By WIN Provider: Dr. Matthew Bird, Chiropractor
Do you wonder how chiropractic helps stress management?
All aspects of your health concerns or conditions can fall under the broad umbrella of stress.
Stress is essentially the culminating aspect of your life that weighs itself on our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.
The stress response can be summarized physiologically by the release of your “stress hormones” noradrenaline and cortisol.
This “fight or flight” response in many situations is stuck in the ON position and can lead to a whole host of problems such as muscular and joint pain, weight loss or even weight gain, hormone disruptions, neurological dysregulation, auto immune disorders, cardiovascular disease, cancer etc.
How does Chiropractic Help Stress Management?
By looking at person, as opposed to merely a diagnosis, the goal is to build resiliency of the neuromusculoskeletal system.
This helps you develop strategies and skills to combat the many “threats” life throws at you.
There are many “threats” that may trigger your fight or flight system. However, stress is an individual response and will vary greatly across a population.
So, let’s keep it simple and look at time as the one of the constant stressors that effects all of us. As time marches along we tend to ignore the subtle effects it has on us. The most obvious effects of time on our body is our posture.
Most people under the age of 25 tend to ignore this aspect or simply believe it won’t affect them especially when locked to a desk working 40hrs a week.
Sedentary lifestyles will lead to joint stiffness and relative weakness with “tight” muscles.
Time under tension lead your experiencing chronic postural adaptations. These can lead to degenerative changes of your musculoskeletal system with deficits in your proprioceptive abilities (spatial awareness).
Now it doesn’t take long to build bad habits, but it could take a very long time to change those habits.
Chiropractic care will arm you with strategies to tackle the common daily stresses of life.
It can help you build resiliency into your tissues (muscles, ligaments, tendons etc.) and restoring/optimizing your joint functions.
Through manual therapy and modalities WIN Chiropractors are able to alter the afferent signals travelling from your body to your brain so you may create an altered/improved efferent signal (brain to body) creating balance in your spatial awareness, movement strategies and building your capacity to take on the many obstacles of life.
Hebbian Principle: neurons that fire together wire together! Thus, breaking habits means neurons that fire apart wire apart!
Working with your WIN Chiropractor will help you further understand the key aspects of health by balancing 3 key features: Diet, Exercise and Rest
Restoring spinal balance via spinal manipulation, nervous system balance with acupuncture, gut health with diet and daily exercise to positively activate our stress response and utilize all the nutrients from a healthy dietary plan.
Chiropractic care is a simple solution to the many stressful aspects of life.
Taking time now to look after yourself will pay out with dividends later in life!
To discuss how Chiropractic can help, visit with me at WIN Health to discuss options that can support you.