When Your Body Can’t Switch Off: Understanding and Healing Chronic Stress with Chinese Medicine
If you’re reading this, chances are your body feels like it’s stuck in overdrive. Maybe you’re lying awake at 3am with your mind racing through tomorrow’s to-do list or yesterday’s interactions. Maybe you’re having those anxiety dreams where you can’t find your way out or you’re being chased. Perhaps your stomach is constantly unsettled, your shoulders live somewhere near your ears, or you wake up with a clenched jaw and tangled sheets after a night that felt more like running a marathon than sleeping.
You’re not alone. Since COVID-19 and the ongoing economic and social challenges that followed, there’s been a compounding layer of stress with little reprieve. What we’re seeing is collective chronic stress—and our bodies are bearing the weight.
The Many Faces of Chronic Stress
Chronic stress doesn’t always look like panic attacks or obvious anxiety. Often, it shows up as a collection of seemingly unrelated physical symptoms that leave you wondering what’s wrong with your body:
Sleep Disturbances: Difficulty falling asleep, waking frequently, those vivid stress dreams where you’re trying to get home but can’t find the way, being chased, or endlessly problem-solving. You might wake feeling like you’ve run a marathon, with messy sheets and finding yourself in strange sleeping positions.
Digestive Issues: What I call “nervous belly”—a grumbly stomach followed by diarrhea, often with loss of appetite. Alternatively, you might experience the opposite: a “holding pattern” where stress makes it difficult to have a bowel movement, as if your body can’t let go.
Muscle Tension and Pain: Chronic shoulder and hip tension, teeth grinding or jaw clenching during sleep (often without realizing it), headaches, neck pain, and TMJ pain. When there’s significant tension in the jaw and TMJ area, this can irritate the amygdala—your brain’s stress center—creating a feedback loop that perpetuates the sense of being on high alert.
Inflammatory and Immune Issues: Increased inflammation throughout the body, autoimmune flares, frequent illness, or conditions that won’t quite resolve.
Mood Changes: Anxiety, irritability, feeling emotionally fragile, or depression that seems to come from nowhere.
These aren’t separate problems—they’re all part of the same picture. Your body is stuck in survival mode.
Understanding the Nervous System Trap
As humans, we’re designed to co-regulate—to find calm and safety through connection with others. But living in dense urban environments where we’re constantly stimulated, combined with the collective stress of recent years, makes it incredibly difficult to break out of chronic stress patterns. We’re surrounded by other nervous systems that are also dysregulated, and it can be a vicious cycle.
Here’s what happens physiologically: When your body perceives threat (real or percieved), it activates the sympathetic nervous system—your “fight, freeze or flight” response. This is meant to be temporary: you face the threat, then return to parasympathetic functioning—”rest and digest”—where healing, digestion, sleep and restoration happen.
But with chronic stress, your body finds it hard to switch back. The vagus nerve, which acts as the brake on your stress response, becomes weakened. The organ systems that get switched off when you’re running from the theoretical bear—digestion, reproduction, immune function, tissue repair—don’t come back online completely. This means digesting food or absorbing nutrients properly may be impaired, which can deplete your body further.
The Chinese Medicine Perspective
Traditional Chinese Medicine has a sophisticated understanding of how stress affects the whole body. Several patterns commonly appear with chronic stress:
Liver Qi Stagnation: The Liver in Chinese medicine governs the smooth flow of Qi (energy) and emotions. When stress causes Qi to become stuck, you experience irritability, tension, digestive issues, headaches, and that feeling of being wound too tight.
Heart and Kidney Not Communicating: The Heart houses the Shen (spirit/mind) and should communicate with the Kidneys, which provide grounding and rest. When this connection is disrupted, you get insomnia, anxiety, palpitations, and those relentless stress dreams.
Spleen Qi Deficiency: Chronic stress and worry deplete the Spleen’s ability to transform food into energy. This creates digestive problems, fatigue, overthinking, and difficulty letting go—both physically (constipation) and mentally.
Kidney Yin and Yang Deficiency: Long-term stress depletes your deepest reserves—Kidney Essence. Yin deficiency causes restless sleep, night sweats, and feeling wired-but-tired. Yang deficiency creates exhaustion, coldness, and depression.
Liver Blood Deficiency: When stress is prolonged, it depletes Blood, leading to insomnia, anxiety, muscle tension, and feeling emotionally ungrounded.
These patterns often appear in combination, creating the complex symptom picture that makes you feel like your body has turned against you.
How Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine Help
Treatment addresses both the immediate symptoms and the underlying nervous system dysregulation. The goal is to help strengthen your body and allow it to relax, restore proper function, and rebuild your reserves.
