You might ask yourself, what has that to do with chiropractic care and getting you better.
A good sleep is vital for a well- functioning body. It improves your body’s ability to heal well and quickly as in the night (when we are asleep) your nervous system is rebuilding and recovering itself and the body from the daily stressors which just passed.
Most of us have experienced a night with too little or even no sleep and we all know how the following day feels. Not good! You probably did feel dazed and hung over.
Why would that be?
A good night’s sleep is known to improve general health and well-being. Your mind works better when you are well rested and so does your entire body. This includes the healing capability of any injury/ache/pain you might have. When we don’t sleep well, our body will have it harder to get well sooner, guaranteed.
During the night your brain will ‘fine tune’ you for the upcoming day(s) by deleting unnecessary information, literally while you sleep. Special nerve cells get active while we are slumbering away at night. They will seek, find and delete unimportant information. Input and events from the past day are being processed and examined at night. Depending on importance, this information is getting either deleted or stored into your long-term memory. This happens especially during the so-called REM sleep (which is also the part of the night we are having dreams at).
Experiments have shown that a continued lack of REM sleep can drastically (we are talking here years, not just weeks or months) reduce your life expectancy.
What commonly can decrease your REM sleep? Alcohol intake and/or sleeping tablets (preferably not together) have shown to minimize the quality of your sleep.
Further studies have demonstrated that sleep loss increases inflammation in your body, something we really like to put a cap on, especially when having an injury. Also interesting is that inflammation is part of the foundation of most chronic illnesses, hence we like to have as little inflammation as possible in our bodies, good sleep will help with that.
Interestingly studies have also shown that chronic sleep loss will actually decrease your ability to think rationally and make calculated decisions. Sleep physically washes toxins, including those that can lead to Alzheimer's, from your brain.
And that is why we are very keen on understanding how your sleep is going. Regular Chiropractic Care has been shown to improve sleep quality and brain-body communication. We like to get and keep you better for as long as possible and sleep is one vital component for that to happen.
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