If I were to ask someone, “What are the Benefits of Seeing a Chiropractor?” I’d estimate 95% of people would say it improves neck pain, low back pain, and I may even get a few responses of helping with headaches. And while all these things are true, there are a number of ways that specific spinal adjustments can help your overall health. Taking good care of your spine, means taking good care of your nervous system. This is why there are many so-called ‘unexpected benefits’ of chiropractic care that the average person doesn’t even know about! So we’ve decided to put together a list of the ‘unexpected benefits’ of chiropractic care that we see the most in our office.
- Improves Your Mood
A benefit of getting adjusted when your body needs it, is you are actually balancing you’re entire system. The nervous system’s job is to process, weed through, and integrate all the information we encounter throughout our day. If it’s not doing that effectively, you get stuck in this hyper-stress mode. You can imagine if you feel stressed all the time, this might contribute to mood swings, anxiety, and even depression over a long period of time. Once people in our office start care, their body gets out of this hyper-stressed state and returns back to balance. And because of this balance, they see dramatic improvements in stabilizing their mood, improving anxiety and depression, and overall handling stress better.
- Improves Your Sleep
As we said above, when your body needs to be adjusted it is stuck in this hyper-stressed state. How well do you think your body rests when it’s stressed? Have you ever experienced this – laying in bed, exhausted after a long day, and your heart rate starts increasing. Your mind starts racing. And every item on your to-do list starts popping into your head. You could lay there for minutes or hours like this, just trying to fall asleep. Or, on the other end of things… you get to sleep alright, but you wake up enough times a night to see every hour on the clock. Ugh. Either way, you wake up feeling exhausted and lacking energy during the day.
When your body gets adjusted, it returns back to balance and leaves this hyper-stressed state. Your body will much more easily go to sleep; and gets a deeper, better quality sleep. That’s one of the top improvements people see in our office – better quality sleep.
- Improves Your Immune System
Two major factors that affect your immune system are STRESS and SLEEP. Think back to finals week during college… Were you a little stressed at this time? I sure was. Was your sleep affected as you were staying up late studying and cramming for exams? And what always seemed to follow finals week? You got SICK! It makes sense, you were wearing your body down, putting yourself under high amounts of stress, and not letting your body recuperate because of lack of sleep.
This same thing happens when our body needs to be adjusted and is stuck in that hyper-stressed state. Our bodies are under a higher amount of stress on a regular basis and our sleep can be affected. Restoring our bodies back to a balanced state will reduce that stress and promote better quality sleep, in turn boosting your immune system and helping your body recover from illness faster. I’d call that a WIN WIN!
- Improves Your Attention & Focus
Another effect of your body stuck in this hyper-stressed state, is it becomes much more reactive in nature instead of focused. It can cause us to become easily distracted and can be described as ‘brain fog’ for some adults. As people start care and their body returns back to a balanced state, they notice better and longer attention spans as well as better ability to focus.
As you’ve noticed, all of these ‘unexpected benefits’ go back to the nervous system and the stress response. If our body’s nervous system is functioning well, it shouldn’t be stuck in a hyper-stressed state. When people come into our office, it’s common for them to be struggling with a lot of these issues in addition to physical complaints. As they get adjusted, their nervous system returns back to a balanced state and these stress-related conditions improve along with their physical symptoms.
