November is BALANCE month at Satori.
What's the relationship between pain and balance?
Imagine the stress of falling down the stairs:
Your hold your breath, your heart is beating wildly as adrenal glands dump stress chemicals into your blood stream; you automatically brace for the impact, shortening and tightening your muscles.
How many steps do you take during the day?
Now imagine that you are falling just a little, but with each and every step.
This small sensation + stress of falling and catching yourself (which, for
most part happens below the level of awareness) accumulates over time, leading not only to tissue degeneration in our catching parts (knee cartilage, spinal disks, among others), but also to exhaustion of the adrenaline system - possibly leading to adrenal fatigue and diseases of nervous system such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, insomnia, depression, and decline in nervous tissue health.
How does that
happen?
Our muscles, tendons and joints should know where they are without looking.
Persistent pain and chronic tension changes this well-tuned system.
Stiff, unyielding muscles send low quality + incorrect information to the decision making center – the brain.
The brain, not knowing that information is based on stiffness, makes over-correction - usually by ordering the muscles to stiffen up some more – to stabilize.
On the top of that, persistent pain changes the function of the nervous system - not only by hijacking brain's movement centers, but also by disrupting brain's ability to communicate messages down to our body parts.
I know I say this often, but again - catch 22!
Pain and stiffness create body-brain communication problems; body-brain communication problems create stiffness and pain!
And so now, instead of walking actively by engaging our muscles for movement and stabilization, we stiffly fall forward {just a little bit} with each and every step.
Let's change that!
