How do you handle the stresses of life?
Have you ever had a day that started out great and then something happens that sends you over the edge -your blood boiling, you feel your heart beating in your chest, or you feel like just one more thing is going to cause you to lose it? Or perhaps the opposite is true, all is going great and something happens that sends you into a pit of self-doubt and depression, a place where you just want to shut yourself away from the rest of the world.
Both scenarios are normal reactions to the stresses and storms of life. A good way to illustrate this is something called the window of tolerance. The window of tolerance was first described by psychiatrist Dr. Dan Siegel in 1999. It describes the state in which we are able to best function and thrive in everyday life.
The biggest factor that determines how wide our window of tolerance is how we have been subconsciously programmed to deal with the stresses and storms of life. This programming comes from previous generations and is handed down to us; we then pass along these coping mechanisms to future generations.
A great way to illustrate this comes from the studies of Bob Proctor and what is taught at the Proctor-Gallagher Institute. If you aren’t already familiar with his work, I strongly urge you to look him up, YouTube has a treasure chest of his wisdom to learn from. One of the staples of Bob Proctor’s teaching is the stick person.
The stick person is a simple drawing that was given to Bob to explain how our mind works. Draw a circle, and now draw a line that divides the circle into a top half and a bottom half. Below that draw a smaller circle. Now, let’s label this thing.
The top half of the big circle is your conscious mind, the bottom half is your subconscious mind and the smallest circle below is your body.
I am not going to go in extreme depth on all this simple picture explains (he does a fabulous job doing that in one of the hundreds of videos you can find on YouTube) but I do want to talk briefly about the subconscious brain as it pertains to our conditioning.
In his explanation of this stick person, Bob states that when we are born the door to our subconscious mind is wide open. During this time the beliefs, attitudes, and habits of those around us are filtered in and are left unchallenged as we have yet to develop the ability to do so; this is where our programming comes from.
Sometimes this programming is useful, it helps to keep us safe and allows us to handle what life throws our way. Other times, these programs can be less than helpful and can leave us in patterns of constant defense or protection.
This leads me to what all of this has to do with chiropractic care. Our nervous system’s function is to coordinate and control every other system of the body; it is constantly working to adapt to the world in and around us and to adjust to the input it receives.
Our nervous system operates either from a state of ease where restoration and healing can occur or from a state of protection and defense, it’s main priority is keeping our body alive.
Often the conditioning that we are gifted at birth doesn’t always serve us well. This can leave us in a state of constant defense and protection, when this happens the body focuses the majority of its energy on keeping us safe and alive, and the result is other systems don’t get the regulation needed to keep them functioning at their best and the result is dysregulation which shows up as signs and symptoms like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, digestive issues, infertility, autoimmune disease, etc.
Chiropractic care has been shown to impact the nervous system in a way that dials down the stress/defense response and moves our nervous system more toward a state of ease where healing and regeneration can occur.
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Chiropractic
Chiropractor
COMMUNITY HEALTH
Gaffney
