According to Medline, insomnia is a sleeping disorder that essentially involves trouble falling asleep or staying asleep through the night. You can imagine that this would be a complicating factor for someone who is trying to heal from an injury or illness.
You see, your body takes advantage of your downtime when you aren’t moving and spending your energy, stretching tissues and focusing on problem solving to resolve issues and heal damaged tissues. Well, how does this happen? What can cause someone to lose the ability to sleep at night?
A big change in habit or daily activity can obviously affect your sleep. For example: if your daily activities decrease in intensity you may be left with too much energy at the end of the da y. There are a lot of other factors, sleep disturbances are a complication of many prescription drugs and other chemical factors like alcohol or caffeine. What’s going on there?
Well, caffeine and other drugs are stimulants which means that they heighten the activity and metabolism of the nervous system, which has a direct effect on every part of the body. This will lead the systems in the body that are responsible for heightening and lowering your state of arousal to have trouble knowing whether it is trying to wake you up or bring you down for rest. Well what about people that have long-standing problems, who aren’t using drugs?
The body responds to stressors in order to adapt you to your environment. So, when you are going under an undue amount of stress or physical pain and discomfort, the body responds by heightening your state of arousal, putting you into a sort of ‘survival mode’. This heightened state of stress and arousal can cause a person to have an unusual sleeping pattern as their heightened level of stress leaves them tired at irregular intervals, taking naps and not being able to stay down for their full night.
What we find in our office is that people who have stress on the nervous system due to problems with their spine also have a lot of difficulty with getting a full night’s sleep. Since the nerves directly surrounding the spine are the ones that coordinate the release of hormones and neuroreceptors that raise the arousal of the body, it isn’t a stretch to see that trouble with the muscles and ligaments on the spine will irritate these nerves, causing problems with the whole system.
That’s where a spinal correction comes in. By making sure that pervious injuries and stresses don’t keep a person’s spine out of proper alignment, we can expect a more calm and properly functioning nervous system. This is what many of our patients come to experience. It seems that a third or more of our patients will tell us after a couple of weeks of visits, ‘you know, I didn’t tell you this at first, but, I was having a lot of trouble sleeping before I started coming here. Now, I wake up feeling well rested. Do you think this care has anything to do with that?’ So often, that we’ve made it protocol to ask how a new patient has been sleeping before we begin treatment.
We approach these problems in the spine and natural insomnia treatment in Los Angeles with specific x-ray techniques that let us see a person’s spinal distortions in great detail. With gentle corrections we direct the joints in the spine to more natural alignments and release the pulling and tension that unnatural posture can put on the spinal cord. Less tension leads to more efficient function and a better you!
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Dr. Hall’s Upper Cervical Health Care offices service patients from the broader Los Angeles area including Long Beach, Beverly Hills, Carson, Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Torrance, Santa Monica, Cerritos, Rancho Palos Verdes, Palos Verdes Estates, EL Segundo, Westwood, Glendale, Pasadena, Eagle Rock, Atwater Village, Encino, Silver Lake, Venice, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Fountain Valley, Malibu, Pacific Palisades, Montebello, Fullerton, Anaheim, Whittier , Simi Valley, Santa Barbara, Westlake Village, Alhambra, Culver City, Gardena, Bellflower, Burbank, La Canada, Whittier, Monterey Park, West Hollywood, North Hollywood, West Covina, Inglewood, Hawthorne, Lawndale, San Pedro, Marina Del Rey, Playa Del Rey, Valencia, Santa Clarita, Moorpark, Yoruba Linda, Corona , Moreno Valley, Lomita, and other Southern California regions such as Orange County
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