Stress has become synonymous with what we understand as “adulting” these days. Between the crazy world around us, dealing with family, plus the demands of a job and bills, it’s enough to drive anyone a little insane. Anxiety comes along with stress, but it is an entirely different problem.

While it’s advantageous to minimize your triggers for stress and anxiety, it’s not possible to remove them all. People who manage life well have an arsenal of healthy tools at their disposal to help cope with stress, not just remove it. Discover how stress and anxiety work, and the top five benefits chiropractic care can offer to reduce these common emotions.

Understanding How Stress and Anxiety Work

Both stress and anxiety have similar symptoms, and can be hard to differentiate. These may include headaches, high blood pressure, difficulty sleeping, and a general sense of uneasiness. Despite these similarities, they actually have vastly different sources.

Stress is something everyone deals with throughout their life. This is a response to an external stimulus, usually a threat or the perception of a threat. While experiencing stress, your heart rate increases, blood pressure rises, you breath more rapidly, your muscles tighten, and your senses become sharper.

Humans developed this response as a way to prepare to deal with an external threat, like animals or someone attacking them. We don’t face many of these physical threats in the developed world. However, we’ve started perceiving other threats, such as a threat to our safety and security, which includes vocational instability.

Anxiety, on the other hand, originates internally as a response to stress. The noted characteristic of anxiety is a “persistent feeling of apprehension or dread,” even when the perceived threat has passed. In extreme cases, you may experience anxiety in anticipation of a possible stressor, even when the actual trigger isn’t present.

Your physiological health affects your emotions. Conversely, your emotions also affect your physiological health. There are chemicals that control how you feel, known as neuropeptides, which originate in your spine. If you have a spinal misalignment, it can inhibit their release. Further, too many of these emotional chemicals can also cause misalignments in your spine.

It’s this connection between emotions and spinal health that makes chiropractic care so imperative for minimizing stress and anxiety. Here are the top five ways chiropractic care physiologically affects changes.

1. Clears Neuropeptide Pathways

Let’s discuss those neuropeptides mentioned previously. These are chemicals that you’ve likely heard of, including endorphins, adrenaline, serotonin, dopamine, and more. While we associate some of these with specific feelings, such as serotonin and dopamine with feeling good. However, that’s an oversimplification.

Rather, these neuropeptides pass messages through the nervous system. Your nervous system runs through your entire body, it’s not only constrained to your brain.

Chiropractic adjustments with the Torque Release Technique can aid your body in releasing these neuropeptides, allowing messages to flow properly throughout your body. While this helps, it’s important to also work on clearing the emotional side and deal with your triggers.

2. Lowers Blood Pressure

Increased blood pressure is one natural physiological response to stress. When you experience chronically high levels of stress, this can lead to dangerous hypertension, a known risk factor for heart disease.

When you’re in pain, such as when you have a pinched nerve or a spinal misaligned, your blood pressure also goes up. As previously mentioned, stress and anxiety can lead to both of these physiological problems, further raising blood pressure.

Research has shown that both chiropractic care and massage therapy can lower blood pressure. Part of the relief for blood pressure comes from the pain relief that chiropractic care offers. It further helps lower blood pressure by activating the autonomic nervous symptom, which puts your body in a restorative state.

3. No Side Effects

When stress and anxiety get bad enough, your medical team may recommend prescriptive treatments. While these can be life-saving in some circumstances, they come at a cost. Every pharmaceutical has a host of possible side effects, just look at the manufacturer’s insert to see the list for your prescriptions.

Chiropractic care is completely natural, with no introduction of synthetic or unnatural substances into the body. Rather, it works to assist the body in producing for itself what it’s meant to when it’s in a healthy state. When you pay attention to your stress and anxiety levels, you can avoid relying on pharmaceuticals by using other tools earlier.

4. Promotes Healthy Sleep

Stress and sleep have an almost love-hate relationship with how they work together. On one hand, stress inhibits quality sleep. On the other hand, a lack of sleep causes more stress. So when you get into a sleep deprivation cycle mixed with a stressful period of life, it’s a perpetual feeding cycle down a long, dark road.

So, let’s recognize that road and avoid going down it by helping the body get better sleep. Chiropractic care helps promote quality sleep in several ways. First, it can help alleviate the pain that makes sleeping uncomfortable. Next, regular adjustments to your neck can help prevent sleep apnea. Finally, chiropractic care helps reduce cortisol in your system, which many people know as the stress hormone, helping your body to relax and sleep better.

5. Activates Positive Emotions

It’s true that you can’t simultaneously have positive and negative emotions because of the chemical makeup that creates these emotions. Your body releases endorphins like dopamine during chiropractic adjustments because of the relief it offers. These endorphins bring about positive emotions, helping to relieve your stress and anxiety.

Chronic stress and anxiety can take a significant toll on your physical and emotional wellbeing. While chiropractic care cannot remove the triggers for your stress and anxiety, it is a tool for dealing with them and reducing their impact. The Torque Release Technique is one of the best out there that helps the bodies emotional state when compared to the more traditional techniques.

Call (720) 328-1790 to schedule your initial visit with one of our chiropractors and experience what life is like with less stress and anxiety.