Healthy Lifestyle

10/17/22

Why We Don’t Care All That Much About Your Pain...

That sounds kind of harsh doesn’t it? Let us explain.  

While pain is a major player in both people’s lives and the medical field, it is also just a symptom. Much like a runny nose or a fever, it tells us nothing about the root cause and is simply just another alarm from our body to tell us something is wrong. So, while we can and will work to alleviate your pain symptoms through chiropractic care, it’s actually the least of our concerns. Instead, we’re focused on getting to the root cause of what created that pain signal in the first place. Without addressing the root cause, your pain will continue to resurface and will need to be managed until the true issue is resolved. And, quite frankly, we don’t want to see you simply manage your symptoms. We want to see you heal.

So, ready to find out what the most common culprit is?

S T R E S S

Stress is something our body really can’t adapt to or overcome. For the last decade, researchers, scientists, and health professionals have been studying and speaking about stress as the “gateway” of all diseases. To understand this, you have to understand the many faces of stress.

  • Mental – many of us are most familiar with this one. It’s the work deadline, the kid's project due tomorrow that hasn’t been started, the looming to-do list, and so on... This mental barrage not only creates tension in our muscle and fascial system, but also releases stress chemicals in our body which affect everything from our heart rate and blood pressure to our digestion and nutrient use.  
  • Physical – physical stress is very individualized. While some of us may be able to tolerate a 10-mile run, others struggle just getting up and down the stairs. Physical stress is really anything that provides a challenge to our body and requires recovery. Many of us get loads of physical stress just from the way we carry ourselves in our posture day to day. Others have very repetitive jobs which place physical stress on one area of the body over and over. And some of us have the unfortunate circumstance of experiencing a large amount of physical stress all at once, such as an injury or accident.
  • Emotional – emotional stress comes in many forms. It can be a trauma from years ago that continues to play out in our lives in our daily patterns, behaviors, and cycles. It can also be an unmet need such as connection, love, compassion, etc. Emotional needs wire deep into our nervous system and also show up in our bodies as physical manifestations. While these can take a little bit more digging and work to get to the bottom of, they can also be some of the most profound for our healing and evolution.
  • Chemical – food, air, water, our homes, our cleaning products, our beauty products... we are truly bombarded with chemicals. Thankfully our body has detox and elimination systems, but, unfortunately, those systems and pathways were never meant to deal with this kind of toxic load. The pesticides, herbicides, dyes, binders, preserving agents, and more in our food all come into our bodies as foreign substances that have to be broken down and eliminated. Ever wonder why that soda is zero calories? It’s because your body can’t use any of it for energy and therefore it has no use for it and must break it down and eliminate it. Our air is more polluted than ever. Our homes off-gas thousands of chemicals from our carpets, the walls, the paint, the furniture, and even the mattresses (a-hem flame retardants anyone?). Our water is full of “forever chemicals” and plastic residues, and our cleaning products have chemicals proven to lead to cancer and hormone disruption. It’s honestly a wonder we’re even still here.
  • Spiritual – this one is hard... and it tends to hurt the most, too. This is very simply a disconnection from something greater than yourself. While this doesn’t need to be anything related to any of the religions out there, we all need to feel connected to something, and without that, we tend to feel isolated and hopeless.

Now that we have a better understanding of the many faces of stress, it should be fairly easy to see how this plays a major role in our day-to-day health. When we are over-taxed with stressors, our body and nervous system cannot be at ease and without that state of ease, we cannot heal. It is our mission to not only help people move through and process their many forms of stress better so they too can heal and live in a greater state of ease but also to educate them so they can help to mitigate some of the forms of stress in their life. After all, we believe Healing Starts at the Center.