What Happens to Stress When You Receive Chiropractic Care?

As a chiropractor in Islington I have seen plenty of patients come into the clinic suffering from stress, either caused by work or by family issues. Of course more recently there has been stress caused by COVID19 and the subsequent repercussions!

If you read the previous article about ‘What Stress does to your Body?’ you can start to understand  how the nervous system has a big impact on how the body functions and how you feel. The impact on stress on your health can’t be ignored and when you have your first appointment, amongst other things, we will discuss how stressed you are, what is causing your stress, and how the stress is affecting your body.  We will also measure your heart rate variability which is probably the easiest way to establish some objective measure about your stress level.

This need to understand your stress levels may seem a bit strange when you initially come in to my Islington chiropractic clinic wanting treatment for neck pain or low back pain, but I need to know what your body is up to and how your nervous system is functioning and in what state it is in, remember the fight or flight response?

Everyday stress can come from three different sources, our emotions, our body and the environment. Emotional stress is the hardest to determine as it is how we are feeling either all the time or under certain situations. 

Emotional stress can be insidious and you may not realise initially how much stress you are under or how the stress is affecting you. You may have been under the stress for a long time and you may be too used to the stress to realise you are suffering from it. Work, relationships and money worries can all contribute to emotional stress as well as COVID19 and its knock on effects.

Environmental stress is a little more obvious and most practice members realise when their surroundings are causing problems. Maybe commuting to work is difficult and unreliable, maybe your workstation is causing problems or maybe you have noisy neighbours that prevent you from sleeping.

When you are run down and tired there may be a number of factors that you may not have considered; are you  drinking enough water or eating a balanced diet. You made exercising  regularly but not factoring in a recovery phase into your training, or you may be not creating a good work life balance. 

Just like emotional stress there are plenty of ways your body can be stressed and you may not realise it because you are too caught up with daily life and the habits and routines that you have formed over the years.

Chiropractic isn’t about treating your pain, yes, we will obviously look at the problem area and of course we want you to be pain free, but we look at it in the context of how your spine is functioning and how it should function with the understanding that your spine protects your spinal cord and nervous system. 

Your spine has to function properly to keep you upright, to allow you to look right and left and to bend, it has to allow you to twist and to get into and out of chairs as well as allowing you to run and jump. Every vertebrae in your spine has to function properly to allow these movements and to allow these movements to occur in such a manner that your nervous system is also allowed to work properly too. I ways remind patients that our bodies have evolved over millions of years to be perfect for being a  hunter gatherer, to eat a forage a free range organic diet that didn’t involve refined carbohydrates as well as  spending a lot of our time being active. I’m not sure anyone lives a life like that in Islington!

As a chiropractor  in Islington I will locate the areas in your spine that aren’t working properly and adjust them so the work better, I will also help you to look at what has been causing the spine to stop working properly and help you maintain the improvements from treatment. We will also look at your ergonomics and give you specific rehabilitation exercises to help keep your spine functioning correctly. 

If we need to we will set some goals with you to improve how you are living so you have a better relationship with your body so you get more out of your body and this will enable you to live a better life.