Is There a Pressure Point for Hot Flashes?

Most advice about hot flashes is about cooling down once the heat has already hit. Chinese medicine asks a different question: why is the heat rising in the first place, and can you send it back down? Here is how the heat of menopause works, the point on the sole of your foot that I use for it, and the simple evening foot soak that brings the two together.

Is there a pressure point for hot flashes?

There is, and it is a long way from where the heat shows up. Hot flashes are felt in the chest, the neck and the face. The point I use is on the bottom of the foot. That distance is the whole idea.

Chinese medicine treats where a symptom comes from and where it is going. Menopausal heat has lost its anchor and is drifting upward. So instead of cooling it down after it hits, you give it somewhere to go: down, through the feet. The point for that job is Yongquan, the first point of the Kidney channel.

I wrote about the bigger picture of this stage of life in Why Is Menopause Called the Second Spring? This post is the practical follow-up: one thing to do in the evening, and why it works. Small, repeatable habits like this are what we build on inside Gut Brain Synchrony.

Why do hot flashes happen?

Because the body's thermostat changes when sex hormones fall, and it changes fastest when they fall suddenly.

A hormonal shock, not a female quirk

Men show this clearly. If a man's testes were removed, or his testosterone shut down with medication, he would start having hot flashes almost immediately. That is what happens in prostate cancer treatment. In a London study of 250 men on androgen deprivation therapy, 80 percent reported vasomotor symptoms and 11.6 percent of all the men rated them severe, with drenching sweats and hot flashes common.^[1]

Women show the same pattern. When the ovaries are removed surgically, the hormone drop happens in a day instead of over years. In a study comparing 48 women after risk-reducing removal of the ovaries with 60 women after natural menopause, the surgical group scored about twice as high on a standard climacteric symptom scale, 17.36 against 8.65, including the vasomotor symptoms.^[2]

A thermostat with no slack in it

A 2025 review lays out the mechanism. Deep in the hypothalamus sits a cluster of cells called KNDy neurons. When estradiol falls, they become overactive and signal the brain's temperature center to dump heat, by opening the blood vessels in the skin and switching on sweating.^[3] That is the flush.

Normally there is a band of core temperature where your body neither sweats nor shivers. At Wayne State University, Robert Freedman measured it. In 8 postmenopausal women without hot flashes it was about 0.4°C wide. In 12 women with hot flashes it had shrunk to essentially zero. During exercise, every symptomatic woman had a hot flash and none of the others did.^[4]

So the tiniest temperature bump triggers a full heat dump. And here is the detail that matters for Chinese medicine: estrogen levels do not differ between women who flash and women who do not.^[5] The hormone falls for everyone. What differs is how well each body holds steady while it falls.

What is empty heat in Chinese medicine?

Empty heat is heat that comes from a shortage of cooling, not from an excess of fire. It is the name Chinese medicine gives to menopausal hot flashes.

Full heat is a fire with too much fuel, like a fever from an infection. Empty heat is a normal fire with too little water around it. The fire has not grown. The water that kept it in check has gone down.

That water is yin. Your Kidneys store your body's cooling reserve, and we call it Kidney yin. As the transition draws on it, there is less to hold the heat down. Heat is light and it rises. With nothing to anchor it, it floats up and gets stuck in the chest, the neck and the face.

The signs of this pattern are familiar: heat in waves, often in the afternoon or at night, sweating during sleep, flushed cheeks, a dry mouth, restlessness, and heat in the palms and soles, which the classics call five-palm heat. It is Freedman's narrowed band, described from the other direction.

Where is the Yongquan point?

Yongquan is on the sole of your foot, in the hollow that appears when you curl your toes, about a third of the way from the web between your second and third toes to the back of your heel.

The name means bubbling spring. It is the lowest point on the body, the place where, in the classical image, the Kidney water wells up out of the ground. That makes it the traditional point for pulling things down: heat that has risen, and a mind that is racing when it should be settling.

