Chronic pain can change your brain, your hormones and takes an emotional toll. It is a complex and long-lasting pain from a dull ache to intense pain. Both are unrelenting, lasting for months or even years. The resulting brain and hormone changes increase the pain’s effects, raising your stress levels, reducing your quality of life and life expectancy, your sleep, and overall health. But your brain is trainable and along with Chiropractic care, goes along way to reducing the effects of chronic pain.

It’s almost November and you’ve probably noticed that malls and shops are already putting up Christmas decorations! Some people love that, while others can feel their stress levels rising. Stress can take a huge emotional toll.

Something else that takes a huge emotional toll is chronic pain. What’s worse is that chronic pain isn’t seasonal. There’s no definite cut-off date with things returning to normal. Chronic pain is unrelenting, and ever-present.

Not only does chronic pain take a huge emotional toll on the person experiencing it, but it also changes the way your brain regulates your hormones.

How Your Brain Regulates Your Hormones

Like your nerves, your hormones are also messengers. They deliver slow chemical messages through your bloodstream, and the effects are longer-lasting. They maintain a consistent balance within your body and regulate the processes your body needs, including things like your appetite, mood, and your sleep cycle.

But how does chronic pain interfere with this process and how does this add to your emotional burden?

The Causes And Effects Of Chronic Pain

While acute pain often is the result of an injury or an illness, it’s temporary and usually only lasts for a short time. It’s a red flag highlighting a problem. Chronic pain though is more common than people think, it’s also complex and long-lasting. Often much longer than expected, even after healing has happened. Sometimes it lasts for months or years.

In terms of your mental health, unrelenting chronic pain can cause moderate to severe depression, difficulty controlling mood swings, a continual expectation of pain that can cause nervousness and a tension that doesn’t allow for true relaxation.

Because your brain isn’t built to live in perpetual pain, and because your brain has to deal with the pain it doesn’t have the processing power to deal with other things, like ensuring your pituitary gland creates and sends out the right hormones, in the right quantity, to the right organ, your brain can become damaged. This attempt at pain control and the related stress involved can actually change the structure of your ‘little grey cells’, as Poirot would call them.

Chronic pain often leads to:

• A general anxiety disorder
• A major depressive disorder
• Fatigue
• Insomnia or difficulty in falling asleep
• Mood swings

The most common forms of chronic pain include:

• Neuropathic – nerve pain
• Musculoskeletal – in your bones, joints, ligaments, muscles, and tendons
• Visceral – in your organs
• Inflammatory – autoimmune conditions, or infections
• Central sensitization – long term changes making you more sensitive to minor pain, discomfort and emotions

People with persistent, long-term chronic pain may lose over 10% of the brain’s grey matter. Unfortunately, it’s the grey matter in which attention, learning, motor control, and memory processing takes place. A lessening of the ability to pay attention, to solve problems, and keep memories can be the result. However, Chiropractic care can go a long way to helping people with chronic pain regain a measure of control of their lives.

The multiple aspects of chronic pain include inflammation and muscle spasms. Of all the chronic pain symptoms, the ones that can be treated most effectively are joint related…neck, back, hips, shoulders. A lack of proper spinal alignment is one of the causes of chronic pain. Chiropractic care helps by realigning the spine allowing the spine and joints to function properly. When you can move more easily, your mood improves. Your brain can relax and concentrate on what it does best. By reducing both pain and inflammation, improving your range of motion, Chiropractic care promote healing.

Specific Benefits of Chiropractic Care

Enhanced Body Function
Chiropractic care can help improve the body’s systems.

Improved mobility
By realigning the spine and other joints, chiropractic care improves mobility and range of motion.

Pain Relief
Reducing pain by restoring proper alignment improves the musculoskeletal system functioning.

Reduced Dependence on Medication
Regular chiropractic care is a non-invasive and drug-free alternative to pain management.

Personalized Treatments
The personal, tailored approach of Chiropractic care meets the individual’s needs and conditions.

Pain steals your life from you. Let us help you regain as much of your life back as possible.

Yours in health,
Dr. Monica and Helen