According to Prevention Magazine’s annual Prevention Index survey, nearly three-quarters of adults (73 percent) feel extremely stressed on a weekly basis. This is a significant increase compared to back in 1983 when only 55% of Index respondents had felt the same.
These statistics reveal how our modern lifestyle is increasingly filled with potentially stressful daily challenges: work commitments, family conflicts, and raising children. We are also periodically confronted with life altering events: leaving school, changing jobs, and experiencing losses. Moreover, these stresses are compounded when we subject ourselves to low levels of physical activity, long working hours and poor dietary habits. The cost to society in terms of lost productivity and ill health is spiraling out of control to the point where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, now estimates that out of all money spent on health care, 80% goes toward the management of stress-related disorders
Stated simply, stress occurs when the demands of a situation outweigh your body’s ability to cope. Furthermore, stress is to the human condition, what tension is to a violin string: too little and the music is dull; too much and the music is shrill or worse still, the string snaps.
The consequences of the increasing levels of stress in today’s world is that our generation, and our children’s generation, will experience a way of the life that requires the human body to be at its adaptive best. In fact, how well your are, is in large determined by your ability to adapt to life’s chemical, physical and emotional stresses.
That’s where chiropractic comes in.
The system that is responsible for guiding your body toward adapting to stress is your nervous system. One of the most common problems caused by chemical, physical and emotional stresses are subtle misalignments of the spine, called subluxations. Unfortunately, subluxations, which may be caused by stress, detract from the body’s ability to cope with stress. Your increased levels of stress then leave you more susceptible to subluxations and a vicious cycle results.
Your chiropractor strives to prevent this cycle with advice on how to effectively manage the causes of spinal subluxations and by minimizing the effects of subluxations once present.
Remember that camouflaging symptoms with medication may only delay finding effective coping strategies. Moreover, an absence of symptoms does not mean the absence of stress. In conclusion, those who win, in terms of well-being, are those who can best adapt. Coping with stress is best achieved with a nervous system free of interference. Helping you achieve your adaptive best so that you can cope with life’s stresses is your chiropractor’s objective.