Stress and Muscle Tension

At Adjusted Chiropractic Studios we often look after clients who are experiencing a variety of symptoms related to stress.

Some of these symptoms may include problems with muscle spasm and tension, trouble with sleep, as well as stress and anxiety.

There are 3 main types of stress:

• Emotional
• Physical
• Chemical

The human stress response is called the Fight/Flight response and is in fact an intelligent response of the body designed to mount a bunch of Physiological reactions in order to preserve life.  This fight flight reaction gives us the chance to either fight the danger or get the heck out of there and run.  It is designed to be an immediate reaction which is sustained over a short period of time.  The system which controls your ability to adapt to stress is the Nervous System, with the brain in control

Some of the Physiological changes that occur due to the fight/flight response include:

• Increase heart rate and blood pressure to pump blood around the body and deliver oxygen and nutrients to the muscles
• Muscles fire up ready to react
• Divert blood away from non essential functions like digestion
• Dump a fuel source into the blood to provide energy
• Sweating to cool the body down
• Pupils dilate to increase visual field

The trouble with the modern world is that stress is not brief and come by every now and then.  In fact, stress in the modern world is a daily, sometimes a minute by minute occurrence.  Stress these days is:

• Pressure at work
• Finances
• School/study
• Relationships
• Social media
• Family

This potentially puts us in a sustained stress response.

Let’s not forget that stress can also present in the Physical or Chemical form.  Physical stress in the modern world includes things like sitting at a desk all day, or bad posture in relation to mobile or tablet use.  Chemical stress includes poor nutrition or dietary choices as well as chemical overload from the number of products we use that come straight out of a factory.

Stress is everywhere and we are bombarded by it.  No wonder we have started to see an increase in the number of lifestyle diseases such as Heart Disease, Blood pressure, Cholesterol, Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes.  In fact when we look at Australia compared to the rest of the world, we are by far one of the unhealthiest countries in the world along with USA, UK and Mexico.

The world health organisation (WHO) is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to data around a variety of health conditions related to stress.  See attached link to their extract on obesity:

https://www.who.int/topics/obesity/en/

At Adjusted Chiropractic Studios we take an extensive history in regards to the types of stress you are subjected to and what symptoms you are currently experiencing.  We use state of the art core score technology to test how your nervous system is adapting to stress.  Heart rate variability (HRV) gives us up to date information of the resilience in your nervous system or in other words, how are you coping with stress.  The test is pain free with no radiation and can be repeated at regular intervals to see how you are tracking.

For more information on HRV please see link below from Harvard Medical School:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heart-rate-variability-new-way-track-well-2017112212789

Some of the common treatments we use to help include Spinal Adjustments or spinal correction, exercise prescription and rehabilitation to reduce the postural stress or physical load on the system.  We give nutritional or dietary advice to make sure we are supporting your system with wholesome food.  We also may recommend meditation, mindfulness or restorative exercise to address the emotional components of the stress response.

The holistic approach ensures you are addressing all 3 causes of stress and are able to map changes and improvements with our core score testing.

For those people who are acutely presenting the symptoms of stress and require urgent attention, lifeline is an Australian National charity providing 24 hour crisis support.

https://www.lifeline.org.au