Adapting To A Higher Quality Of Life

ADAPTING TO A HIGHER QUALITY OF LIFE

DR. GREG CHAPPELL AND LYN CHAPPELL

Adapting to life is a process that we, as human beings, are engaged in every moment of our lives.  It is not  a process that only occurs at challenging times when we get "stressed out". It is a constant dynamics of millions of interactions that  happen every second of our lives for us to maintain life and continually strive to express our inborn, optimum potential.

Woody Allen said that, "Life is one damn thing after another." Actually, life's stressors can be viewed as either positive or negative. Positive stressors, eustress, are those that enhance the body's functioning, ie., the stress that moves you to a point of discomfort so you actively reassess your life situation or that which brings you to a state of tension to see things a different way or to allow creative inspiration to occur.

Distress is when your life gets overwhelmed or out of control beyond the body"s or mind's ability to adapt appropriately. Some stress can go both ways. Gravity is good because it holds you to the earth. But, to someone who has bad posture, this force accentuates the negative strain on the spine and nervous system causing degenerative conditions to accelerate and reduce the nervous system's adaptative capabilities.

So stress is an inherent aspect of being human. It can either enhance your life or depreciate it depending on how it is managed. In our assessment, the key lies in a combination of understanding how to remove interferences to adaptative capabilities and reducing the stress loads on our systems in the first place.

Life stresses basically fall into three categories: physical, biochemical, and mental/emotional. Here are a few examples. Physical: Birth trauma, falling while learning how to walk and run, accidents, slips and falls, physical stress at work or play, bad posture, and "couch potato" & sleeping positions. Biochemical: Unhealthy nutrition, food additives and preservatives, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, prescription and over -the -counter drugs, artificial sweeteners, and skin and inhalant exposure from chemicals, cleaning agents, solvents, toxic gasses from new furniture & carpets, herbicides, and pesticides. Mental/Emotional: Unhealthy relationships (even with yourself), lack of relaxation and recreation, lack of self-esteem or self-worth, and negative moods, emotions and behaviors.

The primary way you adapt to these stresses is through the nervous system. The purpose of the nervous system is to monitor the constantly changing needs of the body and to control and coordinate appropriate, timely responses necessary for adaptation, learning, and development. This happens through the combined efforts of the physical nerves which are like long thin telephone wires transmitting information and through the chemical nervous system by the release of neuropeptides, or "informational substances".

Neuropeptides are primarily modulated through the limbic system. The primary anatomical location of this system, until recently, was believed to exist primarily in the midsection of the brain. Neuroscientists now say that there is more limbic system tissue in the spinal cord than in the brain. Spinal misalignments, what chiropractors term subluxations, cause tension in the spinal cord interfering with neuropeptide modulation and nerve signal transmission resulting in an inability to adapt appropriately. This, in turn, effects your ability to express a healthy state of functioning.

The compounded problem of high stress loads in our lives and decreasing ability to adapt due to uncorrected subluxations, causes a downward spiral in your body's ability to express a high quality of health. This is what our society views as the "inevitable consequence of aging".  When stress loads exceed our ability to adapt, the resultant discrepancy between the two is lowered resistance to illness and disease and less reserves to handle episodes of intense stress that occur with life changes.

Therefore, a balanced approach to managing our daily stress more effectively would be to create an awareness and lifestyle that strives to reduce the stress loads and enhance the body-mind's ability to adapt to them. First, reducing the stress loads is simply a matter of taking a look at the causes and taking action to minimize their effects. It's not about being perfect in all aspects. Just making a little effort to modify behaviors and habits in some areas has cumulative effects in reducing the overall demands that the body needs to adapt to.

Second, we all need to be evaluated for subluxations as they can exist without pain or symptoms. Unfortunately, most people in our society view chiropractic as a treatment for back and neck pain. Information generating out of the frontiers of mind-body science is supporting what chiropractors have been saying for over a hundred years. Proper flow of nerve system information is vital in creating a continual high state of health and the better that the nerve system functions, the more capacity we have to create newer and better ways of adapting to our life stresses. We truly have the capacity to get healthier as we age instead of sicker and more degenerated.

Visualize a computer system. To get information out of your software you have to key information in. If the keyboard isn't working properly, it's "garbage in, garbage out". According to the scientists, the same holds true in your nervous system circuitry. The better the information gets from the body to the central nervous system, the better and more efficiently we can adapt and "learn" newer and more creative ways of being in our lives. Chiropractic adjustments of the spine remove subluxations and related interference thus "clearing up the keyboard" for maximum informational input.    

William Jennings Bryant stated, "Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved." Health does not manifest from luck and chance. It is a thing to be created and nurtured, over time, by intention through conscious lifestyle choices. Start creating a healthier, higher quality of life by making choices that reduce your stress loads and get your spine adjusted on a regular basis to keep your circuits opened up for maximum life expression.