Acupuncture for Insomnia

There are many reasons why someone might not be sleeping. Acupuncture treats insomnia very effectively whether it is caused by stress, anxiety and worry, acid reflux, hot flashes, pain, frequent bathroom trips, or even those inexplicable nights when you are just staring at the ceiling.

Insomnia can be anything from frequently waking at night or laying in bed with your mind racing, to sleepless nights.

Some people respond quickly with 2 or 3 sessions; others take many weeks. One of my first insomnia patients had had poor sleep all her life, with frequent nightmares and occasional terrors. For 12 sessions, we worked without any change at all. I finally caught on to a connection between her insomnia and digestive symptoms that she had also had for many years, and suddenly it shifted dramatically. Over the next 4 weeks she went from terrible sleep every night to one or two good nights a week, and then to 7 out of 7. At that point, she took a break from acupuncture and returned once every month or two when stress from work or life would cause her to have a couple bad nights of sleep. One booster acupuncture treatment and the insomnia was gone again.

Since this early patient, I’ve treated a lot of people for insomnia and all, thankfully, improved faster than this, but the pattern of recovery has been basically the same.

With insomnia, we look at three situations:

• What’s happening at bedtime,

• how you feel in the morning,

• and what happens during the night.

Bedtime

Anxiety and worry are the main players here. Acupuncture helps calm the nerves and settle the mind. Alongside meditation or gentle exercise and a regular bedtime routine (called “sleep hygiene”), weekly acupuncture for insomnia teaches your body to settle into sleep more quickly.

This mental-emotional insomnia often simply requires steady effort in meditation. Meditation is a practice of becoming aware of your internal experience, your mind in particular, and gaining some amount of control with it. A little bit of dedicated practice every day, especially with the guidance of an experienced teacher, can change your state of mind in a matter of weeks. Acupuncture helps the process by teaching your body how to switch quickly into the parasympathetic “rest and digest” state. What’s interesting is that body’s do not become dependent on acupuncture, but rather learns what happens in an acupuncture treatment and develops a new habit. Meditation and acupuncture work synergistically to treat the root cause of stress-induced insomnia.

Secondarily, some people experience acid reflux that acts up when they laying down. The fix might be as simple as eating dinner earlier in the evening, eating a smaller dinner, or eliminating aggravating foods like chili, garlic or dairy.

A more complicated situation is when the top of the stomach, called the lower esophageal sphincter, does not close completely, so that stomach acid pours into the esophagus. Acupuncture is one of the best treatments for this problem. The usual medications suppress stomach acid production, which can negatively affect digestion and are only band-aid treatments that do not address the real problem. Surgery may be on the table, but surgery always has significant costs to it and should always be a very last resort. Recovery from the surgery itself and the time off work or away from family, bad reactions to anaesthetic, long-term scar tissue adhesions affecting the stomach, diaphragm, and other structures in the neighborhood, and the time and financial costs to the health care system are all reasons to try absolutely everything else before surgery.

Acupuncture can be an effective treatment for acid reflux whether from a problem with stomach acid or with the lower esophageal sphincter, and it has none of the potentially significant downsides of acid-suppressing medications or surgery.

Morning

Here we look at either waking up too early in the morning, or waking up feeling groggy and exhausted.

Waking up “too early” may not be a problem at all—the problem may be in going sleep too late. If you are asleep by 10pm or 11pm, then it may be totally fine to wake up at 4am or 5am. And yes, you may then feel tired by lunch time, and that might be perfectly normal. Do your most challenging work in the morning, have a short nap after lunch, and then finish your day with the lighter and more enjoyable tasks.

When it comes to sleep, “normal” has a lot of variation to it. Some people have a naturally late cycle. Some people sleep better with a shorter nighttime sleep and a midday nap. Almost everyone experience variation throughout their lifetime. What’s more important is noticing whether your energy is enough to get you through the day.

An obvious problem is waking feeling not rested, even after being “asleep” for many hours. This suggests that your “asleep” is more like standing up sideways, i.e. not sleep at all.

During the night

Very shallow sleep or waking frequent is the most difficult situation that we’ve discussed so far, but do not be discouraged, it can change! I have seen it happen many times.

Shallow sleep may come from the breath (as in sleep apnea), from the mind (as with dream-disturbed sleep), or from the body (pain or urination, for example). These tend to be harder to change, and may need layered treatment. Sometimes acupuncture alone can manage this. More often, acupuncture is one aspect of an overall practice of wellbeing. Diet, mental and emotional health, general exercise like walking or Tai Chi, and perhaps targeted exercises, may all be part of the day-to-day that realigns your circadian rhythm and gets your sleep deeper and more restful.

A final thought on sleeping pills…

Sleeping pills work for many people, but they have side effects and easily create dependency. Sleeping pills do not help you sleep better; they hijack your body and knock you out for a night. The more this happens, the less your body can sleep on its own. This, to me, is bad medicine—medicine that creates dependency and ultimately leaves you worse off than you were at the start.

There are plenty of pharmaceuticals that are helpful and worth the short- or long-term side effects. I do not believe that sleeping pills are among those, not when there are effective natural remedies.

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Henry practices acupuncture and natural medicine in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. He also teaches Tai Chi and Qigong, and teaches acupuncture courses at undergraduate and professional levels.

Cover photo by Hessam Nabavi on Unsplash.