Stress

What does stress do to the body?

To understand how to address the impacts of stress on our body, it helps to  have an understanding of what happens to our brain and body in the face of stress.

The stress from a traumatic event activates your sympathetic nervous system or our ‘alert system’.

This starts the ‘stress response’ and floods your brain with hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to enable us to ‘fight or flee’. These hormones also deactivate our pre-frontal cortex (PFC). The PFC is our rational, thinking brain. The deactivation of this is why we are often emotional, irrational and can ‘snap’ or be quick to rage when we are stressed out. Staying in this stress response for too long will impact the physiology of the body too. It will increase heart rate, negatively influence breathing, decrease immunity, increase inflammation and put un-needed pressure on the cardiovascular system. Muscles close to your spine and skull turn off too-so your brain has trouble knowing what is going on in and around your body.

How can chiropractic improve our resilience to stress?

Aside from being a safe and healing touch, chiropractic adjustments activate the small muscles close to the spine and the skull (those same ones that stress turns off). This helps your brain to know what is going on in your body and in the world around you. Chiropractic adjustments also change the processing in the pre-frontal cortex(which is switched off in stressful times). This means we can think more clearly and rationally. Chiropractic adjustments are also linked to the calming and healing nervous system (the parasympathetic nervous system). This maybe why so many people report they feel well, relax easier and cope better with stress when under regular chiropractic care.

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