Stress Management in San Antonio, TX
Serenity Acupuncture & Healing Center helps individuals manage many forms of stress, from everyday tension and overwhelm to the emotional and physical effects associated with anxiety, burnout, sleep issues, and chronic stress.
Serenity Acupuncture & Healing Center Gets To The Root Of Stress
We live in a world where stress can feel like it is at an all-time high. Our ability to feel safe, to navigate our present reality, our capacity to feel calm, peaceful, and happy, become more challenging with each passing year. While there have been many times in the history of this planet when people have struggled with stress, right now, it feels unprecedented.
Understanding How Chronic Stress Keeps Your Body In “Fight or Flight” Mode
The Heart Math Institute in Boulder, California has been studying stress and how it affects the human body, for decades. Some of their work, which focuses on the sympathetic and parasympathetic parts of the brain, indicate that people, especially those in the United States, stay in a state of stress maybe 70% of the time. Sympathetic is the fight or flight response of the body. Parasympathetic is the rest and relaxation response. Our brain is designed to keep us in a state of rest and relaxed mode, except, and only when there is danger.
In modern life, chronic stress, financial anxiety, and digital overload can cause many individuals to stay "stuck" in a low-level sympathetic state. When the body fails to properly transition back to parasympathetic dominance, it results in a condition called sympathetic overdrive or sympathetic dominance.
The Physical Effects of Chronic Stress on Your Body
When your nervous system is stuck in fight-or-flight, your sympathetic nervous system is constantly firing, treating modern, everyday stressors like life-threatening dangers. This traps your body in an exhausting loop of elevated adrenaline and cortisol, disrupting sleep, digestion, and healing.
If you are constantly locked in this state, your body diverts blood flow away from the digestion system (causing slow metabolism and weight gain) and the immune system (making you more prone to illness). It will elevate your resting heart rate which puts additional strain on your heart and can lead to potential heart conditions and can cause long-term issues due to continual stress.
Research shows that about 62% of newly diagnosed hypertensive patients and 30% of metabolic syndrome patients are a result of the sympathetic system being in overdrive.
Restoring Balance: Supporting Your Body’s Natural Relaxation Response
Because this chronic activation is a physiological pattern, it requires intentional action to shift your body back into the "rest and digest" parasympathetic state. Acupuncture is one very effective way of resetting this system in your body. Even after just one treatment, patients are often amazed at how relaxed they feel and with regular treatments on a monthly, bimonthly or even trimonthly basis, that state of relaxation can become more easily obtained.
Incorporating other modalities to continue to perpetuate the parasympathetic response is essential. Meditation, yoga, deep breathing exercises, coffee with a friend, taking walks, being in nature, bubble baths or just being in water, whatever brings you to a state of peace, even for a few minutes each day, will help to reduce that fight or flight response that is so easily triggered by our often-chaotic lives.