The chirping of the alarm barely rouses you enough to pry one arm out from under the blanket. Your hand automatically navigates its way to the bedside nightstand and inches its way to the alarm clock, a move ingrained by years of repetition. Or for my husband, country music (which he despises) and an alarm placed across the room helps him out of bed at 4:30am.
Despite your best intentions of arising on time, you may find yourself hitting the snooze button twice more, rationalizing to yourself that you don’t need that much time to get ready for work anyway.
Finally, the Critical Alert goes off in your head. GET UP NOW OR GET IN TROUBLE!
You shower at hyper-speed, grab breakfast on the run, and you’re out the door.
Unfortunately, the same story is played out every day by those of us who ignore our own internal “alarms” or symptoms. Symptoms are your body’s warning system built in to alert you of a potential crisis.
What are your options when symptoms arise?
First, you could choose to do nothing, which is what most people do for a while. Many hope that by ignoring the problem, it will somehow go away. Even if the pain eventually subsides, the underlying cause rarely resolves on its own.
When ignoring the problem proves ineffective, your next course of action might be to find a medication to relieve you of the symptom. Medicating a symptom is like hitting the snooze on the alarm. It just delays the inevitable, that you eventually will need to wake up and address your problem in a sensible, effective manner.
That brings us to your third option: Acupuncture. The focus of acupuncture care is to remove meridian system blockages and imbalances within the body, allowing the free flow of the bodies energy and to express 100% life. Symptoms don’t exist in the absence of an underlying imbalance. Eliminate the cause and the symptom goes away once and for all.
So what alarm clock are you going to listen to today?