How to Overcome the Stress of Thoughts, Toxins, and Traumas

Stress is defined by the Cleveland Clinic as a normal reaction the body has when change occurs. Stress interferes with your body’s ability to communicate optimally and ultimately affects your health in a negative manner. It’s widely known stress is behind a significant portion of chronic health issues. In the chiropractic field we refer to the three Ts of stress that poorly affect your body’s ability to communicate via your nervous system and your health: thoughts, toxins, and traumas. 

Thoughts

Your thoughts, mindset, and mental health affect your physical health. Doctors of all kinds now openly discuss the link between the mind and the body. In chiropractic, we have long talked about how the quality of your thoughts and mindset affect your body’s ability to adapt to life, your environment around you, and your health. Significant life stressors such as hard family times, deaths, changes in jobs, or homes and yes COVID-19 as well as chronically low grade dissatisfaction in relationships, unfulfilling work, and life with kids, create stress that result in physical reactions of the body. You may experience this as anxiety, excessive worry, and lack of being able to sleep in the beginning stages. Going unresolved for long periods of time wears down the body’s ability to function optimally and then the body becomes less able to ward off health issues. The immune system is diminished in its ability to function optimally and dis-ease (or uneasiness) in some form arises. Your thoughts matter. 

Toxins

There are toxins everywhere. These are substances that are inherently harmful at some level and produce negative effects in the body. The soil and food supply are full of harmful chemicals. Makeup and cleaning supplies are riddled with additives that are toxic to the body. Much of the water supply is contaminated with metals and other substances not meant to be ingested. There are binders (additional ingredients) in supplements and medications that many people ingest. The farther away from the earth and its natural state something is, or the more synthetic it is, the more toxic it is. Toxins create disturbances and shifts in natural processes of the body, often at a chemical reaction level. This decreases the body’s ability to adapt most optimally to other stress you experience. As a result, your system becomes overloaded more quickly and with less stimulus. You are less than optimally healthy and you will become sicker easier. 

Traumas

Trauma comes emotionally, mentally, and physically. All three of these wear on the body and its ability to communicate optimally and be as healthy as possible. Physical stress can come in the form of long days and little sleep, car accidents, sporting injuries, and chronic poor posture. When the body undergoes physical trauma it has to repair and heal. That process takes energy and resources that the body would otherwise be utilizing to support optimal communication and health. It is important to note that poor posture is a traumatic event for the body. This society is more sedentary than ever; in addition, we are inundated with technological devices that most use with fully unconscious body awareness. This means that, for most, they are often in a state of -- or causing -- physical trauma and have no idea they are doing so. Your physical interactions and experiences can create stress or promote proper communication and health.