Here in April we want to talk about stress. This is stress awareness month and stress is something we are all affected by all the time.
The key to getting and staying well is to find out:
- Where the stressors exist in your environment.
- Ways to minimize that (stress) in a natural, healthy way.
- How to improve your body’s ability to adapt to these stresses so your body is able to do its most important function, which is regulate your health and heal your body.
Now there’s three different types of stress. And right behind me, this really explains the stress response in your body and how chiropractic actually helps your body better adapt to the stress response.
How to Understand the Stress Responses in Your Body
https://youtu.be/HPQMRYPp2UE?rel=0
Watch the video now! Prefer to read? Here ‘s the gist of what else Dr. Tim spoke about in this video clip.
The Three Primary Types of Stressors
These three types of stresses are listed here.
- emotional thoughts
- physical traumas
- chemical toxins
So these come in the form of life stress, financial stress, relationship stress, and emotional stress.
Emotional Stressors
Many times we get caught in the area of focusing on things that we can’t really control or influence. Many times we get caught in the urgent and maybe unimportant things or the urgent and important because we didn’t do the proactive things to prevent that from happening.
I see this happening in health all the time. People tend to be very reactive to their health. They wait until something breaks down, or an issue shows up, or they’re injured, before they really do things about it.
But if they were properly taught to look for the warning signs, to understand how the body functions, and things they may have been able to do preventatively or proactively to avoid that type of injury, dysfunction, or disease, it would really help you live a much better life.
And that’s what we want to focus on in this video here today.
Physical Stressors
This can be in the way of macro traumas, which would be like a car accident, a major sports injury, a fall down the stairs or off the roof. Something we can all think of that causes significant damage quickly.
Much more commonly is actually repetitive stress traumas. This is things like sitting at your desk all day, working on a computer or device, using your cell phone consistently, doing the same repetitive activity over and over and over again. These little micro-traumas day in day out, week after week, month after month, year after year, add up to the same amount of physical stress and trauma as a major accident or injury would be.
Therefore it limits your body’s ability to adapt.
Physically your posture gets challenged. You start to hunch over. Your muscles get weak. They’re not able to adapt to new things. Therefore you get injured easily.
Your performance starts to go down. You’re not able to do as many things as you want to do. Your ability to adapt to life around you goes down.
Chemical Stressors
And the third is chemical toxins. Now chemical toxins exist in our environment and sometimes are unavoidable. There may be toxins in the air, toxins around you, these things you can’t necessarily avoid.
There are things that you may not know of that exist in common things you use regularly like personal care products, the food you eat, the water that you drink, the cleaning products that you use, cosmetics, clothing, things that are around us, that you may not be aware of, that are full of chemical stress and toxins that are burdening your health.
And then there’s the things that you add in. Things like alcohol, sugary processed foods, medications, vaccines. Chemical toxins that come many times to treat the stresses of emotional or physical stress, or to treat the effects of overwhelming chemical stress that causes dysfunction and disease in the body.
So instead of correcting the cause and getting a natural solution to help the body heal itself, well, many times we’re taught or told to take some kind of chemical or drug or some type of food or other chemical stress to actually manage the symptoms to help you feel better in the moment, without ever fixing the cause.
The Power of Chiropractic Adjustments to Combat the Effects of Stress
So right behind me, it really talks about the bigness of chiropractic and the power of even a single adjustment which we see exponentially beneficial with our corrective care approach. Most people don’t know there’s two types of chiropractic. There’s those that focus on a limited scope where they’re just treating neck or back pain, It’s very common and you might’ve been to this type of person if you went to somebody on your insurance plan.
If you had a work injury or maybe were in a car accident, they likely sent you to this limited scope chiropractor where they’re going to help you feel better, but typically not really fix the cause, not restore the function that was lost. And there’s going to be very little long-term benefit.
Now, corrective care chiropractors is much more unique. This is where we focus and why we get a different level of result. And we really see life’s changed here in the office because we’re addressing the effects of these three types of stress. And through our Five Essentials health program, we actually help you identify where these stresses exist in your environment and give you healthy ways to start minimizing those stresses so your body’s not so overwhelmed.
We work with you on replacing these unhealthy stressful lifestyle habits to more healthy, natural, preventative lifestyle habits, where your body actually gets stronger. This means you’re going to have more energy, less pain, better function, better sleep, better digestion, a stronger immune system, your resiliency, your ability to adapt goes up. So I want to talk about how your body deals with stress and we’ll talk about how chiropractic is the natural solution you’ve been looking for.
Whenever we’re under stress, whether it’s emotionally, physically, chemically, or a combination of those, this creates a stress response in your body. This is called sympathetic overdrive.
The Ways Your Body Responds to Stress
Above you can see the stress response. When you’re under stress consistently, some things increase. The things that increase are:
- your stress hormones
- cortisol
- catecholamines, which are inflammatory chemicals in your body. So you’re going to have more pain and you’re going to down-regulate healthy function.
- heart rate
- blood pressure
- glucose
- fat in your blood
- insulin resistance
- breathing rate
- bone loss.
Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not really excited about any of those things!
On the other side, certain systems that you need for healthy function. Well, those are going to decrease.
- digestive function
- metabolism
- serotonin (which is good, healthy, happy mood, hormones)
- memory
- growth hormone (which helps you actually burn fat and build muscle and slows down the aging process)
- hormone balance
- immune system
- focus and concentration
- testosterone.
As we look at that list, I’m not super excited about having lower testosterone, a weaker immune system, a slower metabolism and a weaker body overall, but this is where most people exist because they’re living in this stress response.
Measuring the Stress Response in Your Body
We can actually measure the stress response in your body and how your body is adapting through the special nerve scans that we do here in our office. When you’re measuring in the 70’s, 60’s and 50’s, especially, you’re actually in this stress response. This is where I find many people are, and this is the root cause of their health issues.
So we have hundreds and hundreds of people coming in every week, thousands of people a year that are not coming in to treat neck or back pain, They’re coming in to improve their health naturally, to get to the cause of their issues, and find a natural drug free solution.
So if you’re tired of being sick and tired, if you don’t want another drug to mask the symptoms, if you’re tired of just masking the symptoms and treating disease and managing your health issues and you’re ready to finally get healthy again. To commit to healthy living, we have the answer. This is exactly what we do.
We have hundreds of people coming in every week getting these types of solutions with the Five Essentials of Max Living. They are addressing the causes of stress and through correction chiropractic care we help them to restore normal function, to decrease the stress response and put your body back in balance.
Learn More About Your Most Pressing Health Concerns
If you want to learn more about how you can get to the cause of your stress issues and your health problems and find a natural drug free solution check us out online or call the office. We have hundreds of videos here on our Youtube channel that you can look at and there’s all kinds of other resources that we post to other social media channels to help you live a healthier life, naturally.
Have you had the opportunity to join us at one of our community education events yet? During the community education events, Dr. Tim sifts through all of the knowledge out there to bring you key information about how to get healthy and stay that way and shares answers to frequently asked questions on chiropractic care and healthy eating. Contact our office to learn about upcoming classes. Enjoy the clips of previous events here.