Today’s blog post will discuss easy ways you can achieve holiday stress relief, feel more joy, and stay healthy this holiday season. The key ingredient is a Raleigh Acupuncture holiday stress relief treatment. Come in for a treatment, then apply these three principles for an awesome holiday.*
(*Just because we write these suggestions doesn’t mean we do them well. We’re just as challenged as you!)
STEP ONE – Keep Breathing
Imagine you’re a smoker. Every 45 minutes you have to excuse yourself, step outside, and smoke a cigarette. The only difference is that instead of smoking, you just breath, in and out, as if you were smoking – without a cigarette. That’s called intentional breathing. If you want to impress your friends you can call it meditation. It’s crucial for keeping your stress levels low. I’ll explain why below.
STEP TWO – Take The High Road
When someone or something triggers you, take the high road, do the right thing, and don’t let yourself get sucked into the vortex of angry reaction. Be the mature one. See that whoever is annoying you is not doing it out of malice. They’re probably stressed out and just acting out. If you don’t take it personally it won’t bother you as much.
STEP THREE – Remember The Joy
If you’re married, remember the time you met your spouse and fell in love. If you’re single, remember a happy memory of your family or best friend. Dwell on these happy memories for a moment. These positive thoughts are the best medicine for the heart and soul. We are bombarded with trouble and pain every day. Our friends and loved ones give us endless grief. Yet, we love them and they love us. It’s easy to forget the good stuff. Let’s remember it, just for a moment.
How Does Acupuncture Address This?
Step One: Breathing and Chinese Medicine
Chinese medicine practitioners are always talking about Qi. Qi is a form of energy. It’s what makes life possible, nourishes the organs, muscles and joints, and allows us to function. Just as our cars need gas to run, our bodies need qi. We make qi from the food we eat and the air we breathe.
It’s so easy to forget to breathe. During stressful situations we simply don’t breathe properly. Intentional breathing, as described above, helps train our bodies to remember to breathe more fully, even in times of stress. Better breathing results in more qi nourishing our bodies and minds. That makes for a happier us.
The Raleigh Acupuncture holiday stress relief treatment makes this whole breathing issue much easier to accomplish. It naturally gets your qi to move and primes your lungs to breathe better.
Step Two: The High Road and Chinese Medicine
Our natural reaction to hostility is to meet it head on with an equal amount of hostility. When someone cuts us off on the road we curse at them, or at a minimum call them an idiot. At the moment we are being cut off, or the moment a loved one loses their temper with us, or the moment we drop and break a dish at home, something very specific is happening inside of our bodies. We call it stress.
In Chinese medicine we recognize that stress causes our qi to stagnate. The qi that flows continuously through our bodies becomes stuck or stagnant in that moment. The problem with qi stagnation is that it doesn’t just cause the feeling of stress. It also stresses our body, our organs, and our health. Qi stagnation is not good for us. It weakens our immune system, triggers pains in the body, and messes with our health.
Less qi stagnation equals a happier, healthier life. That’s where taking the high road comes in. Anything we can do to reduce qi stagnation helps us. So if we can be less triggered, even a fraction of the time, we’re better off.
Once again, the Raleigh Acupuncture holiday stress relief treatment makes “taking the high road” much easier to accomplish. The treatment gets your qi flowing like a river in spring. So when the forces of the world conspire to stagnate your qi, you can roll with it much more easily.
Step Three: Joy and Chinese Medicine
We all grew up as kids knowing that joy was an emotion of the heart. It was only when we got older that we were told the heart had nothing to do with joy. It was just an organ that pumped blood. Well, in Chinese medicine joy IS related to the heart. All organs, in Chinese medicine, have an associated emotion. Liver is anger, spleen is worry, lungs are grief, and the heart is joy.
Feeling more joy in life is therefore good medicine for the heart. On an intuitive level you know this is true. Now you know that it’s medically based – with Chinese medicine. So when we focus on joy, we nourish our hearts.
In our fast paced, busy lives it’s easy to go through a day, a week or even a month without tapping into joy. So it’s a good habit to remember past joyful times in order to activate the feeling. Start remembering happy memories and next thing you know you’ll be feeling a bit more joyful.
One of the greatest benefits of the Raleigh Acupuncture holiday stress relief treatment is how it nourishes your heart so you can feel more joy. If you are struggling with tapping in to your joy, get an acupuncture treatment and ask us to nourish your heart. You will be amazed at how good you feel afterwards.
Here at Raleigh Acupuncture we wish you a happy and healthy holiday season. May the New Year bring joy and peace to you and your family.
Raleigh Acupuncture Holiday Stress Relief
Watch this video to learn how acupuncture reduces stress.
To learn more about other conditions we treat with acupuncture click CONDITIONS WE TREAT.
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