Work, Family Finances and Stress

Feeling stressed out?  Welcome to America!  It is not unusual that people have a lot of stress in their lives. Everything from work, family, to finances and other obligations can have a huge impact on how you feel not only emotionally but also physically.  Interestingly, it is intriguing how learning that stress has wide ranging effects on the human body still surprises many people.  

It has been known for a long time that stress can cause physiologic changes resulting in dangerous conditions including higher blood pressure, increased blood sugar, increased cholesterol, increase in the hormone cortisol, and the resultant increase in abdominal fat caused by increased cortisol levels.  Many people feel the effects of stress as increased tension in their neck and upper back areas.

We Face Stress in Life 

Episodes of stress can either resolve quickly or they may become chronic. Your body perceives stress as anything causing a dump of adrenaline. Such a sudden increase in adrenaline may occur from your alarm clock going off each morning or rushing to get out of your house as you scurry to work. A person’s response to these adrenaline dumps is dependent on your individual make up, genetics, life experiences, and personal behaviors. Habits such as a poor diet, smoking, consuming alcohol or caffeine, and lack of exercise can all effect how your body handles stress.  

If a stressful situation is allowed to continue for an extended period of time it results in chronic stress where your body continues to respond as if stress were present even though the stressful episode has passed. Chronic stress may give rise to insulin resistance, heart disease, memory loss, immune system dysfunction, decreased bone density, and misalignment of the vertebrae in your spine.  

Chiropractic Care can Help Relieve Some of the Stress Caused by Your Body

Stress affects your body by causing misalignments in your spine known in the chiropractic field as subluxations. Chiropractic adjusting helps normalize the motion of individual vertebrae thereby relieving nerve interference so the stress cannot create havoc in your body’s organs and systems. In other words, chiropractic care “heads off stress at the pass” so it cannot manifest its detrimental effects allowing your body to return to a more normal, healthful state.