Love and Pain

Hope you had a great Valentine’s Day! February is the month of love so I thought it might be a good opportunity to talk about something a little different from our usual subject matter but no less relevant to our overall health and wellness. We have mostly shared about topics such as mechanical neck and back pain and how our diets affect our pain and overall health and wellness.  May we talk a little about how the quality of our relationships affects our health and may even impact our pain?

Sometimes patients come in with neck pain, headache or back pain as their chief complaint but once we start treating and talking in the office, stress with relationships at work, relationships at home, with friends, family and even with self comes up as a major contributing factor. Sometimes, patients don't even realize until they start talking about it that these issues were bothering them so very much.  While some patients benefit from talking to a trained therapist, many just need a non judgmental listening ear.

Studies show that stressed relationships can contribute to various negative health effects including increasing the risk of having a heart attack. Studies also show stress to be worse for us than diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity or smoking.

Having worked in health care for almost 2 decades I see the effects of stress on patients’ health almost daily. Here are a couple of suggestions for keeping your relationships healthy, reducing your stress and even maybe improving your pain:

1)      Don’t take your important relationships for granted. Make time for them every day.

2)      Stay away from negative people. Spend your time with people who are uplifting.

3)      Do fun stuff with your loved ones. Family togetherness cannot be over rated.

4)      Talk to and listen to your loved ones.

5)      Be mindful of your stress and don’t “take things out” on your loved ones

6)      Make new friends: Get a hobby, join a class, volunteer all these things help us stay connected.

7)      Be gentle with yourself. Sometimes we can be our worst critics and all by ourselves cause our stress to skyrocket.

Please share your comments about this article and any of our other articles in our Facebook community: www.facebook.com/SaporitoChiropractic. We look forward to hearing from you and having you join us!