The Benefits of Chiropractic Care During the Holidays
Creating the perfect holiday celebration for your family takes plenty of work. After spending hours wrapping gifts and planning elaborate meals, you may feel anything but joyous. In fact, stress, aches, and pains are just as much a part of the holiday season as parties and shopping. Luckily, your chiropractor offers a variety of treatments that will ease your symptoms and help you enjoy the holidays.
Chiropractic Care Helps You Avoid Aches and Pains from Holiday Activities
Shopping sounds like a fairly low-risk activity, but that's not always the case. When you spend hours shopping, whether you're hitting the mall or searching online, you're bound to experience a few negative physical effects.
Concrete floors are often concealed behind tile or carpeting at your favorite stores. Spending hours walking and standing on these floors can trigger back, neck, leg, shoulder, or muscle pain. If you spend hours hunched over your laptop, tablet, or phone doing a little online shopping, you may also experience neck, back, and shoulder pain.
Pain may be a result of subluxations that occur when the vertebrae in your spine become misaligned. Chiropractors often use spinal manipulation to realign your spine and correct subluxations. Quick, hands-on thrusts improve the alignment of the spine during this painless treatment.
Visiting the chiropractor before and after major shopping trips will help you avoid days of pain. Chiropractic treatments can also ease aches and pain caused by shoveling snow, spending long hours in a car or plane, slipping on an icy sidewalk, skiing, sled riding, ice skating, and other winter activities.
Chiropractic Treatment Provides a Natural Way to Treat Holiday Stress
If the holidays stress you out, you're not alone. More than a third of people surveyed in a PBS News Hour/NPR/Marist survey reported feeling the same way.
Muscle tightening is one of the most obvious signs of stress. When you're feeling overwhelmed or anxious, you may have noticed that the muscles in your neck, shoulders, or upper back feel rock hard.
Pain isn't the only issue when your muscles tighten. Muscle tension can limit your range of motion and trigger painful tension headaches. Tight muscles can even pull your vertebrae out of alignment, causing subluxations.
Massage therapy, spinal manipulation and mobilization, soft tissue mobilization, ultrasound, and other therapies offered by your chiropractor ease the painful physical effects of stress. Massage also triggers the release of endorphins, the body's "feel-good" chemicals. Endorphins help you feel calmer and less stressed.
Improved blood flow is an important benefit of chiropractic treatment. Blood flow improves healing and may also ease the "fight or flight" response that occurs when you feel stressed.
Staying Healthier During the Holidays Is Much Easier with Chiropractic Care
Aches and pains aren't the only effects of misaligned vertebrae and tight joints or muscles. If these structures press against your nerves, your organs and immune system may not function optimally. Eliminating subluxation ensures that organs receive important signals from the nerves, help balance your immune system and reduce inflammation
Improved lymph fluid drainage is another beneficial effect of chiropractic treatments. The fluid removes toxins and wastes from your body. When drainage improves, it may be easier to fight colds and other illnesses.
Chiropractic Care May Help You Avoid Stomach Issues After Holiday Meals
It's almost impossible to follow your usual diet during the holiday season. Parties, work potlucks, and family meals feature a tantalizing array of your favorite foods and treats. If you're not used to eating rich, fatty, sugary, or fried foods, you may soon experience bloating, constipation, gas, and other uncomfortable symptoms.
These problems may also be traced to issues with the nerves that control the organs. Keeping your nerves balanced with chiropractic treatment will help you avoid uncomfortable digestive issues. Thanks to your treatments, you'll be able to better handle the dietary challenges of the season.
Don't let stress or aches and pains keep you from enjoying the holidays! Contact our office to schedule your chiropractic appointment.
Sources:
PBS News Hour: Poll: How Stressed Are Americans This Holiday Season, 12/21/18
U.S. News & World Report: Surprise: Chiropractors Can Treat These 5 Conditions, 11/30/15