Chronic stress is a common problem but that doesn't mean that stress is something you need to live with. Long-term stress can increase your risk of serious health issues, such as anxiety/depression, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and even Alzheimer's disease. It can be hard to reduce your stress levels on your own, but chiropractic care can help you to reduce the physical and mental symptoms of stress.
4 ways that chiropractic care can help with stress
1) Spinal adjustments can reduce stress
Chiropractic spinal adjustments can help to reduce your stress by restoring your physical function and through their impact on nerve function and hormones. Your spinal cord is vital for your nervous system to work as it should and spinal adjustments can help to make sure that your spine is in its optimal position.
Spinal adjustments can also trigger the release of the body's "happy hormones" - serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin - and it can also reduce stress hormones such as cortisol. These hormonal changes can directly reduce your stress levels and can help to boost your mood.
2) Reducing muscle tension
Stress and muscle tension go hand-in-hand. When you are stressed, your muscles become tense, your posture changes, and you move differently. In turn, muscle tension can make you feel stressed, can negatively affect your sleep, and can make it difficult for you to focus. All of this will further increase your stress.
Chiropractic care can offer a range of treatments to reduce muscle tension, such as massage, stretching, and exercise to help restore your body's balance and break the cycle between muscle tension and stress.
3) Improve your sleep
Just like with muscle tension, sleep and stress have a two-way relationship. When you are stressed, you can often have difficulty with getting to sleep or staying asleep. This can be because of racing thoughts, muscle pain and tension, or other physical issues. In turn, sleep deprivation can greatly increase your stress levels and reduce your ability to cope with daily challenges.
Chiropractic care can help to improve your sleep health. This can be through reducing some of the causes of your poor sleep, such as muscle tension, and it can also be through direct advice on your sleep. Chiropractors are trained in sleep health and can give you advice about your sleep environment, your bedtime routine, relaxation techniques, and sleep aids (such as chiropractic pillows).
4) Improving exercise and nutrition
Stress can have a negative impact on your lifestyle, including your exercise and nutrition. Some people stress eat and other people don't eat enough when they are stressed. Many people can't face doing exercise when they are feeling stressed. But healthy nutrition and regular exercise can do wonders for reducing your stress levels and improving your quality of life.
Chiropractors are qualified to give advice about exercise and nutrition and can help you get back to a healthy lifestyle that can reduce your stress.
Chiropractic care takes a whole-body approach to treating stress, and it can address all of the various ways that stress can affect your body and lifestyle. By supporting you to make changes in all these different areas, and by directly treating the physical issues that can arise from stress, chiropractic care can reduce your stress in a long-term and sustainable way.
