You ‘slept funny’ but you’re not aware of what you did, if anything, and now you hurt. Did you sleep like the picture above? Sara snapped this picture of Derek and I sleeping as she was coming to bed. Yes indeed, that is a 22+ month old baby that crawled up onto my head while we both were sleeping. Apparently Derek has my ability to sleep deeply.
I didn’t know I had a baby on my head while I slept until I saw the text from my wife while I was getting ready the next morning.
I had no idea because I felt fine, just like any other morning!
This is a big take-home message so its worth repeating: I slept with a portion of a 25-ish pound weight on my head while lying on my side and my neck was just fine!
I have also woken up with a ridiculously sore neck and not had a weight on my head while I slept, so what’s the deal?
This is akin to bending over to pick up something benign like a piece of paper and your back or neck ‘goes out’. I hope everyone reading this is comfortable with the fact that its not the sheet of paper or the bending over that caused injury and, unless you’re a stomach sleeper, it isn’t the sleeping. We’re designed to sleep and to bend over, so that just doesn’t add up. Just like it wasn’t really the last piece of straw that broke the camel’s back.
Unwanted stress can do it though. Stress is necessary in life, we wouldn’t adapt, change, learn, have dense bones, or have increasing muscle tone from exercise without it. Unwanted stress is different as we hold those patterns in our deep postural tissues. Financial stress, relationship stress, postural stress, work, family, school, dietary, chemical, it’s all in there. With enough time and enough load, our tissues meet threshold and a normally benign movement or situation becomes life-alteringly painful.
Suddenly you can’t sit, stand, lie down, turn, or move. It has become too much and nothing seems to touch it: hot, cold, creams, balms, rest, etc, they don’t work this time and now you need treatment. You might even have ‘trick back’ or neck that does this every so often now.
And it doesn’t feel good.
And it’s frustrating.
And you can’t do what you want to do.
And you don’t like it.
Well what if it was supposed disrupt your life so much that you were supposed to do something about it? What if this is your canary in the coal mine, telling you this isn’t working anymore?
If that is the case then taking a pain killer or anti-inflammatory is definitely not serving you, it would be equivalent to stopping the canary from being able to whistle so you wouldn’t know when you needed to leave the mine.
That’s right, pain is our loudest message that we provide ourselves to create change and it has different degrees of volume. We have much subtler cues, but we often don’t know that they are happening let alone how to interpret them. So what do you do?
The reason I became a chiropractor is because this technique is the best integration of all of the various factors in your life that I have ever found. It can facilitate profound change physically, mentally, and emotionally and it does it all by cuing the system instead of providing the traditional crack that is associated with the traditional manual chiropractic adjustment. For the record that manual adjustment crack is completely safe and can get great physical results.
Its just that with NSA you get those same results and you learn about yourself and grow. You integrate, release, and build from the past, present, and how you perceive the future. In fact your sore neck, injury, trauma, anxiety, pain, headache, or stress etc actually becomes your your gift, your fuel for change!
This is a complete paradigm shift from an allopathic approach to a Reorganizational one.
If you want to grow from your experiences and want to get the most out of life, then Network Chiropractic is for you. If you’re stuck and you want to break the trend NSA is the place for you. If you want to optimize, refine, and enhance the subtleties of your life, then you got it, Network Spinal Analysis is for you.
If you are interested and in Vancouver, give me a call to book an appointment. If you’re somewhere else and you want to find someone near you, I’m happy to help with that too, I believe in this that much.
Have a fantastic day, regardless of how you sleep!
