Help to Manage Stress

During this challenging time, many of us are experiencing extraordinary levels of stress.

Our nervous systems oversee all of our bodily functions, including how we manage stress - This is one of the reasons that chiropractic care is effective as it helps to re-balance our nervous systems.  

Managing our levels of stress is extremely important to our health. There are many ways to do this and I would like to discuss some of the basic tools that you can use: 

Breathing:

When we are in a prolonged state of stress, the 2 factions of our autonomic nervous system become "out of balance”. This basically means that we use too much of our sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for our “fight or flight” or survival response to stress, and we are not using enough of our parasympathetic nervous systems, which is responsible for our “rest and digest” response to stress.  

One of the easiest and most effective ways to do this is to use a tool called conscious breathing, which is commonly used during meditation practices. This simple method helps to stimulate the relaxation response, which will help to stimulate our parasympathetic nervous system.  Dr. Andrew Weil, a well known integrative medicine expert recommends practicing a breathing method called “4, 7, 8”  every day.

Please watch the following video explanation to learn this effective tool. 

We are not meant to be in a prolonged state of stress. This will eventually lead to ‘burn out’ and will have many negative impacts on our health. It, therefore, becomes very important to manage our stress as much as possible to prevent this from happening.