole food supplements, lifestyle suggestions, moxibustion, and cupping. As well as helping couples get pregnant and STAY pregnant by supporting all the paths to conception.

About Farrah Hamraie

Farrah Hamraie, L.Ac, MOM, Dipl.OM (NCCAOM), is licensed and board-certified in Acupuncture and Herbal medicine in the State of Texas with a Masters of Oriental Medicine from the Dallas College of Oriental Medicine.

She is also a Diplomat of NCCAOM (the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine), a Board Certified Acupuncturist, a Chinese Herbalist, and a member of the American Association of Oriental Medicine.