Stress

Stress has a way of infiltrating every corner of our body: besides a boiling brain, a common side effect of stress is muscle tension. You can truly feel stress manifesting in your neck, shoulders, lower back and toes. When stress starts to boil over, the first thing to remember is to breathe: deep breaths help lower your blood pressure and circulate oxygen to the cells of your brain and body. 60 seconds of rhythmic deep breathing by itself is extremely calming, but we can go one step further to simultaneously address the muscle tension.

Here is an excellent stress-fighting technique that combines the benefits of deep breathing with some hard-earned relaxation of the muscles. 

• Sit up straight in your chair and close your eyes. 
• Start breathing in and out evenly, four seconds each way. 
• On the inhale, flex a single muscle group and hold four seconds. 
• On the exhale, release the muscles. 
• Move to the next set, from shoulders down to toes. 

By focusing your whole attention on the rhythm of breathing and the movement of your muscles, you can temporarily negate the effects of stress which have reached such a height. Upon opening your eyes, you will return to work with a refreshed perspective. While the external stressors will still be there, it goes a long way to relax your body and mind from within. At Associates in Chiropractic, we are concerned with the damaging effects of stress on a busy worker’s well-being. We help people find relaxation by treating the muscles of the body to free them from tension and correcting spinal misalignment which leads to nerve impingement. Pain plays into stress as well and we want to remove this factor so that the odds will remain stacked in your favor. 

Dr. Albert Stabile, D.C.