Are you aware of what is going on in your body?

Stress is unavoidable, it’s a fact of life, and as a chiropractor in Islington I have seen a multitude of patients come in for treatment where stress is a significant problem for them. We can suffer from stress out of choice by doing something outside of our comfort zone or doing something challenging, or we can suffer from it as a result of the uncontrollable  and random events that strike us all from time to time.  

This response to our environment is unconscious, no-one chooses to be stressed and we all have different stress responses and levels of this stress response. Some of these responses are learned and are ‘taught’ to us by the environment  we were brought up in, and some are ingrained responses that go back to our embryological development. Our experience of life between 0-5 years can also have a substantial influence as to how the parts of the brain that regulate  our emotional control develop and how as adults we unconsciously try to mitigate or reduce the stress response that we are undergoing. This can obviously result in some behaviours that are negative for our health.

The response to stress manifests itself in the hyper activity of the part of the nervous system known as the autonomic nervous system, this part of the nervous system controls the unconscious systems in us such as heart rate, respiratory rate, muscle tightness, pupil dilation and changes to the digestive system. 

The autonomic nervous system composes of about 83% of our body’s nervous system, the remaining 17% is devoted to the spinal nerves, the nerves that run up and down our arm and legs and allow us to move, the nerves supply conscious movement.

As a chiropractor in Islington I am very aware that some stress can be good for us, it can be both motivational as well as protective, but it can also be bad for us if chronic and this can cause us a multitude of problems that affect our health and our relationships. But there is hope for us!

We can become aware of our body and how it is responding to the environment and the immediate situation we are in. This process of ‘self-awareness’ takes time to develop and there is always a constant battle to maintain this awareness throughout the day!

Accessing our inner ‘self’ and understanding our  thoughts and feelings throughout the day will give us an idea as to the appropriateness of  what we are thinking and feeling, and is it proportional to the surroundings we are in. If we master this we can then start to consciously lower our stress and improve how our autonomic nervous system is functioning.

This process takes time but I feel that this is one of the best skills to develop and master, and it is one of the keys to recover from a long term or recurrent problem if we want to reach and maintain an optimal level of health.