When you have a lot to get done, people relying upon you, demanding work, a busy social life, family expectations and the mundane of the everyday tasks that ‘need’ doing one can paraphrase this experience as stressful. Stress as a word has so many meanings it may as well be equivalent to no content. When we are running the health gauntlet of life with so much on, it is easy to forget how to be one’s self, the nervous system up regulates to help meet the psychosocial demands of life. Meeting the demands of life like increasing the heat from a fire by placing paper on it our nervous system turns up the sympathetic drive. Not as in something approaching empathy a part of the nervous system so called because of its anatomical placement adjacent to the spine. How much we are using our sympathetic nervous system or in other words how stressed or in another way how much we have on in our life can have a bearing on how stiff we notice our body to be. A fascially astute chiropractor can help with this.
Fascial Tension can be regulated by the sympathetic nervous system through the activation of smooth muscles causing a contraction of fascia. Another more confusing scenario is when smooth muscles go into spasm which is a flaccid situation and thus not hold tension in the fascia at a certain place displacing tension to another ‘normal’ area. A note to body workers: do not presume that the pain stiffness or restriction is a primary in need of intervention until you are sure what you have found is not a compensation. Furthermore adrenergic nerve fibres cause a vasoconstriction reducing blood supply to the area facilitating the steady incremental ‘drying up’ and degeneration of fascia.
Bringing to the fore the question; is a virtuous busy life, without chiropractic care, attributing to your stiffness? The likely answer it seems is yes and without a fascially astute chiropractor in your corner you may well be heading toward a stiffer experience of your body.
Tozzi P (2015) Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapy 19 310-326.