Displaying items by tag: stress management

Whether you work in a high-rise mega-corporation or you’re on the ground floor of a local start-up, working in downtown Denver can be stressful. Workplace stress is not often left at the office, either, so it’s something you want to nip in the bud early before it starts to negatively impact the rest of your life. One way to manage and event prevent workplace stress is with acupuncture in downtown Denver. Learn about the benefits acupuncture has to offer here.

What Does Stress Do To Your Body?

Stress, in and of itself, is a good thing. It helps us react to threats quickly and preserve ourselves when presented with a potentially dangerous situation. It does this by putting your central nervous system on high alert, increasing heart and breathing rates while increasing blood flow to your muscles. This becomes a problem when your central nervous system doesn’t stop firing after the threat has been contained.

Unfortunately, the “threats” in our everyday lives can’t always be mitigated in a timely manner. In these cases, you have to find alternative methods to relax your central nervous system when you are faced with ongoing stressors. This is where acupuncture in downtown Denver can come in.

The Benefits Of Acupuncture In Downtown Denver

The negative side effects of stress are far and wide. Ongoing and unmanaged stress can wreak havoc on your body, leading to headaches, pain, physical and mental strain, a compromised immune system, digestive problems, and so much more. Scientific studies have shown the positive impacts that acupuncture can have on stress. Managing your stress with acupuncture in downtown Denver offers more benefits than just stress relief.

Reduced Pain And Tension

Whether you work at a desk all day long or you perform manual labor for hours on end, many jobs take a physical toll on your body. Regular acupuncture in downtown Denver can aid in reducing swelling and inflammation throughout the body, providing a drug-free way to achieve pain reduction and relief.

Headache Relief

One of the most common indicators of stress is constant headaches or migraines. If you are suffering from headaches on a regular basis and your over-the-counter pain relievers can’t seem to do the trick, it’s time to consider the source of your headaches. Acupuncture has been proven to reduce the number of days patients experience migraines in a given time period by treating the cause of the headaches, rather than the result.

Boost Your Immune System

When you are stressed and working long hours, one of the first things to go is self-care. You often stop eating as well as you should, exercising on a regular basis, and getting enough sleep. On top of that, your central nervous system is severely overworked when you face ongoing stress, further compromising your immune system and making you more prone to illness or infection. If you have to miss work or are moving more slowly than usual, you become even more stressed and the cycle repeats itself. Acupuncture in downtown Denver can be easily incorporated into your regular routine and help you get ahead of illness or infection by fighting off the pathogens that cause them.

Streamline Your Digestion

Your digestive health is closely linked to every other part of your body. Most shortcomings in your overall health can be linked back to a problem in your gut. Because that is where the majority of your good bacteria resides, it is important to keep your digestion in check to prevent more serious illnesses. Acupuncture can help you regulate your digestive system and improve your overall health in the process.

Improve Your Focus

Do you ever have those moments when your mind is running a mile a minute and you can’t focus on the one thing that you need to be doing at that exact moment? You’re not alone. Stress forces your body to respond to stimuli at warp speed, so practices like meditation, yoga, or acupuncture in downtown Denver can help you slow that reaction and improve your ability to focus on the tasks at hand.

Feel Better With Acupuncture In Downtown Denver

Stress is a beast of a burden to bear, especially when the stimuli are out of your control. Practices that help you focus on your mental and physical wellness, like acupuncture, are ideal efforts to incorporate into your regular routine BEFORE you encounter stressful situations so that you can stay ahead of your health.

If you are interested in acupuncture in downtown Denver, book your appointment with Dr. Funk today.

If you're like most Denver professionals, you likely find yourself overburdened with stress before you even step foot in the office. From early morning alarm clocks to shuffling kids out the door to the school bus and navigating downtown traffic to get to work on time, it's not hard to believe that your alarm signals are blaring before you've even sat down to drink your morning coffee. What is a little more complicated is understanding what is actually happening to your body when you get stressed out.

With the holidays in full swing, the family traveling into town and a mountain of gifts that still need to be wrapped, we're taking a look at what's going on in your body during this time of chaos.

Stress Is Biological

There are a number of things that happen every day that can send stress signals to your brain. We perceive stress through three different avenues. The first is environmental stress. This is the easiest type of stress to understand. It's a crowded bus, a loud noise, or crazy traffic. It's anything that happens in the world around you that makes you instinctively tense up and then sends your mind into overdrive. The second type of stress is bodily stress. This can be caused by things like illness, lack of sleep, or poor nutrition. It includes anything that puts your body through additional trauma. Finally, one of the most complicated types of stress is emotional stress. Emotional stress is directly related to how you interpret things. This means that you have much more control over your reaction to an emotional stressor than you do over a bodily or environmental stressor. It includes things like someone else's behavior towards you. A clipped response to a question or closed off body language that makes you wonder if they are upset with you or if you have done something wrong. All of these types of stressors set off a chain reaction that takes a toll on your body.

What's Actually Happening?

When you encounter any type of stressor, alarm signals are sent to your amygdala. The amygdala is the part of the brain that regulates your emotions. Your amygdala then alerts your hypothalamus, which is the part of the brain that handles hormone production.

Your hypothalamus then releases a number of different hormones, including epinephrine and cortisol, which triggers the “fight or flight” response in the body. This is the automatic biological response to a threat that generates energy and gives you the ability to physically respond to a situation.

When the fight or flight response is triggered, your body goes into overdrive. Your heart rate and blood sugar increase. Your breathing becomes more rapid and metabolism is stimulated. Your muscles begin to tense up and your oxygen flow is increased.

If this reaction is in response to a controllable stimulus, it will likely be short-term, or acute, stress that will resolve upon removal of the stimulus or completion of a task. However, some stimuli are not as easy to deal with or repeatedly appears in your everyday life. This is called long-term, or chronic, stress. These everyday annoyances or sustained crises are what causes detriment to your body.

Your stress responses are not able to return to normal levels, causing physical and mental damage. According to the American Psychological Association, these ongoing stressors can cause irritability, anxiety, depression, insomnia, headaches, muscle tension, and joint pain, as well as compromise your immune system, leading to illness.

How To Manage Stress

Stress is an inevitable factor in our everyday lives, but you can manage it by incorporating some different techniques that help you respond to stimuli in a different way. Some ways to avoid stress when encountered with a stressful stimulus include focusing on your breathing try the 4-7-8 method or to count to 10 before physically responding to a situation.

Long term, you can help prevent stress responses by exercising regularly, sticking to a well-balanced diet, and making time for things that you enjoy or that help you relax, like meditation, massage, chiropractic or acupuncture.

Chiropractic medicine is focused on the spine, the core of the central nervous system, which is where your stress response originates. Not only does seeing a chiropractor regularly help keep your central nervous system working properly to prevent stress, it can also help your body recover from the everyday stressors that you encounter. Book an appointment today and see how chiropractic care can help you manage your stress.