How does your Environment Affect your CNS

From our Live with Dr Pete Series on Instagram, Dr. Pete answers some commonly asked questions about chiropractic care.

Below are these questions from this session:

• How does your environment affect your nervous system??
• How do your emotions affect your nervous system??
• What can you do to decrease stress in your life?
• How long have you been practicing?
• What piece of advice have you gathered that you would tell yourself as an early?

How does your environment affect your CNS?

One of my favorite things I’ve heard over the years is the way we take in information about our environment is through our central nervous system or five senses, right? What happens is the smell, hearing, and senses that come in through our nervous system go into the spinal cord into the brain to be distributed and determine what our reaction should be.

For example, should my heart rate go up, should I blink? Should I sneeze? Should I run away? Should I have pain, or have muscles move? All of that kind of stuff happens. There are different types of stimulation that we get. If we consume toxic food or bad food, or if we are allergic to some kind of food, or allergic to something that’s in the environment, what’s the potion? What’s the wind like? That can affect your body and how you feel that day. Also, what’s going on in the news, what’s happening emotionally and spiritually, will also affect your nervous system. 

There are many factors bombarding us all day long, and our nervous system and our brain processes these things.  When this system is not working right, it’s going to overflow into stress, anger, tension, and discomfort. If we’re not having a good day or things are going wrong for us and we are not processing all the stimulation from all over the place, this is where disease can occur. 

One of a Chiropractor's jobs is to help our bodies process information through manipulation and adjustments so it can process information and send messages to the right places. This makes it so your system is not overflowing with information. When your system is interfered with, that will come out as a headache or a stomachache, and this nervousness over time creates disease. 

How do your emotions affect your CNS?

A concept that I love is called “stinking thinking.” So everything to do with it that would be; Your emotions will cause disease and symptoms in your body. 

There’s an actual scientific force in your head, but bad thoughts, stress, tension, pressure, your body being on all the time and in fighter flight mode is going to overflow into symptoms of some sort.  Such as “can’t sleep,” stress monkey, racing all night, having fatigue headaches, anything like that will be one of the causes of the overflow symptoms.

What can you do to decrease stress in your life? 

The obvious, which is funny, but I’ve heard frequently from patients is when they quit their job, their stress decreased and they experienced healing. So what is stressing people out the most, typically is their job. When they don’t feel well, they realize it's because they’re unhappy with their job and finding a new job oftentimes can help decrease stress in people's lives. 

Moving to Hawaii, for us, has been a giant step in decreasing stress. Now, not everyone can do that. You know, we had to have a lot of bad things happen to have good things happen so we could make this move. But it is like you have to be able to limit the people around you. Other people can’t make choices for you. If you’re gonna let people stress you out, they can push your buttons, so whether that is listening to meditation, getting a massage, making sure it’s all dark in your room, or not having too much caffeine before bed, these kinds of things are endless.

From the chiropractic standpoint, all those things make a difference. If your nervous system is not working properly and there’s interference going on, there’s going to be tension tightness in the spine so you can’t process information. So, it’s necessary to identify the type of stress, calm the nervous system down, and then calm the emotional system down. Then it’s a holistic, full body approach. If you keep complaining and complaining about the same thing, manifesting the same thing over and over, you're going to keep getting the same thing. So, taking a step back and talking to your doctor and your chiropractor helps. 

I want to let them know the things that are bothering me or the things that are stressing me in my life. What can we do differently? It’s tiny little things that make a tiny difference without adding more work and more stress to your life. That is part of our responsibility is coming up with simple solutions. 

I started getting massages, adjustments, and acupuncture, and those little things helped. Then, I chose to have better people around me, including my staff, which made a bigger difference.

How long have you been a practicing Chiropractor?

I graduated from chiropractic college in the Spring of 1996 and got my first license to practice in Arizona and Nevada that year, making this year my 28th year.

What advice have you gathered that you would tell yourself as an early chiropractor?

Healthcare-healthcare-healthcare, in one sentence, “if you don't use it you will lose it. You can't get it back later. If you’re not taking care of yourself in any way shape or form, it’s like a pencil eraser. Once it's gone, it's gone. My wife tells me all the time: We live in an amazing country at an amazing time in the history of the world and we just let all these other things bombard us into being unhappy and stress ourselves out or tell ourselves that we’re not good enough and on and on and on down the list of all the things. 

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