Health is a balancing act
Imagine you have a sick little house plant. It’s drooping, the leaves are going brown. What would you do?
Perhaps you’d give it some more water. But if it’s still drooping and sad, does that mean water didn’t help?
You decide to fertilise it. But it doesn’t look any healthier straight away. Does that mean it didn’t need good nutrition?
You then decide it’s been sitting in a dark, shady spot in your house, and maybe the sun will help. This plant has now been watered AND nourished AND given sunlight. For now, it still looks the same, but over time you find new leaves starting to grow, and it starts to stand tall again.
Which one of those three things “fixed” the plant?
Our body is constantly responding to its environment, and how well it responds depends on the physical, nutritional, and emotional stresses it is experiencing. We need to balance ALL of these things in our life to see change over time. Our emotional state can show up in our body physically. The foods we eat can affect our emotional state. Being in pain can create certain nutritional deficiencies…. You get the idea. The point is there isn’t one silver bullet, but if you create the right environment, your body can do the rest.
Our body is a self-healing and self-regulating system, as this is what keeps us alive and helps us adapt to the world around us. For our nervous system to be able to interpret the world around us accurately, we need to have a clear connection between the primary control centre of our brain, and our body.
Makes sense, right?
However, if our nervous system is under physical stress (poor posture at work, lack of sleep, or we’ve had an injury of some kind), this can affect the movement of the joints in our spine, therefore interfering with our brain’s connection with our body and its ability to take in information from the outside world accurately.
When our body can’t process effectively, this can put our body into a state of fight or flight, or what we call “sympathetic dominance”. This state is focused primarily on survival rather than when we are in a state of rest and digest, or a “parasympathetic state”.
When our body interprets the world from a fight or flight state, it is constantly scanning for threats, confrontations and problems. Anything that may threaten our primal need for survival. This is not the state where we do our best objective thinking and exhibit our more patient and loving selves!
If you find you are not responding to the situations and people around you the way you would like, consider that the system doing the responding for you may be in need of some TLC. Remember, pain is not the only indicator of a spine in need of care.