If you are suffering from anxiety, depression, addiction or chronic pain and looking for a customized treatment plan, I've got a solution for you. Dierdre Mangan has been my go-to expert for treating mental and physical pain during my time in the restaurant business. She helped me work through physical pain at the end of my long weeks or months while working in restaurants and helped me manage my anxiety after quitting drinking. Originally hailing from New York and undecided about what to pursue after college, Dierdre traveled throughout Europe, ending up in Galway, Ireland. After her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Dierdre settled back in New York where she enrolled at Swedish Institute of Massage Therapy in New York City. It was during this time that Dierdre first was introduced to acupuncture. Throughout her mother's battle with stage 4 melanoma, Dierdre began to accompany her mother into Brooklyn every week for acupuncture treatments. It was this experience that sparked her curiosity and later passion into the 4,000-year-old medicine. Dierdre's personal journey with acupuncture in Chinese herbal medicine has seen her through digestive issues, anxiety, insomnia and pregnancy. As an avid runner, cyclist and skier, Dierdre has experienced first-hand the benefits of acupuncture provides to keep her active year-round. In this episode, Dierdre and I explore the immediate and long-lasting advantages of acupuncture on both your mental and physical well-being.

Welcome to the No Hesitations podcast, the show where restaurant leaders learn tools, tactics and habits from the world's greatest operators. I am your host, Christin Marvin, with Solutions by Christin. I've spent the last two decades in the restaurant industry and now partner with restaurant leaders to help them overcome burnout, increase retention, reignite their passion and drive successful businesses. I also work directly with restaurant leaders through one-on-one coaching and group workshops to help them identify their blind spots, build their confidence and overcome challenges in their business. If you're curious about learning more, visit my website at christinmarvin. com. Slash contact to book a 15-minute goal-planning session.

This podcast is sponsored by ScheduleFly. Schedulefly provides a simple, web-based and app-based restaurant employee scheduling software backed by legendary customer service. If you are using pen paper, excel or fancy scheduling software with tons of bells and whistles that you don't use, schedulefly is perfect for your business. When I was a regional manager handling seven locations, schedulefly was our go-to for scheduling. It's, hands down, the easiest platform that I've ever worked with, and their employee scheduling tool is awesome for shooting out mass messages about crucial restaurant updates. Visit ScheduleFlycom and mention the no Hesitations podcast to learn more and get 10% off. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hi, deirdre, how's it going? How's it going? Thanks for having me on today. Thanks for being here.

I'm super excited about this, so fun fact for listeners.

Dierdre and I have been friends for a long time. We actually have brother and sister, golden Doodles, who have spent the majority of their life together. Sadly, they're in different states now, but I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be in the states now.

But, yeah, Oso and Madeline are their names and they are pretty darn cute, so we Watching you as we speak. Yeah, I had to put Chef and Maddie in the other room and they, every time I do this to record, they look at me like what do you mean? We can't be a part of this? Fomos, fomos, real. So anywho, well, thank you so much for being here.

For sure, I can't wait to share this awesome topic with our listeners. Today we're going to talk about acupuncture, the benefits short-term benefits and long-term benefits for people that work in the industry, and I'm super excited to have you share your story and history of the industry and then a little bit about how you got into acupuncture and studying that, because I know you've got a really personal story there to share which is pretty powerful and just can't wait for listeners to have another resource in their toolkit of how they can continue to take care of themselves both physically and mentally. So thank you so much, appreciate it. So let's talk a little bit about kind of your story. Will you share just some insight into your experience in hospitality and then kind of transition into how you got into acupuncture?

Yeah, absolutely so. My background is originally hospitality restaurants, hotels. I have been a massage therapist now for almost 20 years and then, before massage school, I was actually went to college. I was a history major but I worked in restaurants all through college, pretty much right after high school up until I was 30 or so, in conjunction with doing massage most times. So I very much resonate with all things hospitality. Even now, to this day, I'm still employed by a pretty high end hotel chain spa that I kind of do some massage out of.