When researchers at Chungnam National University dissected six cadavers to map the point, they found it sits in the layers of the sole right next to the medial and lateral plantar nerves, which carry sensation from the bottom of the foot.^[6]

It also turns up in trials, usually with other points. In a Chinese trial of 100 women with perimenopausal insomnia of the heart-kidney imbalance pattern, needling combined with moxibustion, a form of warming, at Yongquan was compared with diazepam and oryzanol. After two 10-day courses, sleep scores were 4.88 in the acupuncture group against 8.00 with medication, where lower is better.^[7] Notice that the perimenopausal trial warmed the point. That is the logic of the foot soak.

Does a foot soak help hot flashes?

It helps the menopause picture as a whole, and the best trial measured exactly that. No study I could find has tested a foot soak on hot flash counts alone.

In an Iranian randomized trial, 100 menopausal women were split into two groups. Half soaked their feet in warm water 10 cm deep for 20 minutes, an hour before bedtime, every night for six weeks. The other half did nothing new. At the start, 96 percent of the soaking group were poor sleepers. By the end they had significantly better sleep and less severe menopausal symptoms than the control group.^[8]

How warm water on the feet moves heat

Warm the feet and the vessels in them open, making the feet a route for heat to leave the body. In a Taiwanese crossover study of 25 adults around 60, a 20-minute soak at 40°C raised foot temperature and widened the gap between the warm feet and the cooler trunk, the signal of open vessels at the extremities.^[9] That is heat moving to the bottom of the body instead of the top.

In that study core temperature also crept up during the soak, by about half a degree, and sleep in the lab did not change.^[9] A Japanese study of nine women found that a full bath raised core temperature by about 1.0°C while a hot foot bath did not, and both shortened the time to fall asleep.^[10] Since small rises in core temperature trigger flushes, keep the water warm rather than hot.

A Dutch review found that warming the feet speeds sleep onset in adults, though the effect was weaker in older adults and absent in elderly people with insomnia.^[11] The soak is a support, not a switch.

Ginger and pepper are optional

Some versions of this soak add ginger or pepper. In a German trial of 28 adults with long-standing insomnia, 80 grams of powdered ginger in a nightly footbath made the feet feel warmer but did not improve sleep more than warm water alone. Both groups improved.^[12] Plain warm water does the work.

Does massaging your feet help menopause?

The research says yes, and it says the exact spot matters less than doing it.

In a British trial, 76 women aged 45 to 60 with menopausal symptoms received nine sessions over 19 weeks of either professional reflexology or a general foot massage. Both groups improved in anxiety and depression, and similar changes were found in the severity of hot flashes and night sweats. Reflexology did no better than the plain foot massage.^[13] The trial had no untreated group, but the lesson holds: you do not need precision to benefit from working the soles of your feet.

In a Turkish village, 70 postmenopausal women were randomized to a daily foot massage for a week or to nothing. Afterward the massage group slept a median of 8 hours a night against 7, with lower fatigue and anxiety scores.^[14]

A 2026 meta-analysis of massage trials in menopausal and postmenopausal women found clear improvements in overall menopause scores, anxiety, depression and fatigue. The effect on the vasomotor subscale was a trend that did not reach significance.^[15] Massage works best on the nervous system side of the picture, which is what Yongquan is meant to settle.

How to do the Yongquan foot soak

For the rest of the evening, What Causes Insomnia in Chinese Medicine? covers why the mind will not switch off at night.

Hot flashes and the foot soak, answered

Why do hot flashes happen at night?

Freedman found that hot flashes follow a daily rhythm that peaks around 6:25 in the evening. Flashes in the first half of the night can wake you, while those in the second half do not, because REM sleep suppresses the body's heat-loss responses.^[16] In Chinese medicine night belongs to yin, so a yin shortfall shows most when yin should be in charge.

What can help hot feet at night?

Hot soles are a classic sign of empty heat. If your feet already burn at night, use water that is barely warm, or simply massage Yongquan before bed. The aim is to draw the heat down and let it go, not to add more.

Is a foot soak before bed good for you?

For most people, yes. Warm feet are linked to falling asleep faster, and in menopausal women six weeks of nightly soaks brought better sleep and milder symptoms.

Stop fighting the heat after it rises. Give it a way down.

— Brehan Crawford, L.Ac.

References

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2. Benshushan A, Rojansky N, Chaviv M, et al. Climacteric symptoms in women undergoing risk-reducing bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy. Climacteric. 2009;12(5):404-409. doi:10.1080/13697130902780846
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