Balancing Emotions to Treat Your Headache

There is a belief in Chinese medicine that illness comes from imbalanced emotions.  In other words, stress makes you sick!  While it’s normal to feel the full range of emotions, these emotions usually pass once felt.  When you get stuck in one emotional state repetitively, such as anger or worry, this can affect your mental and physical health.

As 6th century philosopher Liu Zhou said, “If the spirit is at peace, the heart is in harmony; when the heart is in harmony, the body is whole; if the spirit becomes aggravated the heart wavers, and when the heart wavers the body becomes injured; if one seeks to heal the physical body, therefore, one needs to regulate the spirit first.”  

Addressing underlying emotional patterns is a big part of treating headache.  As an Acupuncturist, part of my job is to detect which emotions may be out of balance related to the location and quality of your headache.  Each major organ and its meridian (energy pathway) corresponds to an emotion.  The lung and large intestine correspond to grief and letting go, the kidney and bladder correspond to fear and indecision, the liver and gall bladder correspond to anger and frustration, the heart and small intestine correspond to joy and bitterness, and the spleen and stomach relate to worry and overthinking.

Once I identify the emotional pattern at play, I select the appropriate acupuncture points to bring you back into balance.  As we treat the emotions, the physical body naturally relaxes and functions better.  And as we treat the organ and meridian related to your headache, it naturally brings your emotions back into balance.  Both happen simultaneously with acupuncture because of its holistic nature. Patients report pain relief related to their headache and migraine while experiencing improved mood, sleep, and digestion.