Chiropractor For Stress Relief in Columbus, OH
Stress is more than just a mental or emotional challenge—it’s a physical event that directly affects your body’s ability to function. Whether it’s work deadlines, family responsibilities, or financial pressure, your body reacts to stress the same way it would to an immediate physical threat.
This response, known as the fight-or-flight reaction, releases cortisol and adrenaline, increases heart rate, tightens muscles, and puts the nervous system into a state of high alert. While this is useful in short bursts, chronic stress overloads the system, leading to tension, pain, poor sleep, and long-term health issues.
What most people don’t realize is that stress has a direct impact on the spine and nervous system. When you’re constantly under stress, your body holds onto it—muscles tighten, posture shifts, and spinal misalignments develop. This physical tension leads to pain, headaches, fatigue, and even digestive issues. Worse, a stressed nervous system keeps your body in survival mode, making it harder to heal, recover, and function properly. Over time, this creates a vicious cycle where stress causes pain, and pain causes more stress.
This is where chiropractic care comes in. Because the spine houses and protects the nervous system, spinal misalignments (subluxations) interfere with nerve function, keeping the body locked in a state of high stress. Chiropractic adjustments help restore proper alignment, relieve tension, and reset the nervous system, allowing the body to shift from fight-or-flight mode to a state of healing and recovery. Many patients report feeling calmer, more focused, and less overwhelmed after an adjustment, not just because their pain decreases but because their nervous system is finally functioning as designed.
Think of your nervous system like a car with two pedals:
- The gas pedal (sympathetic nervous system), which revs up your body’s stress response
- The brake pedal (parasympathetic nervous system), which allows you to rest, recover, and heal
Chronic stress keeps your gas pedal to the metal, flooding your system with tension and preventing you from shifting into a state of recovery. Chiropractic care releases that stuck gas pedal, allowing your body to activate its healing response so you’re not constantly running on overdrive. When your spine is aligned, your nervous system can finally balance stress, relax tight muscles, and restore energy, helping you handle life’s demands without breaking down.
If you’ve been dealing with chronic stress, tension, or stress-related symptoms like headaches, fatigue, or poor sleep, chiropractic care can help your body break the cycle and restore balance. Instead of just managing stress, it’s time to help your body handle it better—and chiropractic is a key piece of that solution.
While stress has been trending downward in recent years, it’s still a massive issue in the United States and has a detrimental impact on health. Sources of stress vary from person to person, but the most commonly reported causes of stress are money, work, the economy, family responsibilities and health concerns.
Thankfully, chiropractic care can help combat the symptoms of stress. Read on to learn more.
$70 New Patient Special Offer
Includes New Patient Consultation, Comprehensive Examination, Full Report of Findings.
How Our Stress Relief Care Plan Works
Schedule Your New Patient Exam
Set up a time so you and your Doctor can do a thorough history and examination to determine the root cause of your pain.
Get A Customized Plan of Action
Your Doctor will create a custom plan of attack to not only get you out of pain fast but to keep you out of pain long term.
Live A Pain Free Energetic Life
Receive the care you need for your problem so you can get back to the time when pain wasn’t dictating what you could do.
What is Stress?
How The Body Reacts To Stress
Stress isn’t just a feeling—it’s a physiological response your body uses to adapt to challenges. Hans Selye, the researcher who first defined stress, described it as “the nonspecific response of the body to any demand placed upon it.” In other words, stress isn’t always bad.
In fact, there are two types: eustress and distress. Eustress is the good kind of stress—it pushes you to grow, adapt, and perform at your best, like when you exercise, take on a new challenge, or prepare for an important event. But when stress becomes chronic, overwhelming, or unmanaged, it turns into distress, leading to physical breakdown, fatigue, anxiety, and illness.
Another way of thinking of chronic stress is that it’s modern stress. It’s a relatively new phenomenon and one that most people alive in the 21st century suffer from.
The problem isn’t stress itself but how your body handles it. The nervous system controls your fight-or-flight (sympathetic) and rest-and-recover (parasympathetic) responses, and when stress is constant, the body gets stuck in overdrive. Cortisol and adrenaline flood your system, keeping your muscles tight, your heart rate elevated, and your digestion, immune function, and healing abilities suppressed. Over time, this leads to pain, tension, sleep issues, hormone imbalances, and even chronic disease. Managing stress isn’t about eliminating it—it’s about helping your body adapt and recover properly, which is where chiropractic care plays a crucial role.
Stress in Children
According to a wide-reaching study by the American Psychological Association (APA), nearly a third of all children surveyed indicated they have experienced physical symptoms associated with stress in the month prior to the study, like trouble falling asleep, stomachaches and headaches. Even more staggering, the youth-suicide rate today is four times higher than in the 1950’s.
How Stress Affects Your Health
Your thoughts have a physical response. When someone cuts you off on 23 and drives 10mph under the speed limit, causing you to stop at every traffic light, you have a biophysical response. The threat wasn’t real—it was just a thought—but your blood pressure goes up, your cortisol shoots through the roof, your digestion slows, and you start to crave junk food. All over a thought.
Stress has real, measurable effects on your health. When your body stays in a prolonged state of stress, it triggers a constant fight-or-flight response, flooding your system with cortisol and adrenaline. Over time, this leads to muscle tension, high blood pressure, digestive issues, hormone imbalances, and weakened immune function. Chronic stress is linked to conditions like heart disease, anxiety, depression, weight gain, and even chronic pain syndromes. It also interferes with your sleep, leaving you exhausted and making it harder for your body to heal and recover properly.
