Acupuncture for Stress: Finding Calm in a World That Won’t Stop Exploding.
When the world feels heavy, sometimes healing begins by helping the nervous system find its way back to calm.
So this post is a bit longer than usual, and for good reason. Many of us are completely overwhelmed. If you know someone who needs help, share this post with them.
I hear some version of the same sentence multiple times every day:
“I’m just stressed.”
Sometimes it’s said with a laugh. Sometimes with a shrug. And sometimes I can see in a patient’s face that there is much more behind those three words. In Mel Robbin’s book, “Stop Saying You’re Fine”, she digs into letting people know how things actually feel. It’s so important.
Work. Money. Family. Health. Politics. War. Violence. Climate concerns. Social media. The seemingly endless stream of bad news bombarding our phones. Despite this, we can’t seem to turn it off.
And lately there is something I hear increasingly from most parents in our office:
“I’m worried about what kind of world my children are going to inherit.”
I understand that one.
As a father, husband, healthcare provider and human being living in the same world as my patients, I don’t exist outside of these concerns. I see the headlines too. I think about the future too.
There are plenty of things happening in the world that we cannot personally control. The people of the world have been through challenging times before, and are currently in other parts of the world, often far, far worse than what we are seeing in North America.
There is something we can work on that is in our control though:
How our nervous system responds to the stressors of our world.
Stress Isn’t Just in Your Head.
Stress is a normal biological response.
When your brain perceives a threat, your body prepares to deal with it. Heart rate can increase. Muscles tighten. Breathing changes. Stress hormones are released. Digestion may slow. Sleep can become more difficult.
This is enormously useful if you’re running away from an axe murderer.
It becomes considerably less useful when the “killer” is your email inbox, mortgage payment, child’s future, work deadline and the evening news.
The problem isn’t that the human stress response exists.
The problem is when we have difficulty turning it off.
I sometimes explain it to patients this way:
Your nervous system has an accelerator and a brake.
The sympathetic nervous system helps mobilize you: The classic “fight or flight” response.
The parasympathetic nervous system participates in the processes associated with rest, recovery, digestion and restoration.
Healthy humans need both.
Needless to say, the goal can’t be to eliminate stress from life. That’s impossible.
The goal is adaptability – being able to respond appropriately when something requires our attention and then return toward a calmer physiological state when the threat has passed. Many of you have smart watches or Oura rings that monitor Heart Rate Variablility, or HRV. HRV is a useful tool in understanding your adaptability.
This is one reason acupuncture has excited me for decades. It calms people. It helps them reset, and we all need this so much.
What Does Acupuncture Have to Do With Stress?
Acupuncture has traditionally been used for thousands of years for a wide variety of health concerns. Modern researchers have increasingly investigated its effects on pain, anxiety, stress and nervous-system regulation.
The research is encouraging, although it is important not to exaggerate what we know. It’s also important to recognize, and I mention this to patients often, that holding Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to western medical research methods is tricky, because the forces at work in TCM are not quantifiable by western medicine and so results are often subjective. That being said, TCM has been around for at least 5,000 years. Do the math again. Jesus died 2,026 years ago. So for at least more than double that time, people have been using TCM because it works. I ask myself, if it didn’t work, would people have used it this long?
All that being said, a randomized controlled trial involving people studying or working at a large university examined acupuncture in participants reporting high levels of stress. Both real and sham acupuncture groups initially improved, but the real acupuncture group showed a significantly greater treatment effect 12 weeks after treatment ended. The authors concluded that acupuncture may help decrease perceived stress and that the effect could persist after treatment.
Research examining anxiety is also interesting.
A “systematic review and meta-analysis” of 20 randomized controlled trials involving 1,823 participants found that acupuncture was associated with greater reductions in anxiety symptoms than control conditions. The researchers also reported generally good tolerance and safety, while emphasizing that better-quality trials are still needed.
