A client sat in my chair a few weeks ago and said something that stopped me mid-sentence.
She'd been coming for treatment for a while. Persistent symptoms. Nothing quite shifting the way either of us hoped. And as she settled in that day, I asked her how her week had been.
She looked at me and said: "I don't think I've done a single thing for myself. Not one thing."
She wasn't complaining. She said it almost matter-of-factly, the way you'd report the weather. As if it was just the way things were.
And I thought: there it is. That's what we're working against.
Because here's the thing. The treatments I offer are powerful. Acupuncture works. But if someone is spending every ounce of energy they have on everyone else — their family, their job, their obligations, their guilt — and putting nothing back in for themselves, we're filling a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
If you've ever felt guilty for resting, for saying no, for choosing yourself even just for an hour: this post is for you. Because self-care isn't selfish. It isn't indulgent. It's the difference between a body that can function, heal, and recover, wondering why nothing seems to shift.
At our clinic in Middlesbrough, I see this pattern every single week. And it's time we talked about it properly.
Key Takeaways
- Your body runs on a finite energy reserve. When you spend years giving more than you restore, that reserve runs out. Symptoms aren't a sign of weakness. They're your body asking to be refilled.
- Chronic stress suppresses the immune, digestive, and reproductive systems — meaning the body literally cannot prioritise healing when it's stuck in survival mode.
- In Chinese medicine, your constitutional reserve is called jing. Unlike your day-to-day energy, it's finite, and depleting it is one of the most common root causes of persistent, hard-to-shift symptoms.
- Self-care isn't a personality trait or a luxury. It's a biological necessity. Even one small deposit this week changes the direction of travel.
- What happens between your treatment sessions matters just as much as the sessions themselves. Healing doesn't only happen on the table.
The Bank Account Your Body Keeps
I want to share an analogy that I've been using with clients lately, because it seems to land in a way that clinical language sometimes doesn't.
Think about your energy like a bank account.
You're born with a starting balance. Your health reserve. Your vitality. The capacity your body has to function, adapt, and heal. And throughout your life, things go in and things come out.
Deposits are anything that restores you. Withdrawals are anything that costs you. And most of us are running a very one-sided account.
Withdrawal Pushing through exhaustion rather than resting — because there's always more to do
Withdrawal Saying yes when everything in you is quietly saying no
Withdrawal Work pressure, poor sleep, and a mind that never fully switches off
Withdrawal Worrying about letting people down — and letting yourself down in the process
Withdrawal Putting everyone else at the top of the list, and yourself firmly at the bottom
Keep withdrawing without ever making a deposit — and eventually, you go into overdraft.
And that's when your body starts to say: hang on. There's nothing left here. That's when symptoms appear. That's when things stop working properly. That's when people arrive at my acupuncture clinic in Middlesbrough having tried everything, wondering why nothing's shifting.
The treatments we offer are deposits. But if you're withdrawing ten times faster than we're putting back in, we're working against the tide. And I can't out-needle a life that's running on empty.
What's Actually Happening in Your Body
This isn't just a metaphor. There's a very real biological process happening underneath it, and I want to explain it in a way that makes sense, not in a way that makes you feel like you're back in a science lesson.
When life is relentlessly demanding and you're always on, always giving, never fully switching off, your nervous system gets stuck in what we call the fight-or-flight state. Your body believes it's under threat. And in that state, it makes a very clear decision about where to send its resources.
Survival first. Healing later.
The problem is, later never comes.
The stress response suppresses the digestive system, the reproductive system, and the body's growth and repair processes, while simultaneously communicating with the brain regions that control mood, motivation, and fear. In other words: healing, hormone regulation, digestion, immunity, emotional resilience. All deprioritised, while your body deals with what it perceives as the emergency of daily life.
I see this play out on the table every week. Someone comes in holding tension in places they don't even realise. Their system is braced. And the first thing acupuncture has to do, before anything else, is give the nervous system permission to come down. Sometimes that's the whole session. And that's okay. Because until the body feels safe, it cannot heal.
Over time, repeated activation of that stress response takes a serious toll. Research links chronic stress to high blood pressure, immune disruption, hormonal imbalance, low mood, and persistent pain. But you probably didn't need a research study to tell you that. You've felt it.
The important thing to understand is this: your body is not failing you. It's doing exactly what it's designed to do. It's protecting you. It's just been in protection mode for so long that it's forgotten what it feels like to rest.
What Chinese Medicine Has Known for Thousands of Years
In traditional Chinese medicine, we have a concept that maps perfectly onto this, and every time I explain it, something seems to click for people in a way that nothing else quite does.