Yeah, so I began in restaurants I think it was 17, as a hostess in Applebee's. It was the busiest Applebee's on Long Island. It was our claim to fame and very much I loved it. You know as hard as it is and it's much of a grind and you know as much as it sucks you in. It's addictive. Yeah, and I love the fact that I could have such a social job and such a physical job but also just still be able to make a good living, especially when I was 17, 18 years old. Yeah, no-transcript. So you know I went to college. After that. I went to college.

I'm from New York originally and I went to college in Western Pennsylvania, Worked at a couple of different restaurants in my little small Podong town out there. And kind of after college I graduated and I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was a history major. You know there's not a ton of options that you can do with that, but you still wind up with overwhelming debt. So what did I do? I traveled and I worked more in restaurants. My journey kind of had me going throughout Europe. I was in Ireland for a while. I came back to New York. I worked in New York for quite a bit after that A lot in breweries as well too and then at some point I decided that I was like, oh, I should have a career in my life, because I think that's what adults do.

Oh, you're one of those people that don't see the restaurant world as a career. I get it Well.

I do doubt. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I decided to go to massage school.

Yeah, I think that's funny because your husband's made his career in a restaurant business, right I know?

So anyway, so, anyway, so I went to massage school and all through massage school, of course I work in restaurant industry and I graduate from massage school and I started working in spas, kind of like local spas, at first, and then, honestly, I still worked in the restaurant industry now because it was great money and again, I just I love the social aspect of it. And I love being able to interact with people and being in a small dark room doing massage is very different than being in a fast paced, vibrant restaurant setting.

It's an interesting transition, right? I think I want to go back to something you said earlier because this just sparked my memory. But I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who's really familiar with the trends in the industry, and we were talking about Applebee's and Tyler and I were watching TV last week and an Applebee's commercial came on and I just looked at him and I said, man, applebee's has been around forever. How are they continuing to reinvent themselves, right, and stick around? Because I just I remember them from being a kid.

And then I heard did you hear about their new membership program that they just launched? Yeah, and how wildly successful it was. So they sold like a hundred thousand memberships in 20 minutes or something. And now people are all apparently up in arms because they they captained a hundred thousand. It's just, you know, it's just crazy to to see a concept that's been around for that long and to be able to do something fun and different like that. But it's also interesting what you said about going from massage to back and forth to the restaurants, right, like two completely polar opposite environments. You're alone, you know it's you and one other person naked, dark, right.

It's warm.

I'm like you're down, you got something sick. I'm speaking from experience because you've helped me with a lot of pain management from. You know whether I've worked along. You know if I had a long week or long month coming up, I'd always book something with you to to look forward to something and have that relief. But I you know we'll talk a little bit more about the benefits too. But you've been able to help me on the acupuncture side. But I can only imagine how interesting that transition was from going into restaurants to just going into your private practice like that.

A hundred percent and I think that's one reason I couldn't give restaurants up and I didn't want to. You know, because I just love the energy and the vibrancy and you know the entire culture of restaurants and I I didn't miss that. You know, as much as I loved being able to provide relief to people and really help them in their health journey and help support like what they needed, there was just this part of me, this social part of me, that I didn't, I didn't get enough in return from just doing massage, you know. So the first 10 plus years of my massage career, I worked in restaurants, more breweries, because of that reason, and it wasn't you know, at first I was like, oh, it's just the extra money, it's until I get my practice started and whatnot.

And then I was like, no, I crave it, and so that's that's really why I've always been drawn to more of like a hospitality industry setting versus, you know, straight private practice in that sense, yeah, and then you had a personal situation with acupuncture with your mom right, we share a little bit about that and was that your first experience with acupuncture?

Yeah, so just fun fact about me is I absolutely hate needles. Oh, I didn't know that. It's 100% terrified of all things that would puncture my skin. I do have tattoos now, but it's like we locked in.

Yeah, so when I was in massage school my mom actually got diagnosed with stage four melanoma. She was about 60 years old at the time and that's actually even before I started massage school. I moved back to New York in order to spend the time with her. I've kind of been traveling a bunch in Europe and, you know, just wander around places for a couple of months at a time. So I ended up back in New York.

