Episode 8: The Physics of Stress – How Emotional Tension Wrecks Your Posture

## Episode 8: The Physics of Stress – How Emotional Tension Wrecks Your Posture

Have you ever been told by a doctor that you "just need to get rid of your stress"? If only it were that easy! 

In Part 8 of our 12-week "Wellness Lifecycle" series, Dr. Brant Hulsebus dives into the actual physics of stress. We often think of stress as a purely emotional experience, but your body reacts to a tough day at the office exactly the same way a hunter-gatherer's body reacts to being chased by a bear. 

Learn how chronic emotional tension locks your autonomic nervous system into "fight or flight" mode, altering your cholesterol, shutting down your digestion, and literally forcing your spine into a defensive "fetal curve." 

### In this episode, you’ll learn:
* **The Bear vs. Modern Life:** Why your body responds to a stressful email by spiking your cholesterol and shutting down your immune system.
* **The Fetal Curve:** The biological reason emotional stress causes rounded shoulders, tight upper backs, and forward head posture. 
* **The Cheesecake Cycle:** Why stress biologically forces you to crave junk food for quick "survival energy"—and how that creates a vicious cycle of more stress and fatigue.
* **The "Ctrl+Alt+Del" Reset:** How a specific chiropractic adjustment to the upper neck (Atlas) helps reset the vagus nerve, signaling to your body that the danger has passed so you can finally relax and heal.

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### About the Host
Dr. Brant Hulsebus is a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic and serves as the team chiropractor for the Rockford IceHogs. Practicing at Hulsebus Rockford Chiropractic, he is dedicated to helping patients overcome physical, chemical, and emotional stress through neurologically-based chiropractic care.

### Join the Journey
This is Part 8 of our 12-week series. Subscribe to follow along as we build your complete roadmap to spinal health and peak performance!

**Have a question?**
If you are dealing with chronic tension, poor sleep, or stress-related posture issues, ask a chiropractor! Leave a comment or contact our Rockford clinic today.

**Connect with us:**
* Website: https://hulsebuschiropractic.com
* Location: 1877 Daimler Road, Rockford, IL 61112

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**Next Week:** We mentioned how stress shuts down your digestion—next week, we are diving deep into that! Join us for Episode 9 as we discuss Chiropractic Care and Gut Health.

