Chiropractic care can help the body manage the effects of stress by taking pressure off the nervous system to allow the brain and body to communicate better and process stress better.
What happens to our bodies when we are anxious or stressed out?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Yeah, great question. Before we talk about that specific question, what is stress? In chiropractic field and in essentially all the medical field, there’s several forms of stress, right? Chiropractors call them the three Ts. We’ve got traumas, so, big traumas like being rear-ended on the freeway or what we call micro-traumas, so being pinned to your desk for 50 hours a week. You have those traumas that come through thought, so, deadlines, toxic relationships, grievances in the family. Then you obviously have stress that’s internal toxins, so poor dietary habits, high in processed foods, food additives, inflammatory foods. Essentially, what happens is when the body’s stressed out through one of those three things, enter the sympathetic nervous system.
We have two types of the nervous system, parasympathetic, which is our body’s ability at night time to enter rapid eye movement, clean our cells, essentially rest and digest, and sympathetic is the opposite. It’s our fight or flight response, so we might be rear-ended on the freeway, eyes open up, the hairs on the back of your head stand up. But if we’re consistently anxious, stressed out, then we’re consistently in the sympathetic nervous system. What that does is it increases our cortisol levels. If our cortisol levels are raised, then it affects our ability to process hormones, particularly insulin, within the blood.
So, if we can’t absorb the insulin, then obviously it spikes our blood sugar, and then it just has this catastrophic event where we’re just on that hamster wheel where we’re consistently stressed. We can’t process stress. We can’t handle the hormone proliferation in the body. This adds to more stress, sickness, and disease. So, our body when we’re stressed does not function well both physically and/or physiologically, and we’re just consistently on that hamster wheel. Stress is a big deal. In our office, we call stress the silent killer. It’s the underlying, underpinning cause of pretty much sickness and disease, period.
What are the side effects of constant chronic stress?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Our clinic is a busy clinic in downtown Chicago. Our patient base is corporate athletes, graduates through people who are starting families, mid-early-20s through early 40s. 90% of our patients’ job role is corporate, so that activity day-to-day is essentially sedentary, sitting or standing. Our bodies are built to be in motion, so if we’re chronically stressed through those micro-stresses, aka poor posture, being pinned to our desk 50 hours a week, supplement that with a high-stress job, deadlines, et cetera, then we’re obviously going to be in that sympathetic state.
How it shows up in our corporate athletes, we call them the corporate lifestyle diseases. It’s essentially metabolic diseases, so an increase in chance of type two diabetes, cardiovascular disease, poor sleep, poor mood, poor energy levels, low libido, inability to gain and/or lose weight. Once the body is chronically stressed, it just has these negative effects on the body, which can manifest in real sickness and disease, again, diabetes, heart disease, or stroke. All the research backs that up.
They go through the roof. We call those lifestyle diseases, just patients who are coming in, fatigue, tired, poor mood, irritable, low libido, can’t gain weight, can’t lose weight, poor sleep patterns, low energy levels. That’s all coming from the micro-stress, which essentially quantifies as stress in the body. Yeah, it has a really nasty effect on our patient base.
What other chiropractic treatments or therapies help the body handle stress?
Dr. Luke Stringer: A chiropractic adjustment is taking a spinal joint through its intended range of motion. Delivering a light force to the joint line, you’re going to hear a pop. This has an amazing effect. 80% of stimulation in your brain comes from movement of the spine, so it obviously stimulates the brain. Stimulation in the brain allows the brain to send signals down the spinal cord to the nerve and then into where that nerve goes. It might be a muscle. It might be an organ. So, if you are subluxated, which means a joint’s out of alignment compressing a nerve and/or you’re globally subluxated, you’ve got that typical corporate posture, head shifted forward, shoulders are rounded, big hump in your upper back, essentially, you’re subluxated, you’re out of alignment, you create stress in the nervous system.
Chiropractic adjustments can get the joint moving, take pressure off the nerve, and stimulate the brain. It allows the body the ability, from the brain to the nerve, nerve to the brain, to communicate better. This is obviously going to reduce stress in the nervous system. Less stress in the nervous system gives your body the ability to deal with stress better. We’re in that parasympathetic nervous system where we’re in rapid eye movement at sleep, we’re in resting and digesting. So, essentially, by obviously taking stress off the joint, the spine, and nervous system, that allows us to decrease stress within the body. Less stress on the nervous system allows us to deal with stress and that allows us to feel and function optimally and as we should.
Can regular chiropractic care help the body fight off the negative effects of stress long-term?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Yeah, absolutely. Chiropractic care is a great way for people to regulate stress on their nervous system. A nervous system that’s under less stress is going to be able to handle stress better, less sickness, less disease, less of those lifestyle diseases. So, if you’re consistently getting adjusted, you could do a quick slip and check, see how many times you’ve been sick over the last 12 months compared to your co-workers who aren’t under chiropractic care. I can guarantee the people under chiropractic care are handling stress better, they’re breaking down less, and they’re functioning better, better energy, better sleep, better mood, better metabolism.
So, yeah, chiropractors should be in everyone’s healthcare team. You should be getting regularly adjusted to make sure your spine is in alignment, the joints are being moved, the nervous system’s stimulated because that’s just going to allow us to deal with day-to-day life and those day-to-day stresses much better than if we’re just chronically subluxated and stressed out.
If you are interested in speaking with Dr. Luke Stringer visit www.southloopchiropractor.com or call (312) 987-4878 to schedule an appointment.
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