A newer systematic review published in 2026 likewise concluded that current evidence suggests acupuncture may provide meaningful benefits for people with anxiety disorders, particularly as an adjunct to conventional treatment. The authors also emphasized limitations in the existing literature, including differences in study design, sample size and acupuncture protocols. What’s important from a systematic review like this is that it suggest Acupuncture as an “add on” to conventional treatment, potentially helping even more as a combo!
Even more interesting to me is the emerging research involving the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is the part of the nervous system that controls, regulates and heals, and is the part of the nervous system that chiropractic care helps so much with. It’s also the part of the nervous system that we test here at the office at the initial exam, and then review with you at your report. It’s the test with the colored lines showing severity of autonomic nerve communication disruption.
A 2025 meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials examined heart-rate variability, or HRV — one method researchers use to study autonomic nervous-system activity. Across 10 trials involving 744 participants, acupuncture produced a modest improvement in one important HRV measurement, although the authors cautioned that the evidence remains heterogeneous and more high-quality research is needed. In our office we encourage patients to use their smart watches and rings to monitor HRV before and after acupuncture as well as during the week once removed from an acupuncture visit.
In other words, we’re beginning to develop a scientific framework for something acupuncture patients have been telling practitioners for generations:
“I feel different after treatment.”
Not drugged.
Not disconnected.
Just…quieter.
The Patient Who Couldn’t Turn Her Brain Off.
I’ll call her Sarah. Her story is typical of patients I’ve treated over the years.
Sarah was a working mother who came into my office carrying what seemed like the weight of the world on her shoulders.
Literally.
Her shoulders were practically touching her ears. Some days more than others.
She wasn’t coming in because something catastrophic had happened. No acute injury. In some ways, that was the problem.
Everything “life” was happening.
Work had become more demanding. One parent was getting older and beginning to need help. Her kids were approaching adulthood, and instead of feeling excited about their futures, she found herself worrying constantly about them. This is the same worry I hear of so often at the office on a daily basis.
Would they be financially secure?
Would they find meaningful careers in the age of AI?
Would they be safe in this world?
What kind of country would they inherit?
What would the world look like in twenty years?
Then she’d read the news.
Another extension of the war.
Another shooting.
Another political crisis.
Lies.
Another story predicting some new catastrophe.
She described waking up at 3:00 in the morning and immediately beginning to think.
One thought became five.
Five became fifty.
By 4:00 AM she was lying in bed trying desperately to make herself relax and get some sleep.
If you’ve ever experienced that, you already know how well that works…
She wasn’t looking for a miracle.
She simply wanted to feel like herself again.
So acupuncture became one part of her care because she couldn’t afford to have her mind chemically dulled with medications. She had too much to do.
Something interesting began happening after she started acupuncture.
After one of her early treatments she sat up and said:
“I don’t remember the last time I felt that quiet.”
That didn’t mean her problems had disappeared.
Her job was still demanding.
Her parents were still aging.
Her children still had uncertain futures.
The news was still the news.
But her response to those things was beginning to change.
Over the following weeks, she told me she was falling asleep more easily. She wasn’t waking quite as often with her mind racing. Her shoulders weren’t constantly clenched. She found herself reacting less intensely to little problems.
And perhaps most importantly, she began recognizing something:
Feeling calm didn’t mean she had stopped caring. BUT… her calm allowed her to care more, and in all the best ways.
She could care deeply about her children without spending every waking moment frightened about their future.
She could be informed about the world without allowing the world to occupy every corner of her nervous system.
That is an important distinction.
Acupuncture Doesn’t Make the World Go Away.
I think this is where conversations about stress sometimes go wrong.
We tell people to meditate.
Exercise.
Take a walk.
Get off their phones.
Sleep eight hours.
Eat better.
Those are all good suggestions.
But sometimes people hear something else:
“You shouldn’t be feeling this way.”
I disagree.
There are legitimate reasons to feel concerned about the world.