At the time she was just starting chemotherapy. She had had a bunch of surgeries to remove the melanoma and fortunately had spread into her lymph. It was spreading into her lungs at that time too. So she went through oh, I think she was about eight or nine months of chemotherapy and during that time she started seeing an acupuncturist in Brooklyn and I used to take her to her appointments because she couldn't really drive at the time and she was able throughout about eight or nine months of chemo and after that she had about another six or seven months of immunotherapy, but she was able to keep working the entire time. She had very little weight loss. She was actually no issues with white blood cell count plummeting, no secondary infection concerns and stuff like that. Why did they recommend?

acupuncture.

So the acupuncture is actually used pretty often in conjunction with chemotherapy or cancer treatments in order to keep your immunity up during those times, also to counteract the effects of nausea, vomiting, weight loss, hair loss, all that kind of stuff.

So she went off the advice of I think that's her doctorate. My mom's an RN too, a nurse, so she works in the Western medical field and they're like here, try it, see how it helps, and she starts wearing it by it and she would go every single week. So that kind of first piqued my interest and I was like, okay, maybe we'll try it. I'm a little scared and evil, I'm not sure about the situation, and so I actually would start receiving some treatments. And fun fact too is that my massage school at the time I was in conjunction, going full time to massage school in New York City they actually had an acupuncture school there too. So started to learn a little bit about just more Eastern medicine, eastern medicine approach and philosophy and kind of how the systems work within your body. And then, fortunately, my mom was able to go into full remission after about a year and a half of treatments, which is pretty unheard of for stage four melanoma.

And that was almost 20 years ago. So pretty, I'm talking one.

Well, and I just love that. You know your mom now lives near you and I've been able to spend a lot of time with her, so just love her so.

Yeah, she's a feisty New York leader. She's got a little fight in her. I love it. I love it. So that was kind of my first introduction to acupuncture, and then my own personal journey with acupuncture started.

Hey there, listeners. Before we jump back into today's episode, let's shine a light on a pressing issue in the restaurant industry employee retention. If you're grappling with the challenges of keeping a solid team together, you're not alone. I would like to extend an invitation for a quick 15 minute discovery call to discuss your specific situation and explore strategies to boost restaurant retention. Your team is the heart of your business and retaining great talent is crucial for your mental and physical health, as well as the health of your business. Visit my website at christenmarvincom slash contact to schedule your call. Let's collaborate to enhance your retention strategies and create an environment where your team thrives. Now back to the show. Thanks for tuning in and I'm eager to connect with you soon.

Once I moved to Colorado I was doing massage full time and actually working at a restaurant up in Longmont, colorado at the time, and started just really, and I have for a long time struggling with anxiety which very much turns into digestive issues. For me and one of my friends, my dear friend Becky, she was just like you have to go see my acupuncture. She's amazing and I was like sure whatever, like it seems, works back in the day and have been probably eight or nine years since I was getting acupuncture regularly and I went and after the first session I was like, oh my God, this is my calling in life. That's awesome. I've forgotten about this.

Well, and I'm always curious about trying anything new in relation to health and wellness.

And acupuncture was something I never, I was never interested in, because the needles just I'm not necessarily afraid of them, but it just seemed too weird to me and it was just hard for me to lay still for extended periods of time, right, like when the restaurant business were always on the go.

And I remember when I stopped drinking I realized I had anxiety and come to find out I think it runs on my family and I didn't know what it was or what to do about it, right. And so I started to kind of do some research and I know I'd reached out to you and you were we're lucky to have a table at the house at the time, because my mother-in-laws in the massage world and had an extra table and you came over and asked me some really pointed questions about like what are you feeling and what's going on and when does it pop up for you? And we did a couple of treatments and it was incredible, like it just immediately helped get rid of it. And I'd love to know like there's some short-term benefits there for sure, right, but then there's also, it feels like, some long-term benefits to that too. Can you speak a little bit to that?

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I would say that and I usually tell people when they go into an experience acupuncture for the first time and they're like, how long is this gonna take to feel better? And the number one thing I ask them is how long have you had this condition? So usually I would say that the longer you've had something, the longer it takes to undo something, whether it's a habit, whether it's chronic pain or anything like that. But the short-term benefits definitely include any kind of like.

