Laughing and Crying From Acupuncture - is it NORMAL?

Is it normal to laugh or cry or freak out during an acupuncture treatment? In this video, I want to share a few of the common emotional reactions that can actually happen from acupuncture without you intending them to happen or without even realizing it's stored in your body somewhere, as well as what they mean, why they happen, and a little bit about my own experience with this happening, and first made me think about this thing called somatic memory. Hey, I'm Alex Hein, current doctoral student in classical or traditional Chinese medicine. I'm also the author of the book called Master the Day. Now, let's talk about what might happen the first time you get acupuncture, or any time for that matter. So one of the times when I went to get acupuncture, I'd laid down and I wasn't in a particular state. I was just normal, came off work, went to see the local guy that was my acupuncturist. And this time when he put the needles in, he left and after five or ten minutes, I noticed like a little tickling sensation in my stomach. And you know, I'm looking down and I'm getting a little bit worried and you know, it's like that feeling where you're in church and you can't talk to your siblings or make jokes or poke each other. And your mom is really on you, looking at you like, I swear to God, you better not do that and make her laugh. And so I had this feeling of like, I'm gonna laugh, but I'm not allowed to laugh because I'm in church. And it started this pressurized feeling in my chest until eventually I just busted out laughing. And I laughed for 10 minutes straight, full body, visceral laughs, until I started tearing, crying out of my eyes, and then it produced this massive sense of relief. So there was this weird release that came out of nowhere. I didn't know I had any of this stuff stored in my body or wherever it was being stored. And I laughed until I cried and then I just fell into a really calm state and then fell asleep during the treatment. Now after that, it really made me intrigued about what that was and how that can happen and why that happens. And I can understand how for someone getting acupuncture for the first time, that would seem scary. So why does this happen? Well, in Chinese medicine, one of the theories is that emotions are linked to certain organs. So in Chinese medicine, things are holographic, which is how not only a physical illness like heart disease can be linked to that anatomical heart or not, or emotions can be linked. For example, grief and sadness is linked to the lung. If you think of like the widow, she's crying, she's like, you can see what it does to her lungs. You can imagine, no one feels like they have a full breath when they're crying or when they feel that emotion. And so these are very practical, tangible observations of the physical body state. This is really on one level what qi is. Now the heart is linked to the emotion of joy or happiness. So you think about a little kid who's super manic. It's Santa's coming. It's Christmas. The kid's like this, like the heart is in excess. There's too much excitement. Eyes are wide, teeth like this, acting like a nut job. So they're in this state of mania. And at the same time, emotions can get stored in the body. Now in Western biomedicine, what's so interesting is that van der Wolk and a lot of the researchers behind the research on trauma and PTSD, there's a great book called The Body Keeps Score. One of the big ideas being researched is the idea of somatic memory in the sense that emotions and traumas like PTSD, for example, sexual trauma or war veterans and other aspects of trauma get stored in the body outside of the brain. In other words, they're being stored in the body and they show up in the physiological response that people have to the trigger or the trauma or whatever it is. So in this one study, the researchers were quoted as saying, ever since people's responses to overwhelming experiences have been systematically explored, researchers have noted that trauma is stored in somatic memory and expressed as changes in the biological stress response. And what's interesting to me is that it's deeper than just being some traumatic memory stored in your brain. So they then went on and said, the inability of people with PTSD to integrate traumatic experiences and their tendency instead to continuously relive the past are mirrored physiologically and hormonally in the misinterpretation of innocuous stimuli as potential threats. So basically, these people are misinterpreting things that are harmless as the triggers, the stress, the trauma response. Animal research suggests that intense emotional memories are processed outside of the hippocampally-mediated memory system and are difficult to extinguish. So these responses are visceral in the body. So that's the very long way of saying that, yes, you may notice crying out of nowhere for no reason. You don't feel the emotion of sadness, but you cry. You may not feel the emotion of happiness, but you may have the spontaneous laughter like I had. Or there may be anger or a memory may come up. These are things that happen. You don't need to freak out. There's no reason to be worried. And this is just kind of an interesting field now that Chinese medicine has been aware of for a long time. But in modern research, somatic memory is becoming a little bit of a buzzword in the last few decades. And it's very interesting just to see how that may come up. So it is something that happens and it's nothing to worry about. So I hope that video today helped explain a little bit more about classical or traditional Chinese medicine, as well as my own experience seeing this happen and being very confused about what was going on and where that was coming from and where it was stored. Now, if you want to stay in touch, the best way is to grab that free guide on my site on 5 Daily Rituals to Help You Add 10 Years to Your Life with Classical Chinese Medicine. AlexHine.com forward slash free is where you can download that and get the free email course. Or you can check it out in the description box there below. Besides that, you can come check out my latest two videos that are related and will explain more about traditional or classical Chinese medicine and how it can help you.