The horrible cycle of stress

Say you had a particularly stressful day at work. You may find on the commute home that you all of a sudden become aware that your entire body is wracked by stiffness. From your neck through your shoulders and down into your lower back, almost all of the muscles that support your spine have tightened as a natural response to mental stress. This increase in tension begins to pull your spine out of alignment, causing nerve impingement and muscle spasm. What you do next defines the stress cycle.

The next step

Now say you are too exhausted to do anything when you get home. Instead of addressing the systemic tension, you simply lay on the couch and watch TV until its time for bed. Chances are, your body won’t actually recuperate during sleep because of the tension. When you wake up the next day still stiff and in pain, it is easy to become frustrated or anguished at the situation and the mental stress then increases. So what can you do to extricate yourself from this situation?

The solution

Before you even start working on stress reduction techniques, you need to resolve the physical manifestations of stress- the spinal misalignment, the muscle tension and spasms and anything else that is related. Chiropractic helps you hit the rest button on systemic tension and restore a state of balance to your nervous system. From here, you have a vantage point from which you can work on lifestyle adjustments that reduce stress.