Can a Chiropractor Help with Sleep Issues?
Short answer, yes. But let me explain.
Let’s talk about stress and sleep for a minute. It’s fairly common knowledge that when your body is under a lot of stress, it negatively affects your sleep. You might have experienced it before – the constant thoughts running through your head, replaying of conversations, and your to-do list all cycling through your head as you lie down exhausted… but unable to fall asleep. I know this isn’t just me, right?
So yes, stress affects sleep. But that leads us to two important questions, how exactly does it affect sleep? What’s going on in the body when you’re stressed that causes you to have poor sleep? AND, arguably more important, what can we do about it?
Beyond just feeling tired, having low energy, and poor motivation – not getting good quality sleep drastically affects our overall health. We become run down, our immune system suffers and we become more susceptible to illness. Our bodies don’t have the time to repair and regenerate – and chronic health conditions will not improve if our bodies can’t repair and our immune system is suffering. Plus, we are all more pleasant to be around when we get good sleep. Again… I know this isn’t just me, right!?
1) How exactly does stress affect sleep?
First, it’s the primary job of the nervous system to process and integrate the stress from our environment. There is a constant bombardment of information (that could be perceived as stress) from your environment that your nervous system has to weed through, absorb, and process.
How much? Really, it’s beyond our comprehension. Way beyond. Our nervous system processes 11 trillion bits of information per second. Whoa, go back and re-read that one. 11 Trillion (with at T) bits per second! Incredible.
So what happens if our body is overwhelmed with this stress/information, or our nervous system is struggling to keep up with the amount it needs to process? First thing, it will get stuck in the sympathetic nervous system response, also known as the fight or flight or stress response.
So, our bodies get stuck in a stress or sympathetic response – so what?
Let’s do a quick travel back in time to high school biology class – short lecture, I promise. The autonomic portion of your nervous system is divided into two parts: 1) Sympathetic and 2) Parasympathetic. We’ve already covered the sympathetic response – it what is activated in emergency situations. Think you’re on the interstate and you slam on your brakes just in time to avoid hitting the car in front of you. What’s happening in your body? Your heart rate increases, your breathing rate increases, you are tense, you are on edge, and much more reactive.
Now, 2) Parasympathetic response is the opposite. This is called rest and digest (as opposed to fight or flight) and is responsible for activating slower processes like digestion, sleep/rest, growth and repair, reproduction, and immune system responses.
When there is too much stress and our nervous system isn’t processing it efficiently we get stuck in this sympathetic, or fight or flight response. Think of these two (sympathetic & parasympathetic) as a teeter-totter. When one goes up, the other side goes down. So when we are locked in this sympathetic/stress response, the parasympathetic response suffers.
Back to you lying in bed, exhausted, but unable to sleep. Think how that feels? Does it feel like you just can’t turn your mind off? Does it feel like your heart is beating faster than it should for lying still in bed? These are signs your body is stuck in this stress response.
And what suffers? That parasympathetic side is diminished. Your body doesn’t easily go into a state of restful sleep, the immune system is lowered, and our digestion could be affected. These are all things we see when that teeter-totter is out of balance, and you are locked on that sympathetic side.
I want to share with you how we measure this in our office. We use testing called Heart Rate Variability. This measures the tiny time difference between beats in your heart. The time interval between beats should be a little different every time. If this is the case, it tells us that your body is in a good balance and the teeter-totter is balanced.
When the teeter-totter is out of balance and we are stuck in the sympathetic response, the scan on the left is what we see. See that little white dot way on the left and on the line between orange and red? It indicates your nervous system is not able to process all the stress it’s encountering and chronic issues develop. And I can almost guarantee people with scans like this suffer from sleep issues.
The scan on the right represents the good balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic that we want to see. That dot is right where it’s supposed to be, on the line and within the green circle. Score! This is optimal because your body needs to be able to swing back and forth freely from side to side as your environment indicates. When you slam on your brakes in traffic, your body should jump to the sympathetic side briefly, then be able to return to balance. When you need to SLEEP, your body should be able to easily swing to the parasympathetic side for a deep, restful sleep and come back to balance as you wake. This is the balance of the nervous system that we strive for, and that we expect as the nervous system process stress and information effectively.
Ok, #1 got long winded. But, I didn’t forget about #2… and this one gets straight to the point.
2) What can we do about it?
First thing, if your body is STUCK it needs to get UN-STUCK. Makes sense, right?
What we do in our office, is look for the presence of misalignments of the spine that are negatively affecting the nervous system. The MOST IMPACTFUL misalignment, especially in terms of your body’s stress response, is in the upper neck (cervical) area. The effects of upper cervical misalignments on neurological function are HUGE: negative neuroplastic changes, hypersympathetic response, decreased brainstem function and blood flow. THIS is what we’re talking about when we say that these upper cervical misalignments cause nervous system dysfunction.
Adjustments of the upper cervical spine to correct these misalignments and restore proper neurological function is the first step to get out of this STUCK stress response of your body.
And one of the best long-term benefits from getting adjusted in the upper cervical area when necessary, is your body can remain in that balanced neurological state and avoid getting STUCK in that stress or sympathetic state.
So, after that long answer – yes, chiropractic can help with sleep issues.
If what I described sounds like you, or someone you know, I would recommend getting initial nervous system testing completed, that includes heart rate variability, to determine if this could be the cause of sleep issues. Please reach out to ask us any more questions or to get this testing scheduled. Let’s get some energy back, help our immune system, and help our moods — let’s get some sleep!
