While chiropractic care is an excellent foundation to helping someone feel better, we also help our patients identify the causes of pain and teach them how to improve their lifestyle for a better quality life!
While you may know why your body hurts, sometimes there isn't always a clear cause for your pain, and this can be confusing to a new patient in our office. Below are the 10 most common reasons why people experience pain.
1.) Trauma: Direct injuries from slips, falls, accidents, and sports injuries. Many times, people don't get proper treatment after an injury which also makes it likely for someone to experience ongoing pain years after the initial injury. Additionally, pain results from repetitive motions from your work, home, and recreational activities. Be aware of how you are using and moving your body!
2.) Sedentary Lifestyles: The vast majority of the population fails to engage in regular movement and physical activity. This lack of routine movement leads to a loss of strength and stability increasing the odds of joint and muscle pain. To be well, you must move well and move regularly!
3.) Poor Dietary Habits: The food we eat can make us healthy or it can make us sick. Eating foods that are highly processed and filled with sugar, flour, and other harmful ingredients can causes inflammation leading to pain. To avoid ongoing pain, taking control of your daily nutrition is an absolute must! There is no one healthy diet that works for everyone so it is important that you talk to a health care provider that is knowledgeable about nutrition!
4.) Dehydration: The human body requires adequate intake of water on a daily basis. How much water you should drink each each day is dependent on your age, weight, and activity levels. Also, adequate daily intake of fresh vegetables and fruit contributes to staying well-hydrated.
5.) Stress: Regular mental and emotional stress from daily living is one of the most overlooked sources of pain and contributes to almost every single disease known to science. Continual stress alters hormone balance, breathing, sleep cycles, and mental states making the body more likely to experience chronic levels of pain as well. It is wise to investigate what stressors are present in your life and discover pro-active ways to handle stress.
6.) Improper Breathing: It might seem odd that breathing and pain are tied together. If you are breathing properly, you are engaging the diaphragm muscle in the abdomen. Proper breathing efficiently draws oxygen into the lungs, and the natural relaxation of the diaphragm helps expel the maximum level of carbon dioxide waste.
Proper breathing from the diaphragm also helps activate relaxation responses in the body and combat stress. When you are breathing shallowly, rapidly, or even holding your breath at times, the muscles in the neck, upper back, and upper rib cage work overtime to bring air into the lungs. This strains the neck and upper back muscles causing pain, headaches, and jaw pain!
6.) Poor Posture: The average human head weights between 10-12 pounds and is made to be balanced over the shoulders, torso, hips, and legs. Due to spending so much time sitting and working at computers or staring at cell phones, the head position moves forward straining the neck and back. Sitting also weakens our neck & core muscles making the problem with posture worse. Ultimately the forward position of the head makes it harder to breath properly adding to the cycle of pain.
7.) Age: As we age, we don't recover as quickly as we once did. If we don't take care of ourselves then we tend to experience more frequent episodes of pain as we get older. This doesn't have to be the case if we improve our lifestyle habits! It is particularly important to begin improving you lifestyle as soon as you can in life so that you can age gracefully!
8.) Previous Episodes of Pain: Having one of more episodes of pain increases the chances of experiencing pain again sometime in the future. This is particularly true of neck and back pain. The more times you experience pain, the more common it is to experience pain more regularly and the more likely it is the pain will become worse with each episode. If you have joint and muscle pain, you should most definitely give us a call! The sooner you get help, the easier it is to help you recover!
9.) Poor Sleep: Perhaps the most vital requirement for good long-term health is quality sleep every night! Sleep is when your body recuperates and heals. If you aren't sleeping well, then it is only a matter of time before pain shows up and your health starts to go south. Don't ignore the signs of poor sleep quality: fatigue, irritability, mood swings, poor immune function, and general health problems!
10.) Negative Outlook: Life doesn't always go according to the way we want it to. How we view our life and what happens to us, greatly determines how we feel. Constant negativity and looking at life through a gloomy lens greatly impacts our health and how we feel. Becoming a more positive person can take a lot of learning and hard work, but the pay-off is that we experience less pain and better health!
Most often when a person experiences pain, they have multiple triggers from the above list. We help our patients identify which of these areas may be triggering their pain, and provide simple strategies to help our patients better manage the triggers that are contributing to their pain.
Chiropractic care is the foundation for a better quality life! Call us at (814) 371-7211 for more information!