Improve Your Sleeping Patterns with Chiropractic Care
Do you have difficulty falling asleep?
Do you lie in bed at night for hours tossing and turning?
Does stress, anxiety, or depression cause you to lose sleep?
If you have answered yes to any of these questions or just wish you slept better, then visiting your Chiropractors at Modern Chiropractic Center in Boise may be just the help you need. Let me explain how.
Your brain controls all the functions of your body. It sends energy, or signals, down your spinal cord and into every organ, tissue, and cell in your body. In our lives, we are all busy and under stress. We also move incorrectly, fall down from time to time, and have incorrect posture due to our lifestyles, occupation, sleeping positions, and gravity. These incorrect postures cause our spine and spinal cord to be under stress or misaligned. These misalignments can cause pain and inflammation and causes our body to be under stress. When our body or spinal cord is under stress, our brain can’t control our organs or nervous systems like it’s designed to.
Sympathetic Nervous System vs. Parasympathetic Nervous System
There are two types of systems contained within our body. There is your sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is also known as your fight or flight response. It’s your adrenaline response to trauma, pain, being startled, stressed, or any type of extreme emotion. It makes your heart race, your pupils to dilate and your muscles to engage so that you may be ready to run or fight for your life.
The parasympathetic response is the rest and digest function of your nervous system. The parasympathetic response should be engaged when we are at home after a long day of work, after eating a meal, and of course, while in bed to sleep.
If you can’t fall asleep as fast as you should,
If you can’t stay asleep throughout the night,
If you wake up feeling fatigued or tired after sleeping for 8 hours,
If you can’t relax, your mind is racing, your muscles are tense and sleeping becomes less effective,
Then your body is most likely stuck in this sympathetic or adrenaline response mode.
Have sleeping disorders?
If you have been diagnosed or have problems with Insomnia, restless leg syndrome, sleep apnea, snoring, nightmares, sleep walking or other sleeping disorders, corrective chiropractic care can help. The doctors at Modern Chiropractic Center can realign your spine, thus helping you to turn off your sympathetics when you are trying to rest. When you can truly enter the parasympathetic mode when you need to, it will provide you with an improved quality of sleep.
Chiropractic Care: Not Just for Pain
Most people assume that chiropractic care is only for people who experience neck or back pain. While it is true that Modern Chiropractic Center in Boise helps people with those pains everyday; we find that the entire body and all its functions improve when the spine and posture are improved.
When I first started practicing chiropractic my wife was pregnant with our 4th child. (Chiropractic care is hugely beneficial during pregnancy-but I will save that for another post)
Shortly after the birth, our baby had a difficult time sleeping, which of course affected my wife’s sleep. In addition our 3 older kids were waking up at 5am everyday. One night I came home from work and I could tell it had been a particularly hard day for everyone. Everyone’s sympathetics were firing and everyone was tense and anxious. We all went to the clinic and I adjusted each of our children, including the infant and my wife. Let me tell you, the kids fell asleep in the car and slept the remainder of the night. I learned about this in school but that was my first experience with helping to reverse the adrenaline system into a more rest and digest mode for the night.
When I woke up to leave for work the next morning everyone was still asleep! Around lunch I called my wife to say hello and she told me everyone slept until 9! She said the baby woke up at 5 to feed, but then fell back asleep (a very unusual thing for this baby). Because my family was adjusted their bodies were able to function correctly and get the rest they so desperately needed.
Call us today to help improve your sleeping habits and get a good night’s rest, you deserve it!
-Dr. Logan Baxter