For most of my thirties, I wore exhaustion like a badge. I work in healthcare administration — the kind of job where the emails start before you’re out of bed and the decisions never really stop. I told myself that the tight chest, the 3 a.m. wake-ups, the way my brain would just keep spinning no matter what I did to slow it down — that was the price of doing meaningful work. That was just what ambitious looked like. I was wrong about all of it.
I’m 36 and I live in Londonderry, NH. I’d been running at that pace for about four years when things started to slip in ways I couldn’t explain away. I’d get to work and forget why I’d walked into a room. I’d sit down to write a straightforward email and stare at a blank screen for fifteen minutes. My anxiety — which I’d always had in the background, manageable — had moved to the front of everything. My shoulders lived up around my ears. My husband started asking, gently but persistently, if I was okay. I kept saying yes. I wasn’t.
| The Therapy Gap
I was already in therapy, which helped in the ways that talk therapy helps — I understood my patterns better, I could name what was happening. But understanding burnout intellectually didn’t make my nervous system any quieter. I’d leave a session feeling clearer and then sit in traffic on the way home and feel the whole thing clamp back down. My therapist actually suggested I look at something somatic — something that worked with the body, not just the mind. That’s what sent me searching.
I’ll be honest: acupuncture for anxiety felt a little thin to me at first. I associated it with pain relief, with sports injuries, not with the particular grinding exhaustion I was carrying. I looked into it mostly to say I had. But the more I read about how acupuncture works with the nervous system — specifically the way it can help regulate the stress response at a physiological level — the more I thought it might actually be relevant to what I was dealing with.
| Walking Into Trend for the First Time
I found Trend Acupuncture through a coworker who commutes from Bedford. She’d been seeing Kristen Markwith for something else entirely and mentioned offhand that Kristen had asked her a lot of questions about her stress levels and sleep during their first appointment — not as small talk, but as real clinical intake. That detail stuck with me. I booked an appointment at Trend in Concord, NH the same week.
Kristen — Dr. Markwith — has been practicing for over 14 years with a Doctorate in Acupuncture, and her focus has always been on complex, chronic presentations that don’t resolve simply. When I sat down with her and started describing what I was experiencing, she didn’t rush me toward a diagnosis or a treatment plan. She listened to the whole thing. The sleep disruption. The chest tightness. The way anxiety wasn’t just a feeling but a full-body state I couldn’t seem to exit. She asked about my digestion, my cycle, my energy patterns across the day. By the end of that first conversation, she’d connected dots I hadn’t thought to connect.
“By the end of that first conversation, she’d connected dots I hadn’t thought to connect — and for the first time in a long time, I felt like someone actually understood what was going on.”
The acupuncture sessions focused on points associated with the nervous system — along my sternum, my inner wrists, the top of my head, the backs of my knees. Kristen explained what she was targeting and why, without being clinical about it. It didn’t feel like a procedure. It felt like someone was actually paying careful attention to what my body needed that day.
After my fourth session, she added ATP Resonance BioTherapy® — a low-level electrical frequency treatment that helps reduce inflammation and support circulation at the cellular level. She used it along my upper back and neck, where she said chronic stress had created real physical tension patterns. I noticed within a day that my shoulders had actually dropped. Not a little. Noticeably. My husband commented without me saying anything.
People make the trip to Trend from all over southern New Hampshire — I’ve had brief conversations in the waiting room with people coming from Salem and as far as Manchester. For something that’s become this central to how I manage my health, the drive to Concord is genuinely not a consideration.
| What’s Actually Different
I’m not going to tell you I’m a different person. I still work a demanding job. I still have hard weeks. But the baseline has shifted in a way that’s hard to overstate. The 3 a.m. wake-ups, which were happening four or five nights a week, are down to maybe once a week now — sometimes less. The chest tightness that used to be my constant companion has mostly lifted. I can sit down and write an email without fifteen minutes of staring.
The most concrete thing I can point to: I went through a genuinely brutal stretch at work two months ago — staffing crisis, board pressure, the works — and I didn’t spiral the way I would have before. I was stressed. But I was functional. I could feel the difference between stress I could metabolize and the old stuck-alarm-going-off-constantly feeling. That distinction didn’t exist for me a year ago.
If you’re somewhere in southern New Hampshire — Londonderry, Manchester, Bedford, anywhere within reach of Concord — and you’ve been grinding through anxiety or burnout and telling yourself it’s just the cost of your life, I’d ask you to consider that it doesn’t have to be. I waited too long. The call takes two minutes.
