Stress Page
Stress and Sleepless
The condition of being anxious and sleepless is mainly a result of stress in a modern society where life is becoming more and more complicated. Everybody suffers from stress to various degrees, depending on how well each person manages it. As far as I am concerned, my stress level decreases when I try to organize my priorities and work, and adopt an easier attitude toward life.
Stress and sleeplessness go hand in hand. Worse, they affect your appetite, energy and mood. They also disturb the balance of your body function in many ways. In serious cases, it results in a vicious circle where some people have to seek treatment in a hospital.
Most treatments for this condition address the symptoms only such as taking anxiety or sleeping pills. They numb your senses and sedate you without getting to the roots of the problem, which is not easy to find. In most cases, the root cause is not physical or health related. It is psychological or even philosophical. Treating only the symptoms can easily lead to substance dependency or abuse for the patient.
Sleep should be taken as a natural body function. When you get tired, you go to sleep. When you wake up, your energy is replenished. Sleepless means this natural body function has been disrupted. The cure should address that disrupting force rather than just putting you to sleep, because artificially-induced sleep cannot replenish your energy effectively.
The Chinese approach tries to go deeper than the symptoms. For relaxation there is Tai Chi and Qi Gong. An herbal prescription can be custom-made to calm the liver and restore the healthy balance in the body.
The Chinese approach focuses on the following:
- Calm the liver which is usually overactive in a stressful or sleepless condition.
- Restore the healthy balance of the body.
- Strengthen the body organs weakened by stress.
- Apply the herbs to REN the blood (For details, click The Concept of REN)