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www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask The Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford IceHogs. Let's dive into it. hello. Welcome to episode eight. If you listen to last week, we talked about the fact that when you're in middle school, you're under a tremendous amount of emotional stress, and I wanted to leave that as a segue into this one, to what actually happens in your body when you're under stress. As chiropractors, we study a lot with the auto economic nervous system. No, if you didn't listen to episode one, go back and take a look at that one. because we discussed the autonomic nervous system a lot, but let's talk about the autonomic nervous system and how we take care of that here in Rockford, Illinois, the autonomic nervous system has two modes. Everything's okay, and we're under attack. Maybe you've heard of it called fight and flight, and when one or two bones in your spine are misaligned, the autonomic nervous system tone can be affected by that. If any of your vertebras are misaligned, they could be stuck in the fight and flight response at the top bone in your neck, your C one, your atlas, or your tailbones misaligned. That can affect the opposite system called the parasympathetic, leaving you in a state of fight and flight unchecked. So whenever you're fight and flight, genetically speaking, we're hunters and gatherers and we're designed to walk the earth, kill small animals, eat vegetables, fruits, healthy fats, but more importantly, avoid the large animals. And so when we see a large animal, our body goes into a catabolic state. Or sympathetic tone or fight and flight. And the idea is that this nervous system changes is to keep us best prepared to survive an attack from a wolf, a bear, a lion, a cougar, whatever. Some of the changes as your cholesterol goes way up. Why that good change if you're being attacked? You? I'm sure you've heard high cholesterol is bad for you. If you're being chased by a bear, high cholesterol is good for you because. You want to clot and live if you got scratched or cut, reproductive drive turns off. We don't need that when we're being chased by a bear. White blood cells gr against viruses, bacteria, cancer, horrible against bears. So your immune system goes down, your ability to fall asleep, goes away and get good quality sleep 'cause you're thinking that you're under attack. Other things, digestion, alters 'cause you don't care about digesting your lunch if you're being chased by a bear. Your blood flow changes. Did you know when you're under fight and flight that most of the blood goes to your arms and your legs? So you can either run or fight it? It goes away from your trunk, your core, because we don't really worry about that if you don't get away. So this is many different changes your body undergoes when you're under attack. And now if I was a hunter and gatherer the way my genetic code is designed, I wouldn't have a lot of emotional stress. Hunters and gatherers and didn't have possessions, relationships, and stuff like that, they just walk the earth. And so it's, none of us actually live that lifestyle where we just walk the earth. We have a lot of emotional stress, and when you're under a high emotional stress, your body can't differentiate between emotional stress, physical stress, and chemical stress. So if I eat a rotten fish sandwich, the chemical stress takes over. If I fall down the stairs or play a game of hockey, the physical stress takes over. But the emotional stress is the exact same as far as my body's concerned. So when we have a lot of emotional stress, it causes our body to go into fight and flight mode. And part of that is you go into what we call the fetal curve. Now, whenever you see someone in the fetal position, everything is flexed. They're all flexed forward. Why are they doing that? If you were truly under attack by a wolf or a bear and you get in that fetal position, what are you really doing? You're protecting your vital organs. You're laying in a position where your vital organs are most protected. The best you can. And so you see people when they're under stress, they tend to hunch over more and they get the rounding of the shoulders and they get this overall collapse of their height and they get that forward head posture and that just wreaks havoc on your nervous system. It wreaks havoc on your spine. It just havoc on your health. A lot of times when you come in the clinic, I'll look at you and I'll ask you, are you under a lot of stress right now? Now, I'm assuming you're under a lot of stress because I can see that your posture is shot. I can see that you're hunched over. I can feel the tightness between your shoulders. These are all physical, logical ag adaptations to a stressful response where your body thinks you're in danger. So you hunch over. You curl up, you get that tightness between your shoulders. And we talked before when we talked about desk ergonomics, how that tightness between your shoulders and the nerves that come outta there are the ones that go to your heart and lungs and how important those nerves are. Not that any nerve's, not important, but when we talk about cardiac and respiratory rates, this is a very important part of your spine. So if you're all stretched out, you're hunched in, you're leaning in like that, you can't relax. And if you can't relax, you can't heal. So you have a lot of emotional stress. Your body is in that fight and flight, and you can't heal, you can't repair yourself. You're ruining your posture, you're building things up, and this becomes like a cascade. So first we get to stress. We get locked up, we get tight. We get in that fetal position, we start destroying our posture. We destroy our posture. We leave ourselves in a more vulnerable position from more physical pain, more physical. Compromise, meaning that I'm walking around in a vulnerable position so it's easy for me to hurt myself more.'cause I'm already in a vulnerable position where if I was an extension and I was back feeling great, I'd be doing great. But when I'm in that fight or flight protection mode, inflection, I'm in trouble. Other thing that just stimulates more of the stress response, and I often tease that when you have a bad emotional day, you go home, you open the fridge, there's a cheesecake and a salad in there. Did you