Why Am I So Tired? Five Ways Chinese Medicine Can Help With Fatigue
Fatigue can be truly debilitating. When we are exhausted it affects everything, how clearly we think, how well we make decisions, and whether we can even get through the day. If you are a new mother running on broken sleep, a professional carrying the weight of a demanding career, someone recovering from COVID or another illness, or a woman navigating perimenopause, you will know exactly what this feels like.
The reasons behind fatigue are many. A busy lifestyle with too little rest, poor sleep or insomnia, too much caffeine, medications, or a diet that isn’t nourishing the body the way it needs to be. What often gets overlooked is that you can be eating a perfectly healthy diet and still feel exhausted, because if your digestive system isn’t functioning well, your body simply can’t transform that food into usable energy.
This is why the first step in addressing fatigue is always working out where it is coming from. Chinese medicine takes a whole-person approach, looking at the full picture of your health rather than treating tiredness as a single isolated symptom. Here are five ways we help patients at Mei Hua restore their energy.
What can you do to help fight fatigue?
Acupuncture support
Acupuncture works with the energy of our body and it is a way to help to readjust imbalances in our body. Once we have worked out the cause of the fatigue, for example if it is insomnia, digestive issues, pregnancy, menopause or post viral fatigue. A course of acupuncture therapy can help rebalance the functions of the body to fight fatigue and feel we can make it through the day with energy. Sometimes an acupuncture session can be a well earned rest!
Herbal support
There are some great herbs to help restore our energy levels. The beauty of Chinese herbs is that there are herbs that help to increase your energy levels while at the same time address the cause behind why you are experiencing fatigue! What in our body is not functioning properly that is causing fatigue and using herbs to address this issue.
Looking at our diet
Diet can have a lot to do with fatigue. Our energy resources come from the foods and fluids we consume. We might not be nourishing our body with foods that support our energy needs, or our digestive system may actually be struggling to digest the foods we do eat. Sometimes a change in the way we eat can improve our energy levels. This is why I often give out a diet diary to see what improvements we can make to diet to increase our energy levels. Sometimes it is as easy as changing the way we cook our foods. Other times it might be a lot more in depth.
Lifestyle Choices
Modern life is not easy and there are a lot of stress that we have to deal with on a day to day basis. This stress can cause tension in our bodies that can lead to fatigue. Chronic stress from work, traffic, family issues and so on all have an impact on our energy levels. Over time this chronic stress has a huge impact on our health and energy levels. So while receiving acupuncture and herbal support, looking at lifestyle and its impact on your body and energy levels is another way to fight fatigue.
Exercise
Are we doing enough exercise, or are we doing too much exercise? Too much exercise may have contributed to fatigue to the extent there is no more energy resources to do any exercise. However there are restorative styles of exercise that help to improve our energy and help with fatigue. Breathing exercises, restorative style yoga or yin yoga, and tai chi or qi gong are all styles of exercise that can help build up energy and reduce fatigue.
Treating the Whole Person, Not Just the Symptom
What connects all five of these approaches is the philosophy at the heart of Chinese medicine: that the body functions as a whole, and that lasting energy comes from addressing the root cause of depletion rather than pushing through it. Whether your fatigue has a clear cause or has simply crept up on you over time, there is usually a path forward.
Fatigue does not have to be your normal. If you have been feeling persistently tired and want to understand what might be behind it, a health assessment at Mei Hua is a great place to start. It is a 45-minute conversation where we look at your full health picture, ask the right questions, and begin to map out what might help. We would love to see you at our clinic in Redcliffe.
