Why would a chiropractor be writing about stress? Shouldn’t it all be about back pain, sports-injuries, migraines and things like that?
Well, chiropractors do specialise in musculoskeletal conditions, like neck pain and sciatica, but your body and brain are inseparable and a problem with one has a knock on effect on the other.
Stress is a particularly influential phenomenon when it comes to physical effects on your body. So that is how we end up here.
The Nature of Stress
Stress is your body preparing for fight or flight action, as in running away from a sabre-tooth tiger.
In order to fight or flee effectively, your body undergoes physical changes in response to stress: increasing blood pressure, turning on muscles, changing breathing patterns, diverting blood from your bowel to your muscles etc etc.
Short term, these adaptations are fine and perfectly healthy.
But when we experience stress long-term, because of job worries, relationship problems etc, stress adaptations become pathological – chronic high blood pressure for instance.
And long-term stress is a major factor when it comes to pain, both in a physical and a physiological way.
Pain from Stress
Can stress cause you pain? The answer is very definitely, yes.
Stress can both cause and contribute to pain in a number of ways.
As a contributor
In terms of contributing to pain, long-term stress alters your brain chemistry in a way that makes you more sensitive to pain.
Cortisol, the stress hormone, is a natural pain killer, so you might think more is better. But long-term stress can lead to your body beginning to build a tolerance to the pain-killing effects of cortisol.
The outcome of this tolerance is that things that were uncomfortable become painful, and that things that were painful become really painful.
Stress can also affect your sleep and your mood, both closely linked to your ability to cope with pain.
Lack of sleep or low mood increase the effect pain has on your brain.
It’s important to emphasise, that this does not mean pain somehow becomes psychological.
Pain is a result of chemical events in your brain and stress affects this chemistry, altering how your brain senses pain.
As a cause
Perhaps more surprisingly, stress can actually be a direct cause of pain, bringing on pain where there is no other cause.
The most common and clear-cut example of stress causing pain is when stress causes neck pain and headaches (or migraines).
Let’s go back to our Sabre Tooth Tiger a moment.
Upon seeing this ferocious beast eyeing you up for lunch, your body will switch into fight-or-flight mode.
Whether you choose to fight or flee, getting more oxygen into your body is probably going to help. So your breathing changes.
Muscles in your neck, called accessory respiratory muscles, switch on. This helps you expand your chest more fully and more rapidly.
This makes total sense if you are about to run for your life, and is the event that these muscles live for.
But because a fight-or-fight event is only going to last a short time (either you get away or you get eaten), these muscles are only adapted to work for short periods of time.
Back to the modern day, where stressful events might last months or years, and these muscles switch on in exactly the same way as they have throughout your evolutionary history.
Only now, they are required to keep working. Hour after hour and month after month.
This causes them to become hypertonic (permanently switched on and tight).
Hypertonic muscles are sore. As an illustration, imaging tensing your biceps for 10 minutes straight. How sore would that be? Now imaging doing that for a solid month.
So, neck pain is a common result of stress. But there’s more.
Hypertonic muscles also radiate pain. Muscles in the neck, for instance, radiate pain to the head, leading to headaches or migraines.
So there you are, not sleeping with worry, low in mood because of life-events, with a stiff neck and a daily headache.
But there’s more.
Hypertonic muscles also change your posture. Tight muscles in your neck cause your shoulders to hunch and your head to slip forwards.
This places more load on your shoulders and middle back, potentially setting problems off there. And so the chain of events can continue throughout your body.
In a nutshell, yes, stress can cause very real pain.
Dealing with Pain from Stress
Just because stress is a cause of pain, that does not mean that you have to live with pain until the stressful events of your life work themselves out.
There are some very simple ways of dealing with pain that results from stress.
In fact, the physical manifestations of stress can be easily dealt with using manual therapy.
Chiropractic treatment to reduce muscle tension, recover mobility and improve posture is very effective for people who have stress-related or stress-caused pain.
In addition to addressing the consequences and symptoms of stress, chiropractic treatment can actually provide stress relief.
That might sound bizarre, because stress relief comes from spa-massages, right?
The effect of chiropractic treatment on feelings of stress is a consequence of effectiveness with which muscle tension can be alleviated through chiropractic treatment.
You see, the muscles in your neck (for example) switch on in response to stress because of a neurological connection to the part of your brain that is active when you are stressed.
When that part of your brain lights up, your neck muscles light up. But it is a two-way street.
When your neck muscles relax, it sends a message to the stress centre of your brain saying calm down, everything is OK.
So, amazingly, chiropractic treatment can not only help with the physical symptoms of stress but also the amount of stress you experience.
Self-Help
We’re chiropractors, not self-help gurus. So please don’t read on thinking that we are going to help you reach your relationship and career goals using some weird hack.
The below advice is purely for helping you reduce the effect stress has on your body. But it works.
Even without removing the source of stress, there are ways of relieving the physical manifestations of stress.
This is important because it is the physical manifestations that lead to harm (again, think chronic high blood pressure).
One of the best ways of alleviating the physical manifestations of stress is with exercise.
Exercise mimics the fight or flight action that your body is preparing for when you are stressed.
You are tricking your body into believing that you have dealt with the source of stress; you are still alive after a bout of physical activity so you must have successfully fled/fought off your attacker.
Following exercise, your body goes into a rest and recovery mode, removing many of the pathological adaptations to stress.
To be most effective, exercise should be short in duration but very intense (please be sensible here).
Exercise doesn’t just help deal with the physical manifestations of stress either.
When those physical changes following exercise occur, your brain picks up on the idea that you have removed the “threat”, meaning that you FEEL less stressed.
It’s a similar mechanism to how chiropractic treatment can help with stress.
If you can’t exercise
There are days or times when you can’t exercise, or circumstances where intense exercise is not advisable.
Fortunately, there is another physiological trick we can use.
Abdominal breathing, inhaling into your belly, is incredibly powerful at relieving stress/symptoms of stress.
Going back to the Sabre Tooth Tiger one last time, when you are stressed your accessory respiratory muscles kick in.
But when you are resting, breathing is carried out by your diaphragm.
By over-exaggerating your belly movements when you breathe, you force your diaphragm to take over.
This provides some respite to your neck/shoulder muscles, but also sends the message to your brain that you are not faced with a fight-or-flight situation any longer and are, in fact, sat around the campfire with your friends and family.
Exercises to assist with abdominal breathing are numerous and can be found online, but are absolutely to be recommended!
