The most profound thing I or anyone can do for your health is to help you experience a state of relaxation, care, and love, and then support you in recreating that experience more often in whatever ways work for your life.

My chosen tool happens to be acupuncture, and it’s incredibly effective. There are infinite other ways to tap into a state of relaxation, to melt stress, to be present, extend yourself some love and care, invite in joy, train your body and brain to enter a parasympathetic state–to rest and digest.

We are so conditioned to “do”. We believe that healing must take lots of effort and work. Creating healthy habits often is effort and work. However, there is tremendous value in the less obvious but critical processes that take place when you rest and relax. If only taking a bath felt as productive as going on a jog, we might live differently.

I can run all kinds of expensive state of the art tests and tell you what supplements and herbs will help you feel better. And it will. However, our bodies are truly designed to be completely self-healing, utterly regenerative on a cellular level (literally).

We get in our own way. We eat crap, we allow chronic stress to take place, we don’t move enough, we don’t drink enough water, we aren’t outside in the sun enough. Our air, products, water, and food is full of chemicals, pesticides, pollutants. No wonder this incredible system breaks down. However, when buffered by a positive attitude, well-managed stress, and strong relationships, our bodies will forgive much of an imperfect diet, an imperfect lifestyle, and exposure to chemicals we can’t control.

Mental Stress Outweighs Diet and Exercise

You can eat the cleanest diet in the world, and your constant high-stress job/relationship/whatever will be the death of you anyway. Everyone knows stress is harmful, but few of us know how to tackle it.

The problem isn’t stress itself– there will always be stress and we are engineered to handle short-term stress beautifully, with health benefits even!

We must change our relationship to stress so that we stop this cycle of chronic long-term activation. This requires some intention. It requires making stress-relief a priority right next to quality time with family or your career. It means scheduling in time every week at first, and then daily to unwind, breathe deeply, get present, be in your body, move, rest, laugh.

Acupuncture Overrides Stress

Acupuncture is one way to override the stress response. When you schedule an acupuncture appointment you are taking an hour or a few hours each week and gifting yourself the desperately needed time to unplug, sink in, rest, and rejuvenate. You don’t have to do anything to benefit. You just show up. With acupuncture, you will enjoy some added perks like improved immune function, circulation, hormone balance, and pain relief too.

One of the most beautiful things about getting regular acupuncture is that you actually train your nervous system to downregulate. You rewire stress pathways to relaxation pathways. You teach your body how to let go. In a culture where this is often a foreign concept, this (passive) training is invaluable. It allows you to recover from stress more quickly, mitigating the damaging effects of stress on your body.

Invest in your health, it’s the smartest investment you’ll ever make.