Chiropractic Care for Stress
The demands on our time and attention are increasing all the time. The world we live in has become increasingly more difficult to live without some negative stresses in our lives. Our jobs are becoming more competitive and less secure. The industrial age may have provided useful machines and helped to increase productivity but along with it came NOISE: construction noise, loudspeakers, motorized vehicles, etc. Physical stresses have increasingly become worse over the years (air, sound and water pollution). Our awareness of world news has also increased dramatically because of the electronic media and internet available to us. Lets be honest, it’s not usually good news. All of these things contribute to increasing the anxiety in our lives and has basically assaulted our senses creating a physical and emotional reaction.
How does stress effect us?
Our modern healthcare is more and more recognizing the many illnesses that stress causes or that certainly has adverse affects on a persons life. Stress will trigger a flight or fight response in us. This can affect almost every part of the body. Our brain, more specifically the hypothalamus, stimulates the sympathetic nervous system. Our body reacts by increasing our heart rate, blood volume and blood pressure. Our blood is then directed away from our digestion and the extremities. Then responding to our sympathetic nervous system, the adrenal glands secrete corticoids, which include epinephrine, adrenaline and norepinephrine. This is extremely helpful if we are running for our lives and in immediate danger. However, the effects of this on our bodies longterm can be disastrous to our health! Some of the health issues relating to stress can include high blood pressure, muscle tissue damage, infertility, diabetes, slower healing times, immune response damage. Stress has also been linked to cardiovascular disease and plays a vital role in post-traumatic stress disorder.
What is our reaction to stress?
So how do we actually react to stress?? There are three basic sources of our stress: emotions, environment and our bodies. Emotional stress involves our reactions, including our thoughts and emotions, to environmental and physical stressors in our lives. We can all react differently to similar stressors. We are all different in how we can cope or manage the stressors in our lives. Understanding how you cope is key to helping you release the stresses in your life. Environmental stress are the things around us, or that we are exposed to. This can include noise, weather, physical threats, performance standards, and how we are treated by others. Body stress can be disease processes, malfunction in our organs, poor nutrition, lack of proper sleep and physical injury.
How can a chiropractor help??
Chiropractors cannot reduce the stresses that occur in your life, they can however provide treatment to help develop a healthy response to the stress. Chiropractors are often qualified and trained in many areas relating to you overall health and well-being. They are equipped to offer advice on ways that you can remove some stresses from your life, relaxation techniques and vitamins and supplements that can benefit your health.
Chiropractors focus primarily on the spine, understanding that the spine is the root of the nervous system through which nerve impulses travel from the brain to the rest of the body. When we are stressed our muscles get very tense, under chronic stress conditions the muscle tension can create misalignments in our spinal column, known as subluxations. This can lead to nerve irritation. The adjustments we receive from the chiropractor release this muscle tension, enabling our bodies to return to a more relax state. Getting adjustments also contribute to reducing spinal nerve irritation and can improve blood circulation.
Chiropractic care can assist in treating the effects of stress on our bodies, but more importantly it can help the body manage and process stress in a healthier way. Chiropractors believe that our bodies were created to heal! How about you, do you believe you can reduce stress in your life by seeing a chiropractor??
Resources: http://www.altmd.com/Articles/Chiropractic-Care-for-Stress