Imagine yourself out in the woods running along a beautiful trail. The weather is cool and the sun is still rising. The leaves have changed from a soft green to a vibrant yellow and red. While admiring the forests beauty, you hear a rustle. “Just the leaves”, you tell yourself and continue jogging. The rustle of the leaves turns into a pattern that you can’t ignore and beginning to look around you see a tiger starring at you in the trees. Your heart starts beating. Your blood pressure rises. The blood in your brain and organs moves to your muscles as your body prepares itself to run away and fight for your life or face certain death. This is what Stress looks like.
During a Stress Response, your internal system goes into short term survival mode and doesn’t concern itself with long term well being. Your brains only concern is to help your body make it through the present moment, and it is certainly not thinking about life at 100. Cortisol gets released, your immune system shuts down, growth hormone plummets and adrenaline runs rampant. These are all responses associated with stress and remain synonymous with every major degenerative disease, such as; Cancer, Heart Disease, Alzheimer’s and Autoimmune Disorders.
Your body is well equipped to deal with stress. The only problem is, stress is supposed to be short lived. Let me explain… That tiger you were running away from? Let’s pretend you successfully escaped by running at full speed, albeit unlikely, and 10 minutes later found yourself in the safety of your own home. You have survived and your body, co-operating to the stress response, helped you respond in kind. This would be a great scenario, however, in today’s world stress doesn’t last 10 minutes in the woods. Stress lasts all day long and well into the night, as we find ourselves unable to disconnect from our emails, social media accounts and work responsibilities. Stress is more rampant than any other time in history.
People work longer hours than ever before, eat more toxic food than in all of history and sit all day at their desks, compromising their physical structure and leaving their cells in a state of complete distress.
There is more emotional, physical and chemical stress in the marketplace than ever before, and we’re all blind consumers waiting in line, holding high our maxed out credit cards.
This is perhaps where making every effort towards living a healthier lifestyle gains merit. Eating clean, exercising and being looked after by a chiropractor, naturopath and osteopath should be a commitment you make to yourself. When you receive a chiropractic adjustment, the movement in your spinal joint triggers a place in your spinal cord called lamina 7. Lamina 7 then sends a message to your hypothalamus which has been triggering the release of stress hormones. It shuts down the releasing stress hormones and initiates a regeneration response. If you’ve never experienced a chiropractic adjustment, this is the moment your friends have described to you as experiencing a “release”. An adjustment shuts off stress and initiates health and healing.
Chiropractic is the most effective way to break the stress cycle in your life and, at New Life Chiropractic, we encourage you to look for additional causes of stress worthy of addressing and removing from your life. Is the stress caused by your job and your non-stop lifestyle? Or it a relationship, finances or food choices? Maybe it’s because you’re sitting all day. Eliminate the cause and your health will begin to soar.
Health living is as simple as finding the root of stress and making every effort to reduce it, providing the body an opportunity to heal. Join us at Unhealthy Anonymous the last Wednesday of each month as we discuss stress elimination in every category. We’ll give you a new set of lenses to see health in a brand new way.
Bless you,
Dr. Matt
