12/03/2024
Sleeping Problems, Insomnia and Five Element Acupuncture
Lying awake at 4am while the rest of the world sleeps. The silence is deafening. Thoughts rushing through your head. The pressure of having to get through the next day whilst tired and not at the best of your ability. Worry and anxiety sets in as the clock ticks ever closer to towards wake up time. You are still wide awake.
As many as 16 million UK adults (1) are suffering from sleepless nights as a third (31%) say they have insomnia.
Don’t worry you are not alone.
Our societal structure expects extra work hours, the ability to tackle problems outside of our job description, to carry other colleagues weight when needed and that's to name just a few.
For some it is not a problem, but for those with insomnia it can be a constant struggle.
One thing that is becoming clear as more studies emerge is how important our sleep is to the normal function of the human body and so to almost every aspect of our life.
Why getting a good night’s sleep is so important - What the research says:
Sleep deprivation has been linked to heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke (2), gaining weight (3), shorter life span (4), weaker immune system, memory (5) quality of life, and the list goes on. It’s difficult to find an area of life that is not affected when a person does not get enough sleep.
I suffered from insomnia for a long time. It became so debilitating I decided to do my own research and investigated the subject not only to understand the causes but to find real coping mechanisms and finally a cure.
Essentially I wanted to perform both better at work and socially, increase my general health and my sense of well being. It was only when I got treated successfully with five element acupuncture that I first recognised this was a real possibility.
All too often people with insomnia will plough through the day having not rested sufficiently and lacking energy. Getting by on minimal sleep sees people eating into reserves they don’t have which can lead to burnout.
Every night I could not sleep more than 4 hours and then would wake up and be unable to get back to sleep. Lying there feeling so tired and heavy, my muscles aching, knowing if I could just get an extra hour it would be ok. But something was stopping me from falling back to sleep. Frustration would set in. I knew the day ahead was going to be horrible.
I had just enough sleep so I could do my job, but everything else in my life went out of the window. At the weekends I was so exhausted I’d have no energy to do recreational activities. I understandably became depressed.
How Acupuncture Can Help:
When insomnia is treated with five element acupuncture the results can be profound. The reason five element acupuncture helps so well is that for someone who is prone to sleeping problems the cause is often a simple block in the meridian energy pathways. The trick is often finding the block, but once it has been found and is removed the changes can be noticeable straight away, the very same night.
Other types of acupuncture do not treat these blocks in the same way and so the results may take much longer. So this is why the five element system works so well for insomnia.
Once the patient has regained the right amount of sleep necessary for them, it is then a case of continuing the acupuncture enough to strengthen the whole body system so the person can prevent the symptoms from reoccurring.
How Do We Strengthen The Body?
Treating the root cause:
Aside from blocks in the meridian system, with Five Element Acupuncture we aim to treat the root cause of the illness. Everyone has an Achilles heal within the five elements, think of it like a weak system within the body. As the body is a collection of interconnected systems, any person is only as strong as its weakest part.
Through our diagnosis we aim to discover this weakness and treat it. By allowing the weaker part to receive more energy this can then be shared through the rest of the body and the person recovers fully. It is a more long term solution than any short term fixes such as sleeping tablets which themselves lead to further undesirable side effects.
Doctors are very limited as to what they can do when a patient comes to them with a sleeping problem. If they do prescribe drugs, the drugs won’t fix the symptoms in the long term, they provide only temporary relief and leave the person feeling tired and groggy the next day, unable to engage fully with life.
I always have great results with my patients. Some of them don’t even come for sleeping problems, but when I treat them for the other condition and their sleep improves it’s an extra bonus they weren’t expecting.
And with Better Sleep…………..
You are more inclined to eat less
Live longer
Live happier
Have a healthy immune system
Improve your memory
Have a better quality of life
1. www.aviva.com/newsroom/news-releases/2017/10/Sleepless-cities-revealed-as-one-in-three-adults-suffer-from-insomnia/&ved=2ahUKEwi5sPan2ozkAhW_VRUIHedzBm4QFjACegQIDhAG&usg=AOvVaw1R1HMS9CHMSHBy9KISN
2. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/sleep-deprivation-and-deficiency
3. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/connection-between-sleep-and-overeating
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2864873/
5.https://www.healthline.com/health/science-sleep-why-you-need-7-8-hours-night -memory
Increasing evidence suggests an association between both short and long duration of habitual sleep with adverse health outcomes.To assess whether the population longitudinal evidence supports the presence of a relationship between duration of sleep and ...