There are legitimate reasons to worry about our children.
There are legitimate financial, social, political and personal pressures affecting people every day.
The objective isn’t to become indifferent to those things.
It’s to become more resilient in the presence of them.
That is very different.
What Might Acupuncture Be Doing?
We don’t have every answer yet, but here’s some evolving science:
Current research suggests acupuncture may influence several systems involved in stress and anxiety, including autonomic nervous-system activity and brain signaling associated with the stress response. Researchers have also proposed effects involving the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, or HPA, axis — one of the major systems involved in regulating our physiological response to stress.
But I think there’s also value in remembering something simpler that adds to an acupuncture session.
For perhaps 30–45 minutes, you are lying still.
Your phone isn’t in your hand.
Nobody needs anything from you.
You’re not answering emails.
You’re not scrolling through headlines.
You’re not solving tomorrow.
You’re simply allowing your body an opportunity to settle.
And sometimes that is remarkably powerful.
Stress Is Not Weakness
One thing I want my patients to understand is that experiencing stress doesn’t mean you’re failing at life.
It means you’re human.
Our brains evolved to pay attention to potential threats. Today, however, we have something previous generations never experienced:
An almost unlimited supply of threats delivered directly into our pockets 24 hours a day.
Our nervous systems weren’t designed for that.
We can know what happened halfway around the planet within seconds.
We can watch tragedy unfold repeatedly and graphically.
We can compare our lives with thousands of other people’s lives before breakfast. Lives that are not real, but they appear real.
Parents can spend enormous amounts of time imagining every possible thing that might happen to their children.
Eventually, the nervous system may need some help finding the brake pedal again.
For some people, acupuncture can be one tool that helps.
There Is Still Room for Hope.
This is the part I don’t want us to lose.
Hope.
Human beings have lived through extraordinarily difficult periods before.
Wars.
Pandemics.
Economic collapses.
Political upheaval.
Natural disasters.
Personal tragedies.
And still people fell in love.
They raised children.
They planted gardens.
They made music.
They opened businesses.
They helped strangers.
They laughed at dinner tables.
They healed.
Our children deserve our concern.
But they also deserve something else from us:
Our hope.
They need to see adults who understand that uncertainty doesn’t automatically mean catastrophe.
They need to see that strength doesn’t mean never feeling frightened.
Sometimes strength means acknowledging fear, taking care of ourselves, helping the people around us and continuing forward anyway.
Healing doesn’t require pretending that everything is fine.
Healing can begin with recognizing that even when the world around us feels chaotic, we can still cultivate moments of calm within ourselves.
Perhaps lying quietly on an acupuncture table for half an hour and giving your nervous system permission to stop solving the entire world.
You don’t have to fix everything today.
You don’t have to know exactly what the future holds.
And you certainly don’t have to carry tomorrow’s problems every minute of today.
Sometimes healing begins much more simply.
A quiet room.
A few needles.
A slower breath.
And the realization that underneath all of the noise, your body still remembers how to find its way toward calm.
The world may be uncertain.
But uncertainty and hopelessness are not the same thing.
There is still tremendous capacity for healing.
There is still tremendous capacity for change.
And there is always room for hope.
— Dr. Lou
**Acupuncture in and of itself should not stress people out. The needles are small and don’t usually hurt at all. At our office, the cost for 2026 is very affordable and ranges from $125 at its highest, to as little as $80 when bundled with other services. I can’t in good conscience charge so much that acupuncture is not available to everyone. Many offices in Portland charge up to $185/visit. Not fair. I lived in China for nearly two years and have studied and practiced acupuncture and TCM for over 25 years. Even with those credentials, it doesn’t have to be a luxury. Our prices are fair and manageable for everyone, and with zero clinical compromise.
**Insurance is accepted and we will verify your benefits for you to help you navigate an otherwise stressful insurance system! **SMILES**
For more information please call our office.
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