High Blood Pressure Anxiety And Stress

hello I'm Dr. Ekberg and today we're going to talk a little bit about

hypertension also known as high blood pressure what a lot of people don't

realize is that blood pressure is a normal physiological variable it's not a

disease that happens to you it's just something that the body regulates up and

down all the time if you're sitting down and you're standing up then your body

has to raise your blood pressure has to constrict those blood vessels and the

heart has to pump a little harder so that you don't faint there's all kinds

of different things that's going to make your blood pressure change so high blood

pressure or low blood pressure is not the issue the issue is why would it get

stuck in in the high blood pressure state so anytime that you have stress if

you walk up some stairs or if you're tense or if you have a grizzly bear come

running after you any of those states of stress is going to increase your blood

pressure because your body is going to need that blood pressure to drive the

blood around and make you work harder the problem then is not that the blood

pressure goes up the problem is that it stays up why does your body think that

you're still in a state of stress and that's the real problem so we have to

understand a little bit about how the brain works so in your body we're going

to simplify tremendously here and we're going to call this the brain the cortex

the left and right side of the cortex and down below we're going to have the

brain stem and the part where you respond to stress we call the

sympathetic nervous system so whenever there is a stress out side somewhere in

the world or something that your body interprets as stress that stress is

going to send a signal and that will first be picked up by your sympathetic

nervous system which creates a stress response and that response results in a

increased blood pressure so that you can fight the bear or deal with whatever is

going on but your body responds to this the same way to any kind of stress so it

doesn't matter if it's a grizzly bear or traffic or bills or politics or war if

your body perceives stress it will increase that blood pressure to get you

ready for the fight and in order for you to have resources available for that

fight the sympathetic will inhibit will turn off the parasympathetic or feed

breed and what that simply means is there's only so many resources in your

body so you can't fight the outside and take care of the inside at the same time

you have to pick one now how do we get how do we stop this why do people get

stuck in this high blood pressure state it's because the cortex is wired and

designed to inhibit to stop that stress response and bring the blood pressure

back down but that's the mechanism that isn't working that's when we get stuck

so how do we increase the activity of the cortex so that we can bring the

blood pressure down so we can increase that inhibition the single best way is

called exercise because when you exercise you fire off receptors in the

body and the place where there's more receptors than anywhere else in your

body is called the spine Nobel Prize winner Roger Sperry says ninety percent

of the stimulation to the brain the stimulation that keeps the brain alive

comes from the spine so when you exercise and move the spine you're

sending powerful signals to the brain that will increase the activity of the

cortex and inhibit that stress response and help the body bring back that

relaxed state so in addition to exercise this is why we want

chiropractic adjustments because if there's some distortion or some problem

with the movement in the spine then that exercise signal is not going to be all

it could be the adjustment in itself is a very powerful signal to the cortex

which will help inhibit that stress response that is why chiropractic can

help not only with various kinds of pain but also with stress related symptoms

such as blood pressure and high cholesterol and chronic pain and things

like that it is not a pinched nerve it is an autonomic nervous system imbalance

to find out more give us a call visit our website or come to one of our

seminars where we talk more about how the body really works and what are all

the different things that you can do to improve that function thank you very

much