It's called jing — your constitutional reserve. Think of it as the deepest savings account in your body. You're born with it. It's inherited, shaped by your earliest years, and it sits beneath everything else: your day-to-day energy, your hormonal health, your resilience, your capacity to recover and regenerate.
And unlike your current account, the energy that replenishes with a good night's sleep, a nourishing meal, a proper rest — your jing is finite.
A thought worth sitting with
Your jing doesn't care how much you've achieved, how many people you've looked after, or how impressive your to-do list was. It only knows whether you've looked after yourself. And it keeps score even when you don't.
When I'm working with a client at our acupuncture practice in Middlesbrough and their symptoms are persistent, complex, or slow to respond, one of the first things I'm asking myself is: how deep does this go? Are we working with a depleted surface layer, or has this person been dipping into those constitutional reserves for so long that their body simply doesn't have the raw material it needs to recover?
The signs are there in TCM diagnosis: in the pulses, in the tongue, in the pattern of symptoms. But they're also there in the story. In the woman who can't remember the last time she rested without guilt. In the person who always has to be doing something. In the one who says "I just don't know why I'm not getting better." She has no idea that the answer might have nothing to do with the treatment, and everything to do with what's happening between sessions.
What strikes me every time is how closely this ancient framework mirrors what we now understand scientifically. Chinese medicine identified thousands of years ago that there is a finite reserve of vitality, that it must be protected, not endlessly spent — and that when it runs low, the body begins to struggle in ways that are genuinely hard to explain, and harder to treat. We're still catching up in Western medicine. But we're getting there.
The People-Pleasers, the Perfectionists, and the Carers
This pattern doesn't arrive randomly. It belongs to a very particular kind of person. And if you've made it this far in this post, there's a good chance it belongs to you.
You'll recognise yourself here if, even as you read this, part of your mind is drifting to something you should be doing instead.
You find it genuinely hard to sit still, not because you're restless, but because stillness feels like failure
You use words like I have to, I must, I need to — automatically, without noticing. Not I choose to. Have to. Must. Need.
You say yes when everything in you is , because the guilt of saying no feels worse than the exhaustion of saying yes
You're afraid of what people will think if things aren't perfect — your house, your work, your response time, your appearance
You've tied your worth to your output. To how much you do. To how little you ask for.
And when someone asks what genuinely restores you, you go quiet. Because honestly? You've lost track.
I want to be gentle here, because I see this and it moves me every time.
These aren't character flaws. They're not weaknesses. They're usually the marks of someone who has spent their whole life caring , about doing things well, about the people around them, about not being a burden. Someone who learned somewhere along the , perhaps very early on, that their value came from what they gave, not from who they were.
You didn't arrive at this pattern through laziness or selfishness. You arrived here through caring too much, for too long, with too little left for yourself. And that is not something to be ashamed of. It is something to be compassionate about.
The question now isn't how did I get here? It's this: what do I choose to do differently?
Working with clients across Teesside, this is one of the most important conversations I , not just in the treatment room, but in the five minutes before the needles go in, and the five minutes after they come out. Because sometimes the most therapeutic thing I can offer isn't a point prescription. It's simply sitting with someone while they realise they matter too.
What Deposits Actually Look Like
Once this lands, I always ask the same question.
A question worth sitting with
"What does a deposit look like for you? Not for your family, not for your job, for you. What genuinely restores you?"
And often, there's a long pause.
A real one. Not the pause of someone thinking. The pause of someone who realises they don't quite know the , because they haven't needed to answer that question in a very long time.
And that's okay. It doesn't mean anything is wrong with you. It means you've been so focused outward for so long that the inward landscape has gone a little quiet. The journey of finding out what genuinely restores you and fills you back up is one of the most worthwhile things you can do for your health. And it often surprises people.
It might be a bath with candles and the door shut and no phone in the room. It might be ten minutes outside with a cup of tea, not scrolling, not planning — just being there. It might be saying no to one thing this week that you would normally say yes to out of guilt. It might be asking for help, and this is the harder part: actually letting someone give it.
It might be coming in for your treatment and letting yourself be on the receiving end for once. Not planning your evening from the table. Not mentally writing tomorrow's list. Just being there. Just receiving.
There's also something worth noticing here: some of the things we tell ourselves are deposits — running when we're already depleted, keeping endlessly busy to avoid sitting with ourselves, scrolling to "switch off" — aren't really deposits at all. They're just quieter withdrawals. And part of this work is being honest enough with yourself to tell the difference.
You don't have to know all your deposits today. You just have to find one. Start there.
An Honest Word About How Hard This Is
A moment of honesty
I want to be straightforward with you here, because I think it matters.
Most people find me when something has already tipped. Their body has been asking quietly for a while, and the symptoms are simply the volume being turned up. That's not a failure — that's just how bodies work. They will always find a way to get your attention.
