What’s Keeping You From Sleeping May Surprise You

Do you find it difficult to get a good night’s sleep? Do you wake up in the middle of the night and find it hard to go back to sleep? Although there are many causes for this, here is one that your chiropractor, and only your chiropractor, can help you with. The nerve endings that send the signals that your brain interprets as pain, also connect with the part of your brain that wakes you up. This connection makes sense in evolutionary terms because if something starts to make a meal out of you, you don’t want to sleep through it. I have heard many times: “The pain wakes me up at night”. Seems obvious, right? Here is the interesting part: Those signals do not necessarily reach the cortex of your brain where conscious though takes place. If they do not reach the cortex, you do not feel pain from these signals, but are woken up when they stimulate the “waking up” (RAS) part of the brain. So, pain or not, stimulation of these nerve endings (nociceptors) could be the cause of your poor sleep.

I often have patients tell me that they are sleeping better since getting chiropractic adjustments. Those nerve endings I spoke about are stimulated by the constant pressure that builds up (painful or not) from spinal (or other) joints not moving normally. Chiropractic adjustments get the joints moving again, turning off those signals that wake you up when you should be sleeping.

Remember: With all health problems, you haven’t tried everything until you have tried chiropractic. Better yet, if you want to live a life free of the side-effects of drugs, TRY CHIROPRACTIC FIRST!