If you are suffering from various kinds of musculoskeletal pain, the pain may be physical but the root cause just might be emotional. Stress over daily home or workplace tensions can add up to big discomfort and other health issues. Fortunately, the chiropractic adjustments and other techniques we use here at Secrest Family Chiropractic can undo your body's accumulated responses to all that stress.

How do life's daily challenges tie you into knots? It has to do with the ancient "fight or flight" response hardwired into the central nervous system. Even a relatively minor stressor, from a disagreement with a co-worker to a rushed trip to the grocery store for that quart of milk you forgot, causes adrenaline and other stress hormones to be dumped into your bloodstream.

The muscles react by tensing up. In the absence of any further stress they would relax again, but real life loads stressor after stressor on us until the body freezes up into a kind of permanent tension called a "panic pattern." This chronic tension can affect your spinal alignment and nerve function as well. Before you know it you may be experiencing shoulder, arm, back and neck pain; tension headaches and migraines can also result. Even worse, the nerve impairment from all this tension and misalignment can cause immune impairment, sexual or sleep issues and even heart disease. Poor nutrition and lack of exercise can aggravate the problem.

Our Scottsdale chiropractor can break the panic pattern and relieve the muscular tension behind your stress-related symptoms. Two points that typically become "frozen" include the sternum (breastbone) and coccyx (tailbone). By making small, precise chiropractic adjustments in these two spots, we can release the parts of your body that have grown rigid and created health problems. We can also perform separate migraine headache treatment involving adjustments, lifestyle counseling and nutrition advice to treat your stress-related pain.

What do you do to de-stress?