If you have an acute injury, if you have any kind of like very pinpointed pain, like oh, I slept weird or I've had this, you know, broke my arm, or something like that. Anytime that you get start getting sick as you can hear my voice just getting over a call from one of my kiddos it is amazing for helping push sickness out and just kind of the duration of your healing time like cuts in half. So instead of being sick for a week you can usually push it out within a day or two. Same with like nasal congestion, whether it's like allergies or you're getting a cold and stuff like that. It's really wonderful.

For Actually, believe it or not, a big section of acupuncture now is facial acupuncture or cosmetic acupuncture and you actually see results within one or two treatments. When you start going into more of the mental health realm anxiety, depression, insomnia when you start dealing a little bit more with like chronic illness so like migraines or autoimmune, or the pregnancy fertility area or addiction, it does take longer and that's kind of where you get more of the long-term benefits of it. So some will come in and they're like I haven't slept in like four years. We always start from the ground up, so we start by laying the brick foundation and just being like what's causing this? What can we do with acupuncture to start changing this and then being able to build on it every single session from there.

Yeah, you just mentioned so many wonderful things that acupuncture can do as far as treatments go, and you just did you mention addiction a second ago. Yes, how does acupuncture help with addiction?

So addiction? I mean there's many layers to addiction. There's no simple answer to do that, but it does work on a combination of both a physical addiction as well as the emotional and or mental component of addiction. A lot of times, with addiction in the physical aspect, it's actually the easier part to treat. So, whether it's anything like smoking with the physical cravings, or even alcohol, it can very much help with the physical cravings and where the chemical changes that have happened within your body, just by helping regulate, whether it's your hormones, endorphins especially, helping to regulate your nervous system, both autonomic and central excuse me sympathetic versus the mental, emotional part of it, and that's you can approach that a little differently, whether it's anxiety, whether it's suppression, whether it's just a certain amount of habit. So it's kind of many layers to that onion when you're treating addiction. But it's pretty amazing how powerful it can actually be when used in conjunction with other resources, whether it's therapy or a certain program or something like that.

That's awesome. I had no idea. That's really interesting. I want to know a little bit more. So let's target specifically restaurant operators any restaurant owners that are listening, or any operators people that are on their feet 10 to 12 hours a day. You mentioned a lot of the mental health aspects that acupuncture can help, but let's talk about some of the physical components you know from being in the industry. These long hours you're on your feet, back hips, things like that. What can acupuncture do for people in the restaurant business to help them on a physical level?

I think a lot of times, restaurant people especially suffer from a lot of overuse injuries. So, whether it's stuff with your wrist or your hands, with your low back, with your knees, because you're constantly living, constantly moving, constantly running throughout the whole place, you know, I think the big thing is, and you know, when you deal with overuse injuries, you have to change that pattern. But you can't with reality it's, you're not going to be able to change it. So, being able to go in and manage it, so helping with any kind of inflammation that's being caused, whether it's tendonitis, whether it's bursitis, you know, in a joint, versus like in the muscle tissue itself, and then also being able to more or less help people retrain their bodies in order to use them more efficiently and effectively, rather than just being like oh, I do this all the time, you know, and constantly like moving from this area to this area, standing on concrete, you know, on hard surfaces, you know, not necessarily the most supportive shoes. So just helping people bring back that body awareness to themselves as well.

Yeah, and one of the things I love about working with you is you I would always tell you exactly where where the tension was or where the where I was holding the stress. I always held a lot of stress on my hips, and which I didn't know it until I started getting more frequent massage, but I held a lot of stress on my hips and my shoulders, my neck area, and it was just. You know, sometimes I'd get sick after massage because it was just releasing all of that garbage, which was always a good sign to me that I needed to do it more often, which was a great treat, right. But one of the things that I loved is that you always gave me tools and resources when I walked out of the office of stretches I could do, you know, foam roll or, you know, use a yoga ball or something to just really target areas that were hurting. So I wasn't so reliant on just coming back to you to find the pain relief, but I could continue to kind of manage it on my own.

And then, you know, I found when I did that that I would discover that there was pain somewhere else that I didn't even know existed, and then we'd, would you know kind of start the process over again. I'm like I started to get curious about it. I'm like show, tell me now, like show me where does it hurt. Now you know what can I work on next? So it's it was very. I think working with you really helped me understand my body on a much deeper level than I did before, and just being more mindful of how I'm taking care of myself, which is great.

