Stress and How it Affects your Spine: How Chiropractic Helps

Let’s talk about stress. All of us experience different types of stress on a daily basis. This is especially true in todays society where most people are being bombarded with information from phones, sit most of the day, and constantly face tons of toxins in the environment. It’s important to remember that stress isn’t just caused by situations where we feel overwhelmed. It is way more multifaceted than that. Stress is anything that overwhelms your nervous system (brain and spinal cord) to the point where it is not able to process and or adapt to what it perceives in its environment. As an example, here are the three most common types of stress we face in our daily lives.

1.         Physical stress - this happens during accidents, falls, sports, and even sitting for long periods of the day. Physical stress can cause the joints in our body to begin to break down over time. When joints in the spine begin to break down or become damaged, this can disrupt the ability of nerves to send information between the brain and the rest of your body. This is how areas of the body begin to break down.

2.         Chemical Stress - this can come from toxins in our environment, as well as the things we consume.  Things like preservatives, processed sugar, and even side effects from the medications we consume all contribute to the chemical stress that our bodies have to process every day. When our spine is healthy, flexible, and properly aligned, we have a more adaptive nervous system and we are more likely to be able to overcome the toxins in our environment. However, if our spinal integrity is compromised, the communication between the brain and body is compromised and we may notice that we begin to express sick symptoms as a result of our nervous system being overwhelmed by its environment.

3.         Emotional/mental - this might be the most impactful stress to our well-being, especially in the long term. This type of stress often comes from our childhood, relationships with parents and friends, information we consume, and even the repetitive thoughts we think. All of these can create emotional stress that builds up in our bodies and overtime causes us to lose our vitality. Candace Pert, author of molecules of emotion, and a world renowned neuroscientist said that “as our feelings change, this mixture of peptides travels throughout your body and brain and literally changes the chemistry of every cell in your body…” This highlights the important role our emotions play in our overall health.

In closing it’s important to remember that stress in our environment can create stress in our spine. Stress in our spine disrupts the communication that happens between the brain and all the different parts of our body, causing our bodies to break down and not function at our best. To help combat this, chiropractors are trained to find the stress in your spine, and help your body remove it, so that you can begin to naturally express health more optimally.