Balance and your Health - why its such an important measure!

What balance says about your health

As a chiropractor, balance is looked at as an effective measure to gain insight into the health of your nervous system as a whole. After all, the ability to stand upright and balanced on two feet is a key characteristic that makes us human.

Why is balance so important for your health?

First of all, your body cannot self-regulate and function at its best unless you are physically balanced first. You need to give your brain a chance to register and assess your current situation and say to yourself I am here now. Based on where you are in that specific moment, your nervous system then has to prioritise and calibrate all the chemical, physical and emotion functions it needs to perform in order to keep you alive. For example, which muscles need to be switched on or off? Which blood vessels need to be constricted or relaxed? Which hormones need to be secreted? Should digestion be turned on or off? Where do your eyes need to focus? You get the gist. There’s lot that goes on and none of this processing can happen until after we are centred and physically balanced.

In life, we are constantly swaying and the world around us is always moving. To be balanced you must consciously catch yourself and bring awareness into the now, become attuned to the changes occurring from moment to moment. This will help your nervous system to kick into gear and perform its critical tasks.

To do this, you firstly need to be able to detect movement accurately and instantaneously. From there you need to activate the right muscles at the right time to catch that movement (this is what activates our reflexes to catch us from a fall, for example). Finally, you need to bring yourself back to centre. The quicker you sense movement and become aware that you are never perfectly still, the more balanced you become relative to your environment. The earlier in life you become aware of this, the better.

Another critical factor in achieving balance is ensuring that your spine is in tip top shape. In this sense, your spine is not just a mechanical supporting structure. It is the most finely tuned sensory receptor we have.

The joints of your spine are the most heavily populated with sensory receptors known as ‘mechanoreceptors’. These receptors are constantly sending information back to the brain so that it has the necessary information to keep you balanced. Put simply, the more these receptors break down, the worse your balance gets.

Having your balance off not only increases likelihood of minor injury such as muscle strain or joint sprains but it can also lead to more serious problems and life threatening injury such as hip fractures and head trauma. On top of that, being off balance puts all of your physiological systems in a state of ‘Flight or Fight’. In this state, the emotional centres of your brain (the limbic system) take control of your behaviours.

As a result of being in this heightened emotional state, your postural tone changes, your immune system is weakened and blood is shunted away from your digestive system. When our muscles prepare for fight or flight mode, your frontal lobes are effectively removed from the decision making process which means you become much more reactive, rather than being considered, strategic, collaborative, empathetic and thoughtful. In summary, in this state, we are driven by fear responses. This is why, as chiropractors, we see a direct link between anxiety, depression and poor balance.

This information may seem a little overwhelming but it can be broken down to be quite simple. To achieve optimal health, it is essential that you have a healthy nervous system. To achieve a healthy nervous system, you need to ensure you have good balance. To achieve good balance, you need a healthy spine. If you are not sure where to start or if you are interested in a spinal health check, we recommend booking in for a chiropractic consultation. You really want to get on top of your spinal health as early as you can. Life is too short to deal with the consequences of being off balance.

Dr Andrew Richards (Principal Chiropractor)