Yeah, and I'm really glad that you could share that. You know, my job isn't just to make someone feel better. It's to help their body find balance and give them resources in order to maintain feeling better. You know, I think and I truly believe that is that everyone's body has the capability to heal itself to a certain extent. It's just that we don't always know how to do that or we don't always allow our bodies to do that. That's awesome.

I know how passionate you are about this and how excited you are to share this message, and I'm super excited you get to come on and share with this platform. You just recently went to Japan and was able you were able to study. Would you tell us some of the highlights from that trip?

Of course Japan is an amazing country If you ever have the opportunity, highly recommend. I mean, besides doing so much acupuncture, I put much to say my way through Japan. It was amazing. But yeah, I recently had an opportunity.

So I practice a very specific type of acupuncture. It's a Japanese style called yashinomichi and it's kind of different than more of like the stereotypical acupuncture where someone sticks a whole bunch of needles and leaves the room for, you know, 20 to 40 minutes and comes back and takes them out. I actually just do one needle at a time. I go from point to point and around the body and as the body starts changing, I customize and individualize my treatment that way.

And so back in November I had an opportunity to go study acupuncture in Japan and it was an amazing seven day workshop that I had and we were able to integrate directly into a Japanese acupuncture school and it was. All the lectures and classes were given in Japanese, translated into English, and it was awesome because not only were we able to fully immerse within a Japanese acupuncture community, we were actually able to study and experience the cultural differences between a more Western you know approach than the actual Japanese approach to acupuncture, which gets lost in translation, I think very much. So you know, kind of going to the source to study it versus, you know, a hand me down is a very different. You get a lot of differences out of each experience. Yeah, and it was just was able to really elevate my practice and my understanding and my learning to a different level that you and I was not prepared for. How impactful it was.

That's incredible. I'm still jealous of the sushi stories that you told. Tyler and I went out to sushi last week and we were like, look how expensive this is.

You got a good 20 dollars for all of this.

I love it Well, I know we've talked a lot about acupuncture, but will you share with the listeners I do want to mention Deirdre's, in Denver and has an office in Lakewood. You can find her there. Would you just share a little bit more of the services that you offer in addition to acupuncture for the listeners?

Yeah, absolutely. In my practice I do specialize a little bit more in the prenatal, postnatal, pediatric world. But, that being said, I actually treat the whole family because very often I'll start seeing someone during their pregnancy or start seeing someone's little child. They're like, oh well, I have this, my wife has this, or my husband has this. So it very much becomes like all of a sudden, you're just treating the entire family.

I would say that my personal passion in acupuncture, besides pre and postnatal, is definitely a lot of anxiety, insomnia, depression. Those are a little trifecta that they very much inner and overlap with each other and also a lot with I guess the best way we put it is just chronic, unknown issues that people have had, which is very big. Yeah, the weird things that fall through the Western medical system, whether it be like I've had numbness and tingling in my hand for 10 years and I don't know why. Or I've had this autoimmune disease and I'm on this certain medication and I have all these side effects that the doctor's just like you have to keep taking that. So I just want to help mitigate side effects and medication or whatnot, but just all that stuff that people are just like. Yeah, I've dealt with it, because I've had to, because it turns out you don't have to necessarily.

I love it. That's a beautiful note to end on, for sure. Well, thank you again. So much, deirdre, for being here. We really appreciate it. Would you share with the listeners how they can get in contact with you?

Yeah, absolutely so. The name of the practice I work at is Bumblebee Accu Therapy. We are located this is myself and my partner, Maya Suzuki and we are located in Lakewood, just west of Denver, for about 15 minutes outside of downtown Denver, and you can go and find all of our services and book any appointment on bumblebeeacu. com.

Awesome, great. Thank you so much. I hope this was some really great learning. I learned a ton today from this episode, so I really appreciate you sharing all your knowledge, and I need to book something with you next time we come into town, for sure. So what's that? It just means you have to come back to Denver soon, I know, oh darn, yeah, I think April's our next trip out there, so we will see you sooner than later. But all right, everybody, thanks so much for listening. Be sure to share this podcast with any restaurant leaders that you know who could benefit, and be sure to follow me on LinkedIn at Christin-Marvin. Take care, everybody, we'll see you next week.