Everything I've described in this post is easier to read than it is to live. Changing a pattern that has taken decades to build, one that is woven into how you see yourself and what you believe you owe other people, is not something that happens because you read a blog post and decided to try harder.
But here's what I've learned after years of sitting across from people in that chair: I can give you every tool, every insight, every piece of guidance I have. And none of it changes anything if it stays in the room.
If you always do the same things, you'll always get the same results. That's not me being harsh. That's just the truth of it. And the clients who shift, who genuinely start to feel better, are the ones who take something small away and actually do it.
We can go round in circles together, or we can start moving in a different direction. That choice, genuinely, is yours.
You won't do it perfectly. You're not supposed to. The goal isn't perfection. It's just a slightly different direction. A small deposit, made today, when you might not have made it yesterday. That is enough. That is more than enough.
Choosy, Not Selfish
I want to offer you a word that might change things. Because self-care has been put on bath bomb packaging and wellness retreat brochures until it's lost most of its meaning.
The word is choosy.
You get to be choosy with your energy. Not selfish. Choosy. Intentional. Thoughtful about what you give to and what you protect. Try replacing the old language with something that feels like agency rather than obligation:
I have to do this → I choose to do this
I must be there → I choose to be there
I need to keep going → I choose to rest
I can't say no → I choose what I give my energy to
That shift from have to to choose to is small in language and enormous in practice. It gives you back authorship over your own life. And that sense of agency, of actually being in the driving seat, is itself therapeutic. It changes how your nervous system experiences the day.
Here's what I know to be true, after years of working with patients: when someone starts making even small deposits, when they start choosing themselves in even the tiniest ways — something shifts. Not just in how they feel. But in how their body responds to treatment. In how quickly symptoms begin to ease. In how much more capacity they have to heal.
Because healing requires resource. And you cannot heal from a body that's running on overdraft.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can stress really stop my body from healing?
Yes, and it's not just in your head. When your nervous system is stuck in a prolonged stress response, your body prioritises survival over restoration. The systems responsible for healing, hormone regulation, digestion, and immunity are all deprioritised when the body believes it's under threat. Getting out of that state is often the missing step in why symptoms persist despite . It's something we actively work on through acupuncture.
I rest sometimes — so why do I still feel exhausted?
Rest and genuine restoration aren't always the same thing. Lying down while scrolling your phone, or resting while your mind runs through tomorrow's list, keeps your nervous system activated even when your body is still. True restoration requires your mind and body to come down together. This is one of the reasons acupuncture can be so . It creates a deep parasympathetic shift that's genuinely difficult to access through willpower alone.
What has acupuncture got to do with self-care?
More than most people expect. The treatment itself is an act of , an hour where the only thing required of you is to receive. For people who are highly capable and rarely stop, that in itself is significant. Beyond that, acupuncture works directly on the nervous system, helping to shift the body out of fight-or-flight and into the state where healing becomes possible. It's both a deposit and a doorway.
I feel guilty putting myself first. How do I start?
Gently, and without pressure. One place to start is simply noticing your language. When you catch yourself saying I have to or I must, pause. Ask yourself: what would actually happen if I didn't? Often, the honest answer is: very little. The guilt tends to soften when we start to see that the world doesn't fall apart when we choose ourselves — and that the people around us often prefer us restored over depleted.
Is this relevant to my fertility or hormonal health?
Very much so. Chronic stress directly suppresses the reproductive . The body, in survival mode, deprioritises conception and hormonal balance. This is one of the reasons we so often see a connection between high-pressure lifestyles and hormonal imbalance, irregular cycles, or fertility challenges. If you're based in Middlesbrough, Yarm, Ingleby Barwick, or the wider Teesside area and would like to explore support, you're warmly welcome to get in touch.
Final Thoughts
If you've read this far and felt something, a quiet recognition, a that's me, I want you to know that you are not alone in this.
I see it every week. In the most capable, most caring, most quietly exhausted people I've ever met. And every single one of them deserved more than they were giving themselves.
You don't have to overhaul your life. You don't have to do anything dramatic or difficult today.
You just have to make one small deposit. And then notice what happens. And then make another.
Not because you owe it to anyone else. Not so you can be more productive or more useful or more available.
Because you are worth the same care you give so freely to everyone else. That's it. That's the whole thing.
Wellness grows where energy flows.
Explore Acupuncture Support in Middlesbrough No pressure. Explore in your own time, when you feel ready.Deanna Thomas – Acupuncture & Wellbeing
BSc (Hons), Lic.Ac, MBAcC, DipObsGyn, NLP Practitioner, EFT & IEMT Practitioner