Well, it’s having an effect on your health. How much depends on how adaptable your body is, how much it’s able to resist the stress of your life. Now, stress is broken down into different kinds. There’s physical stress, which we all know, you have an accident or a fall. There’s chemical stress, you’re not getting enough nutrients from your food, or you drink too much coffee, or you’re taking too much medication. And then there’s emotional stress, you have grief, or worry, or all the different emotions that can affect your body in a negative way are collectively stress, and then it gets broken down further. You have stress which is external environmental stress, and then internal stress. But essentially, it all has the same effect on your body, which it stimulates your nervous system, specifically the part of your nervous system called the sympathetic nervous system.

While sympathetic sounds nice and warm and fuzzy, it’s actually the part of your nervous system that is the ‘fight or flight’ response. You are walking through the jungle, you hear a growl or something, your body instantly gets ready to fight or run away. Most people are in this state the majority of the time, unfortunately. Our lives have stress in them. We get tired and we drink coffee, which is another form of stress. You’re kinda stimulating the ‘fight or flight’ response with stimulants, hence the name.

This results over time in a suppressed immune system. Your immune system doesn’t flourish when you’re in fight or flight response. It’s kinda put on the back burner so you can run away from a threat. Studies show that chiropractic care reverses or inhibits the sympathetic response. So it turns off that fight or flight response in the nervous system. In chiropractic, the first goal is typically to improve the body’s adaptability, improve the function of the nervous system. And the second goal is usually pain relief or something, but the first goal is to get the body functioning properly. We can’t remove all the stress from our lives. You can do things like take walks in the forest, do meditation, yoga, go to bed early, and all the things that can help you deal with stress. Martial arts is really good in another way, but it can’t remove that stress. So the goal is to make the body as adaptable as it can be to deal with the stresses of life and to keep us on that balance where we’re still feeling good and our immune system is functioning well, despite all that stress.

I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic and this has been your Health Minute.