One of the most significant ways stress affects your health is by disrupting your nervous system, which controls everything from movement to organ function. When stress causes muscle tightness and spinal misalignments, it creates pressure on the nerves, leading to headaches, back pain, fatigue, and poor concentration. Over time, this interference makes it harder for your body to regulate stress properly, trapping you in a cycle of tension, pain, and exhaustion. This is why addressing stress isn’t just about relaxing—it’s about restoring proper nervous system function so your body can handle life’s demands without breaking down.
Common Symptoms of Stress
The most common symptoms of stress are feeling irritable, angry, overwhelmed, anxious, fatigued and depressed. When under stress, different areas of the body are affected. Here’s a snapshot of some of the effects:
Musculoskeletal system: Muscles tense up and contract under stress, causing headaches, migraines and other conditions
Respiratory system: High stress can cause rapid breath, or hyperventilation, and trigger panic attacks
Cardiovascular system: Acute stress can increase heart rate and inflammation in the coronary arteries, potentially increasing risk of stroke
Endocrine system: While stressed, the adrenal glands produce cortisol, increasing risk of heart disease and diabetes
Nervous system: Under stress, the body will act as though it’s under threat. This reaction is an innate response that has been occurring for millions of years. When the mind perceives a threat or the body experiences a shock, the body releases hormones that boost the ability to either “fight” or flee (“flight”)
Most modern humans don’t experience the same hazards our ancestors encountered, but this natural response has now transformed to reactions to modern day stresses—work, deadlines, traffic, illness, arguments, etc.
Chiropractic Care for Natural Stress Relief in Columbus, OH
Chiropractic care helps the body adapt to and recover from stress by removing interference in the nervous system. When stress causes muscle tension and spinal misalignments (subluxations), it disrupts communication between the brain and body, keeping the nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight mode.
Chiropractic adjustments help restore proper alignment, relieve pressure on the nerves, and improve circulation, allowing the body to shift out of a constant stress response. Many patients feel a sense of relaxation and clarity after an adjustment because their nervous system can finally function the way it was designed.
By correcting spinal misalignments, chiropractic care reduces physical tension, improves posture, and enhances the body’s ability to handle stress effectively. Proper alignment allows the parasympathetic (rest-and-recover) nervous system to function properly, which helps regulate breathing, digestion, heart rate, and immune response—all of which are negatively impacted by chronic stress.
Rather than just managing symptoms, chiropractic removes the interference that keeps stress trapped in the body, helping you feel more energized, resilient, and balanced in your daily life.
Chiropractic care is essential to healthy function of the nervous system, which contains the brain and spinal cord. Chiropractic adjustments activate the parasympathetic system, which calms the “fight or flight” reaction triggered in the sympathetic system. Research has also shown that chiropractic can reduce blood pressure.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can stress cause physical pain?
Absolutely. When you’re stressed, your muscles tense up, your posture shifts, and your nervous system stays on high alert. Think about how your shoulders creep up toward your ears when you’re overwhelmed or how tension builds in your neck after a long, stressful day. Over time, this muscle tightness and poor posture lead to chronic pain, headaches, and stiffness, making stress a very real physical issue.
How does stress affect my nervous system?
Your nervous system is like a car with two pedals: the gas pedal (sympathetic fight-or-flight mode) and the brake pedal (parasympathetic rest-and-recover mode). Chronic stress keeps your foot on the gas, leaving your body in a constant state of tension and overdrive. This can lead to sleep problems, digestive issues, anxiety, and even weakened immune function because your body never gets a chance to relax and heal fully.
Can chiropractic care help with stress, or is it just for back pain?
Chiropractic care is one of the best ways to help your body process and recover from stress. When your spine is misaligned, the resulting nerve interference keeps your nervous system in fight-or-flight mode, making stress feel worse. Adjustments restore balance, relieve tension, and allow your body to switch into recovery mode, helping you handle stress more effectively.
I hold all my stress in my shoulders—can chiropractic help?
Yes! Many people store stress in their upper back, shoulders, and neck, leading to stiffness, headaches, and even numbness or tingling in the arms. Chiropractic adjustments help release built-up tension, improve circulation, and restore mobility, allowing your body to relax and function properly. Pairing adjustments with posture awareness and simple at-home exercises can help keep stress-related tension from returning.
How does stress affect my sleep, and can chiropractic help?
When your nervous system is overwhelmed by stress, your body struggles to shut down at night, leading to racing thoughts, tossing and turning, and shallow sleep. Misalignments in the spine can also contribute to sleep disturbances by irritating the nerves that regulate sleep cycles. Chiropractic care helps calm the nervous system, making it easier to fall asleep and stay asleep so your body can truly recover.
I’m constantly stressed—will I always need chiropractic care?
Stress is part of life, but how your body handles it makes all the difference. Chiropractic care doesn’t eliminate stress, but it helps your body adapt to it better by keeping your nervous system balanced. Many people start care because of pain or tension but continue because they notice they sleep better, feel more energized, and recover faster from daily stress. Chiropractic is like regular maintenance for your body—keeping everything running smoothly so stress doesn’t take over.
$70 New Patient Special Offer
Includes New Patient Consultation, Comprehensive Examination, Full Report of Findings.