Stress seems to be one of the main causes of imbalances and dis-ease in your body and one of the most important things I address with you as a client is your stress levels.   Trying to relieve pain, body imbalances or dis-ease without addressing stress is unlikely to be successful in the long term.  In fact, I frequently find that, reducing and managing stress better, goes a long way in resolving the problem the client has presented with.

Kinesiology is based in the knowledge that your body is a self-healing, self-regulating, self-perpetuating (replacing its own tissues) organism. Essentially everything we need for survival apart from food, air and water is found within the body itself.

Sometimes your body loses the ability to efficiently perform these activities resulting in pain, illness, low energy etc.  Kinesiology uses a variety of processes to help your body re-balance and re-connect with the ability to heal, regulate and perpetuate itself.

What is stress?

According to the American Psychological Association ‘Stress can affect people of all ages, genders and circumstances and can lead to both physical and psychological health issues.  By definition, stress is any uncomfortable “emotional experience accompanied by predictable biochemical, physiological and behavioural changes.”

Stress can be emotional, physical or chemical; emotional or physical trauma, environmental changes, over exercising, diet, toxins, drugs.  You may be able to cope well (and maybe even flourish) with one, two or more of these stresses if they are minor, but if you have too many stresses or the stresses are severe, your body’s ability to cope and function is compromised.  Your body’s ability to cope with stress is like wounds to your body.  Your body could cope quite well with a small number of minor wounds, but one severe wound or multiple serious wounds could cause your body to struggle.

Why does stress affect your health and well-being?

There are four primary survival systems in your body, which are known as the feeding (digestion & elimination), fight/flight (stress), reproduction (hormonal) and immune systems.  Your fight/flight system is designed for your immediate survival, whereas the other three systems are designed to look after longer-term survival.

When you are stressed, your “fight/flight” system is active and much of your body’s energy is channelled to your muscles in readiness to fight or run while energy to the other survival systems is reduced.   This worked well for primitive man because when faced with an animal that wanted to kill you and eat you, you needed your body’s focus to be on either getting away or fighting and killing your predator, not on digesting lunch, reproducing or fighting off a head cold.  Once you had either escaped from or killed the predator the threat is gone, and your body could go back to its normal function; the fight/flight system could calm, and energy would flow back to the other systems.

Unfortunately, our lifestyle these days mean that while our threats may not always be as extreme as ‘kill or be killed’, our threats or stresses are more constant.  This means that your fight/flight system is constantly active to some degree, and the other systems are subsequently deficient in energy.  If you consider the common health issues today, many of them relate to disfunction of the digestion (e.g. reflux, IBS, Crohn’s), reproduction (e.g. fertility, menopause symptoms) and/or immune (e.g. allergies/intolerances) systems possibly the result of a constantly active fight/flight system.

How can Kinesiology help?

One of the Kinesiology tools I use, called Neural Organization Technique (NOT), specifically helps to re-organise the nervous system so your body can function in the way it is supposed to.  Using specific muscle tests, we can identify the systems most affected by stress and then by stimulating reflex points and balancing muscle function, it helps to unwind your body’s fight/flight response as well as ‘waking up’ or re-energising the other survival systems.

If you would like to discuss further how Kinesiology may be able to help you, please contact me now.