There is a sequence I observe regularly in the accounts of people coming to see me for the first time.
First the insomnia: waking at 3am, thoughts spinning, unable to fall back asleep. Then the anxiety, diffuse, without a clear object, a background tension that colors everything. Then the exhaustion, not the kind that passes with a good night's sleep, but the kind that settles in, accumulates, and eventually changes the way you live.
This is not a coincidence. These three signals often share the same root.
What the Body Is Trying to Say
Anxiety, insomnia, and exhaustion are not separate problems. They are three manifestations of a single dysregulation: an autonomic nervous system stuck in sympathetic mode, the alert mode, that can no longer shift into parasympathetic mode, the recovery mode.
Insomnia is often the first signal. Cortisol, normally low at night, stays elevated and prevents falling asleep or causes nighttime waking. The body wants to sleep, but the nervous system is still active.
Anxiety follows: when the nervous system is chronically on alert, the brain looks for reasons for that alert. It always finds them. A meeting tomorrow, a bill, an unanswered message. The event does not create the anxiety. The physiological state seeks a narrative to justify itself.
Exhaustion, finally, is the consequence of impossible recovery. The body spends energy constantly, even at night, even at rest, because it cannot enter repair mode.
Why the Usual Solutions Are Not Always Enough
Most people who reach this point have already tried a great deal. Exercise, sometimes helpful, sometimes worsening when the body is already depleted. Meditation apps, useful but difficult to sustain when the mind is too agitated to sit in silence. Sleep aids or anxiolytics, which address the symptom without always touching the root.
It is not that these approaches do not work. It is that they often ask the nervous system for active effort — sit, breathe "correctly," follow an instruction — when what the nervous system needs is to be carried rather than to carry.
What Reiki Offers Differently
In a Reiki session, there is nothing to do. You are not following instructions. You are not breathing in a particular way. You lie down, and the rest happens without effort on your part.
What occurs physiologically resembles what is observed in deep meditative states: parasympathetic activation, slowing of heart rate, muscular release, shift into theta waves. But without the difficulty of "succeeding at meditation."
For exhausted or anxious people, this absence of effort is often what makes Reiki accessible where other practices remained frustrating.
What People Report After Sessions
Many people observe, after one or more sessions:
Deeper sleep, not necessarily longer, but better quality, with fewer nighttime waking episodes.
A shift in background anxiety, not disappearing overnight, but losing some of its intensity. The same thoughts return, but with less force.
A gradual return to body awareness. Many highly anxious people live primarily in their heads. One of the frequent experiences after Reiki is reconnecting physically to oneself, a kind of embodied presence.
What Reiki Does Not Do
It does not remove the source of stress. If you are going through a difficult time — grief, a breakup, professional overload — Reiki does not change the reality of that situation.
What it can do is offer the nervous system genuine recovery pauses in which it reconnects with its own capacity to self-regulate. And a nervous system that recovers handles what comes better, with a little more distance, a little less reactivity.
That is not nothing.
If you are interested in discovering what Reki can do for you, feel free to book your individual reiki session with me here.
Reiki supports — it does not replace medical care. If you are going through a difficult period, please also consider speaking with a healthcare professional.
About the Author: Cédric Suming is a Usui Reiki Ryōhō Master Teacher, trained in person at the San Francisco Reiki Center, and a LaHoChi practitioner. He practices at Centre Reiki, located at 58 rue d'Argout in Paris's 2nd arrondissement.
