How are your stress levels related to your spine?
Stress downsizes your nervous system’s ability to experience life coherently, reducing your vitality and adaptability to further challenges.
Your nervous system processes and responds to everything you experience in life, both internally and externally. Sometimes, it doesn’t have enough energy to adapt to a particular situation or stimulus. In these cases, rather than your body suffering breakdown from the stress, it will create a tension pattern in your spinal cord that limits your experience of the situation. The tension creates an information bottleneck called a “subluxation,” reducing the load on your nervous system’s processing demands to be more in line with what you have enough energy for. It’s an incredible system for keeping you alive and minimizing breakdown from stress in the moment, but it isn’t a permanent solution, and it has significant long-term drawbacks.
The tension pattern doesn’t go away on its own, so the subluxation stays in effect until something is done about it. Over time, subluxations continue to accumulate, and our experience of life becomes more and more limited, oftentimes without us realizing it’s happening. Beyond our nervous system taking in less information, increased tension in the spinal cord affects the body’s ability to connect and communicate with itself, and symptoms such as pain, fatigue, emotional imbalances, brain fog, anxiety, and many other things start to pop up. In addition, the tension makes you less adaptable to stress in the future because it binds energy, making it unavailable for use. So the cycle repeats – information and stress overload creates subluxations, and the existing subluxations make you less adaptable and create tension in your body, resulting in symptoms and a lesser experience of life. So what to do?
Doctors of Chiropractic are the only health professionals trained to assess for and address subluxations in the nervous system. Typically, this is done by manually adjusting the bones of the spinal column. At LightWave Chiropractic, we take a different approach called NetworkSpinal – using light touches to cue your body’s Innate Intelligence to unravel the tension and access more energy on its own. More on that another time!
When your body has corrected its subluxations, it begins to heal, grow, and adapt at a greater level of connection and coherence. Think of it like freeing up some expenses in your monthly budget – suddenly, more is possible! The longer you receive regular care, the more optimized your nervous system becomes. Your awareness of the subtleties in your experience grows, and it becomes easier to actively determine how you want to show up in every moment of your life. Happy spine, happy life!