Acupuncture calms the nervous system directly. Specific points may help to:
- Regulate the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system balance
- Strengthen vagus nerve function
- Release muscle tension, particularly in the jaw, shoulders, and hips
- Calm the Shen (spirit) to reduce anxiety and improve sleep quality
- Harmonize Liver Qi to restore smooth emotional and physical flow
- Support communication between Heart and Kidney for restful sleep
- Strengthen Spleen function for better digestion and nutrient absorption
- Nourish Kidney Yin and Yang to rebuild deep reserves
Chinese Herbal Formulas are customised to your specific pattern. Classical formulas have been used over the centuries specifically for stress-related conditions and can profoundly shift your body’s stress response.
Nutritional Support addresses the depletion that chronic stress creates. Evidence-based supplements and vitamins help bridge nutritional gaps and provide the building blocks your body needs for proper nervous system regulation and support. Adaptogenic herbs—such as ashwagandha, rhodiola, and holy basil—are particularly valuable for chronic stress. These herbs help your body adapt to stress more effectively by modulating cortisol levels and supporting resilience in the nervous system. They work by helping your body maintain balance rather than pushing it in one direction, essentially teaching your stress response to be more flexible and appropriate to actual threats rather than overreacting to everything.
Diet and nutrition also play a crucial role in maintaining healthy stress responses. When chronically stressed, your body burns through B vitamins, magnesium, and other nutrients at an accelerated rate. Eating regular, balanced meals with adequate protein helps stabilize blood sugar, which directly impacts your ability to handle stress. Whole foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids, magnesium, and antioxidants support both brain function and nervous system regulation. Conversely, relying on caffeine, sugar, and processed foods to push through can create additional stress on your already taxed system.
Vagus Nerve Activation through gentle peripheral stimulation techniques helps strengthen your body’s natural brake on the stress response, supporting the shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic dominance.
Practical Tools for Daily Support
Beyond treatment, there are practices you can incorporate to support your healing:
Brain Dump for Racing Thoughts: If your mind is wired and can’t switch off at night, try a “brain dump.” Sit with pen and paper and write down everything swirling in your head—tasks, worries, random thoughts. Getting it out of your head and onto paper gives your mind permission to rest, as it’s no longer responsible for holding onto everything. This gives your subconscious space to process during waking hours instead of attempting to do this work during sleep.
Sleep Hygiene and Boundaries: Create clear boundaries around work ending. Establish a set number of hours to switch off and wind down before bed—this helps your body practice the letting-go process. This isn’t indulgence; it’s essential for nervous system regulation.
Delta Brainwave Audio: Using delta brainwave frequencies (0.5-4 Hz) on stereo headphones can help downregulate your nervous system without requiring a lot of effort. Delta waves are the slowest brainwave frequency, associated with deep, restorative sleep and healing. Listening to delta wave audio helps entrain your brain toward these slower frequencies, essentially teaching your nervous system what “rest” feels like again. Even 15-20 minutes daily can have profound benefits. Delta brainwaves can also be used during the day when you’re experiencing moments of high stress or anxiety—taking a brief break to listen can help reset your nervous system and bring you back to a calmer state.
Mindfulness Techniques: During daylight hours when things feel overwhelming, mindfulness practices help put things in perspective. Try these simple techniques:
- 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding: Name 5 things you can see, 4 you can touch, 3 you can hear, 2 you can smell, and 1 you can taste. This brings you back to the present moment and out of the stress spiral.
- Box Breathing: Breathe in for 4 counts, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4. Repeat for several rounds. This simple pattern signals safety to your nervous system.
- Body Scan: Take 2-3 minutes to mentally scan from your toes to your head, noticing where you’re holding tension without trying to fix it. Awareness alone begins the release process.
Even brief moments of conscious breathing or grounding can interrupt the stress cycle.
The Path Back to Regulation
Chinese medicine is equipped with sophisticated tools to help you make a comeback from chronic stress. This isn’t just about managing symptoms—it’s about teaching body awareness, helping you recognize your body’s signals, and implementing strategies to heal and maintain progress.
Through a trauma-informed approach that recognizes the collective stress we’re all navigating, treatment creates a safe space where your nervous system can finally exhale. As your body begins to trust that it can switch off, the cascade of symptoms begins to resolve. Sleep improves. Digestion normalizes. Muscle tension releases. The anxiety lifts. You begin to feel like yourself again.
Chronic stress doesn’t have to be your baseline. Your body is capable of healing, regulating, and finding ease again—it just needs the right support and tools to remember how.
Dr Nicola Loizou has been practicing Chinese medicine since 2011 with a specialisation in chronic conditions and women’s health. She practices at Kundalini House in Fitzroy North, Melbourne, where she provides integrative, trauma-informed care that addresses the root causes of chronic stress and supports nervous system regulation.
Contact her directly:
Email: hello@nicolaloizou.com.au
Phone: 0414230559
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