know biologically you're driven to that cheesecake because your emotional state of stress thinks your body's in danger. And I'd rather take 40% of those sugars from that cheesecake and try to use them real quick for that, for the fight and the flight, rather than try to process a salad. So you'll take that cheesecake and you'll use 40% right away, quick little energy burst, and you'll save the other 60% for later in the terms of fat cells. And after you eat that cheesecake, do you feel like going for exercise or running or do you feel like hitting the couch? No, you usually feel like hitting the couch.'cause nobody wants to exercise after eating cheesecake. And then you get up after being the couch for a couple hours. You look in the mirror, your hair's all messed up, your shirt's wrinkled. You look down, you got some cheesecake crumbs on your shirt. How do you feel about yourself? You usually feel so bad you've run another piece of cheesecake. So this becomes a vicious cycle. Because the chemical stress and the emotional stress and the physical stress all drive towards each other. How do you break it? It's easy to say, just get rid of all your emotional stress. I can't begin to tell you how many patients have come in and told me what my doctor told me, what my problem is. I go, really? What's your problem? He said, I just have too much emotional stress. I should just get rid of it all. I'm like, yeah, we all should. How do you do that? How do you go about doing that? So that makes me laugh, that it's, sounds like it's that easy to do. It's really hard to do. So how do you break the stress? One, you can just not eat the cheesecake, right? You can eat your salad. You can force yourself to eat that salad. Two, force yourself to go for a walk. Don't eat either one. Go for a walk first. Try to get some of that, physical stress. Try to alleviate some of that by trying to eat better and move better. But if those aren't working, you might need a chiropractic adjustment. You might need somebody to reset you. Kinda if you're a computer and having a bug, you go hit control, alt, delete, and the computer resets. Or you go to see the chiropractor. We look at your upper two bones in your neck and we reset that vagus nerve that tells your body the danger's gone. It's time to relax. We go down between the shoulders and we adjust. You're there and we alleviate some of that tension. You build up. And of course if you have all that going up on top, you've heard me talk about the right reflex where your eyes have to stay level at all times. We could now do your lower back and your hips.'cause now they're counter twisting the balance, everything else off. And now you're starting to walk straight and walk better. So as chiropractors, we don't claim to be able to give rid of your emotional stress. We happy to coach you in ideas like yoga, meditation, stuff like that, just like we're happy to coach you on how to eat right. And how to move, right? How to exercise more and how to go for a walk and force yourself into things. So we're always happy to be there. But the one thing that we offer that nobody else offers is that chiropractic adjustment. And nobody else can go in there and reset your nervous system like a chiropractic can. But that chiropractic adjustment, that this thing about chiropractic is we don't add anything. We're not giving you a prescription. We're not doing anything. We're just taking what you have. Trying to fine tune it and break it out of its funk, hopefully break you outta your funk. So if you know someone that's been a lot of stress emotionally and a lot of stress overall, whether it's a middle school kid going through puberty, whether it's somebody who just lost a loved one, whether it's someone having a hard time at work, whatever it is, maybe it's a veteran going through a tough time, a lot of times going to chiropractor can help with take some of that stress off and help that person reset, refocus, get going again. So if you've got somebody stuck in that fight and flight mode. You got somebody stuck with that. Not sleeping good, not focusing angry, upset, stomach, you all know the symptoms. Depression sometimes. Going to the chiropractor and getting those areas adjusted can make a huge change in your overall health and help reset to get you back on the path to health. And most of us chiropractors I know here in Rockford, Illinois, I have other people I work with. So that's just you. And you come to see me. I know people you can sit down and talk to. I got friends on the road at Movement Fitness I send you down to get a better exercise program. I know Park Street can go take a good walk and I know where I'm gonna send you to get some better food, to eat some healthier stuff, even if you want to go out and make it easy on yourself. I know great restaurants in Rockford, that's a really good clean foods, so come in and see us. If you're having too much stress or if you know someone having too much stress, tell 'em to go try a chiropractor. Now remember, if you ask your family doctor whether you should go to a chiropractor or not for this, they're gonna tell you. Hopefully they tell you, I don't know, but they're probably gonna tell you no.'cause they don't know. They don't know. So they just say no. So the only person qualified to answer that question would you should go see a chiropractor, would be a chiropractor. So if you're having these stress issues and other things like that, make sure you talk to a chiropractor about chiropractic care. Only a chiropractor knows what chiropractors do and don't do. So ask a chiropractor, leave a message for me if you want me to answer your question. So again, if you got that person that has headaches, that person that can't focus, that person, that can't sleep, that person's really cranky. Maybe that person has a lot of gut problems, a lot of GI issues. Matter of fact, gut issues, gut health, that might be a good conversation. Why don't you come back next week for episode nine. We'll talk a little bit about gut health and what we do as chiropractors that maybe help with digestion. Maybe you heard me talk a little bit about it back in the pediatric one. I think that was episode seven. We'll come back next week. We'll talk a little bit more about gut health. Yeah, people come to us when they have, gut problems. Look forward to telling you more about that next week. Thank you.