AND HOW YOU CAN STOP IT How Stress Can Lead to Injury
You can prevent injuries with all sorts of physical means, but if you fail to address your mental and emotional health, you’ll still be at a heightened risk. While you might not be able to prevent every stressful situation from ever happening, you can control how you react when one does occur. A few simple things you can do to prevent mental stress are to get enough sleep, maintain a healthy diet, and drink plenty of water. If any of these basic stress inhibitors are absent from your daily routine, focus on incorporating them in to alleviate some of your stress. That said, practicing simple breathing exercises or another form of meditation can also be helpful, especially if you’re looking for a physical way to mentally unwind after a stressful day.
While it’s pretty intuitive that physical stressors can cause physical injuries, you might not know that mental and emotional stress can also lead to musculoskeletal injuries that require physical therapy. That’s right — a lack of sleep, a busy workweek, and other stressful life events can make you more prone to injury. Why is this, and how can you prevent the stresses of everyday life from causing you bodily harm? When you experience stress, your body does a few things that naturally put you at an increased risk of injury. First, stress causes your nerves to function inefficiently. Second, stressful situations lead to higher levels of cortisol in the body, a hormone that inhibits muscle repair and immune system function. If you’re always dealing with stressful situations, then you’re constantly leaving your body open to physical injury.
peace knowing that with a few simple changes to your routine, you can prevent your stress from causing physical injury.
While learning about how much stress hurts you can be even more stressful, you can find some
Dan the Golfer Just Wants to Golf Again
Dan worked for the PGA. As you can imagine, he was also an avid golfer. Then, it hit him — his left shoulder began to hurt. It was sudden and it was getting worse ... fast. His orthopedist told him that he needed surgery. The reason was clear: Dan had torn cartilage in his shoulder along with one of his rotator cuff tendons. Because of this, he couldn’t even apply deodorant, let alone swing a golf club, without experiencing horrible pain. He asked if he could try therapy before pursuing surgery. The surgeon was reluctant to suggest this route but did — only to remind Dan that surgery was inevitable. So, Dan came to us. After a careful examination, we told Dan that his left shoulder wasn’t the real problem. What? Dan couldn’t believe it. His shoulder was in incredible pain, after all. We told him that his shoulder wouldn’t just spontaneously start hurting with such intensity. Something had to cause it. Our course of action? Because we believe our bodies are designed to heal themselves, we left Dan’s shoulder alone. But, his motion was limited in just
about everything relating to his shoulder movement — including his ability to swing a golf club. He couldn’t even turn his head to the left or rotate his back to the right. On top of that, the area around his shoulder blade was tight and he had limited range of motion in his forearm and wrist. While we left Dan’s shoulder alone to heal, we went to work on improving other areas. We focused on restoring full range of motion where it was lacking and on correcting his body mechanics, which is a huge part of overcoming limited movement and reducing pain. Within one week, Dan could apply deodorant again. Within six weeks, Dan was swinging a stick with a 5-pound weight strapped to the end of it, and he was doing it all pain-free! What’s even better? Over two years later, Dan returned to the clinic because of a knee injury. Before we started treatment, we asked how his shoulder was holding up. He said it was doing great! He’d had zero issues and no surgery. Just a whole lot of golf!
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