By Channing King
If you want to be healthy, you must learn to manage your stress. We know it’s impossible to avoid stress altogether, but learning to manage it will lengthen your life and make it much better. This time, let’s focus on some things you can think about and do in order to have more peace in your life.
The top three causes of death in our country are heart disease, cancer and adverse drug reactions. We have to realize that when it comes to the top three killers, stress plays a big role. If your body gets overloaded with too much physical, emotional or chemical stress, your body malfunctions. This malfunction can cause heart disease, cancer or other health issues. Drugs are probably the biggest chemical stress. I am not saying pharmaceuticals do not have their place. Rather, I want to point out that drugs do have side effects and are more like chemical band aids than fixes to the root of the problem.
How does stress affect your lifeline? Your brain, spinal cord and nerves bring function, or life, to your body. With stress, a condition in your spine called “subluxation” can occur if your body is overloaded. Subluxations, or misalignments in your spine, are like flipping off the switches in your circuit breaker in your house. They restrict power. Subluxations cause nervous system pressure in your body, and just as a pinched garden hose restricts the water flow to the garden, your pinched nerves restrict healing in your body. Chiropractors correct these subluxations with adjustments, which correct the misalignments and keep the switches and power to your body turned on. This helps your body to be healthy and lessens the effects of stress on it.
You, like many others, may wonder why nerve flow is so important when it comes to your life and being healthy. Let me raise the bar: nerve flow is not only important, I believe it is the the most important part of being healthy. If you were to totally block nerve supply to any place in your body, it would die. It would die because the brain would not be able to get healing messages to that part of the body through the spinal cord and nerves
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If you think about it, you can go 40 days or so without food, about four days without water, about four minutes without air, but you can’t live four seconds without nerve supply. This is why I decided to become a chiropractor, to help people get their bodies and nervous systems functioning well so that they can be healthy and work toward keeping it that way through managing stress.
Let me end this week with a formula for reducing stress that you can start today. The first thing is to start doing everything possible to reduce what causes stress. Try to avoid, but not eliminate, stressful people and situations as much as possible. I know this is usually not possible if they are part of your family. Secondly, if you do not have a chiropractor on your health care team, strongly consider it. Next, avoid medications whenever possible, and talk to your doctor about coming off unnecessary medications. Finally, do not forget the power of good eating habits, exercise and sleep on the effects of stress on your body.
