It is not stress it self but how our body adapts to stress that determines our health outcome.
Sometimes just the thought of stress can make us feel stressed out. So much of our health culture today focuses on how to alleviate stress, and that isn’t necessarily a bad idea. Stress can harm the body. It can cause both our mental and physical health to decrease. We may lose sleep, be unable to focus, and take poor care of ourselves.
Stress can stem from pressures that either we put on ourselves or that society puts on us. It can be pressure to maintain a busy schedule packed with too much to do. It can be pressure to live a lavish lifestyle, work, and spend more, or it can be pressure to work a job we don’t enjoy anymore. Stress can also come from factors that might be out of our control, such as financial stability, caring for our family members, running our households, work or school-related stress, etc. No matter where the pressure starts, we need to find healthy ways to cope with stress so that it doesn’t begin to take over our lives.
Resilience to stress can mean different things. For example, if we reframe how we think about stress, we can change our mindset. If we shift our view of a stressful situation, we can change the way we process the situation and adjust the level of stress that situation takes on us. People who choose to be more optimistic about situations have been found to have more energy, lower depression rates, less anxiety, and overall better cope. While shifting our views, we should also be mindful of our thoughts. We often find ourselves having daily thoughts based on emotion, but when we take the time to think about them, our processing of those thoughts can change the way they impact us. For example, we may think of jealousy, but when we take the time to think about why we feel that way, we may not feel jealous anymore.
Another way we can change our stress response is by being mindful of who we are at our core. Being sure of the person we want to be helps us have something to root us and can remind us to handle situations in a way that is true to ourselves.
While there are good and bad stresses, the most important thing we can do is increase our adaptability and resilience to stress. By correcting subluxation, which causes harmful irritation to the nervous system, chiropractic care helps to increase how much stress our body can handle and still come out on top.