What Happens to Your Body When You’re Always Rushing | Chiropractor - O'Fallon, MO

You wake up a few minutes late, rush to get everyone out the door, drive to work watching the clock, eat lunch while answering emails, hurry to the next appointment, race through errands, and finally get home only to realize there are still ten things left to do.

Nothing particularly terrible happened. There wasn't one major crisis. But your body may have spent much of the day responding as though something needed your immediate attention.

We often think of stress as something caused by major life events, but sometimes it's simply the constant feeling of hurry. When rushing becomes our normal pace, the body doesn't necessarily get as many opportunities to shift out of that heightened state and settle back down.

As a chiropractor, that's interesting to me because the nervous system isn't separate from the rest of your health. It's involved in how your body responds, adapts, moves, rests, and handles the demands you place on it every day.

Your Body Has a Built-In Stress Response

Your stress response exists for a good reason.

When your brain perceives a challenge or threat, your body prepares you to respond. Stress hormones are released, heart rate and breathing can increase, blood pressure rises, and muscles tense. This is commonly called the fight-or-flight response. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health explains that these physical changes are a normal part of how the body responds to stress.

For a short period of time, that's not necessarily a problem. Your body is designed to adapt.

But think about what happens during an ordinary rushed morning. You're mentally calculating how late you are while searching for someone's missing shoe, checking the time, thinking about your first meeting, and trying to get everyone into the car.

Your body doesn't need an actual emergency for a stress response to occur.

And then you arrive at work...and immediately start rushing through something else.

The Problem Isn't One Busy Morning

There's a big difference between occasionally hurrying and feeling like you're always racing the clock.

Researchers use the term allostatic load to describe the cumulative physiological burden that can develop when the body's adaptive systems are activated repeatedly or for prolonged periods. A systematic review describes allostatic load as the cumulative burden associated with chronic stress and life events and found associations between higher allostatic load and poorer health outcomes.

That doesn't mean having a packed Tuesday is going to make you sick. It means our bodies are affected by patterns over time.

This is where the pace of everyday life can matter. If you rarely feel like you have time to slow down, eat without multitasking, breathe deeply, transition between activities, or truly rest, your body may be getting plenty of opportunities to activate and fewer opportunities to recover.

Your Muscles Notice When You're in a Hurry, Too

Think about how you physically carry yourself when you're running late. Your shoulders may creep upward. Your jaw may tighten. You may grip the steering wheel harder. Your breathing can become faster or shallower. You might spend hours at your desk without realizing how much tension you're holding.

The American Psychological Association notes that muscle tension is almost a reflex response to stress. With acute stress, muscles typically tense and then relax when the stress passes. Chronic stress can mean the muscles remain in a more persistent state of guardedness.

This doesn't mean stress is the cause of every tight neck, headache, or sore back. Those symptoms can have many different causes. But it does mean that when we're evaluating someone's spinal and musculoskeletal health, their everyday life matters. Your body comes with you everywhere you go.

Even Digestion and Sleep Can Feel the Effects

The stress response doesn't only involve your muscles.

The autonomic nervous system helps regulate many processes that happen without you consciously thinking about them, and stress involves changes across multiple body systems. Research has connected chronic stress with autonomic and neuroendocrine responses, including changes involving cortisol and the body's stress-regulation systems.

This helps explain why prolonged stress can show up in ways people don't immediately associate with feeling “stressed.” NCCIH notes that long-term stress may contribute to or worsen problems involving digestion, headaches, and sleep, among other symptoms.

You've probably experienced some version of this yourself. You finally get into bed after an exhausting day, yet your mind is still running through tomorrow's list. You're physically tired, but your system hasn't gotten the message that the day is over. That's one reason slowing down isn't just about feeling calmer emotionally. Giving your body regular opportunities to transition out of “go mode” matters, too.

Your Nervous System Wasn't Designed to Stay in One Gear

Your autonomic nervous system includes both sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. These systems work together continuously to help your body respond appropriately to what's happening around and within you.

We need activation. We also need recovery.

NCCIH describes the relaxation response as essentially the counterpart to the stress response, with slower breathing, a lower heart rate, and other physiological changes associated with a calmer state.

This is why simple habits can matter more than we sometimes give them credit for. Taking a few slow breaths before walking into the next appointment, eating lunch without working through it, taking a walk, protecting your sleep, exercising regularly, spending time outside, praying, or simply leaving five extra minutes between commitments can create small opportunities to stop treating every moment like a race.

You don't have to eliminate stress from your life. That's neither realistic nor necessary.

Your body simply needs opportunities to move between demand and recovery.

Where Chiropractic Fits Into the Conversation

At Rise, we talk about the nervous system frequently because it plays such an important role in how the body functions and adapts.

The brain and spinal cord make up the central nervous system, and the spine has an important structural relationship with that system. That's one reason we believe maintaining spinal health through regular chiropractic care belongs in a proactive approach to health, rather than something you think about only after pain appears.

With the Gonstead approach, we're specific. We evaluate the spine, consider the patient's history and examination findings, and identify areas of dysfunction rather than simply performing the same adjustment on everyone.

Chiropractic care doesn't remove the deadlines from your calendar or make life's stressors disappear. It also doesn't replace sleep, exercise, good nutrition, relaxation, or appropriate medical care.

But caring for your spine and nervous system before you're hurting is an important part of the wellness philosophy we practice every day at Rise. It's why many of our families make regular chiropractic adjustments part of their routine rather than waiting until their body is demanding their attention.

You Don't Have to Live Like Everything Is an Emergency

There will always be busy mornings. There will always be seasons when the calendar is fuller than we'd like. The goal isn't to create a perfectly calm life. It's to notice when rushing has become your default setting.

Sometimes the healthiest change isn't adding another thing to your routine. It may be giving yourself enough margin to stop racing from one thing to the next, protecting the habits that help your body recover, and consistently taking care of your nervous system and spinal health along the way.

Your body is incredibly good at adapting to what you ask of it.

Just remember that slowing down is something worth giving it the chance to do, too.

At Rise Family Chiropractic in O'Fallon, Missouri, regular chiropractic care is about more than chasing symptoms. We're here to help you care for your spine and nervous system consistently so you can keep showing up for the life you're living.

TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM