Breaking Bad Habits – Our 3-Legged Stool (Part 2 of 3)

Hey everybody. Dr. Ellison here. I just wanted to follow up in our last video where we talked about the three legged stool. It’s a concept that we teach in our office. To all of our patients to help them understand how they can get the best results out of their care. The first leg to that stool are what we call adjustments in rhythm.

Why do we do adjustments in rhythm? Because when we’re trying to change any structure in the body, specifically in this case, the spine, the nervous system. When we’re trying to change that from an unhealthy state to a healthy state, we have to do something consistently and frequently over time. Just like if you wanted to get in shape, you would go to the gym or swim or workout and exercise, and you would need to do it consistently every week for a certain length of time until you get in shape.

But what would happen if you were to get in shape after three, six months, a year, whatever it took, and all of a sudden you stopped. As you all know, you’re gonna backslide and you’re gonna lose all that you gained over time. The same thing happens to our spine. If we are adjusting it in consistently and in rhythm for a certain length of time, and then you just suddenly stop that,  it’s gonna slide back.

And what we want to do for all those people that have decided at this time, it’s not best for ’em to come out and come into our office for these adjustments. We wanna make sure that you are doing everything you can do at home to avoid backsliding as much as possible, at the very least, to slow that process down.

And so we’re gonna talk about the second leg of the stool, which is breaking bad habits. These are the things you want to stop doing or stop doing as much as you possibly can. The first one, and probably one of the most common things we have in our world today. Is what something known as tech neck, meaning we have technology, we have phones, we have tablets.

We have computers where, where we’re always looking down at them. When we do that for long periods of time, eventually that creates severe problems in our spines, specifically in our neck, and in fact, it can take a perfectly. Normally curve, neck and reverse that if we do it long enough. And so what we want to do is make sure that we’re not using or looking down at technology.

Make sure we’re looking up and using it, using it the right way. The other thing is sitting, we wanna make sure we’re not sitting a lot. And in today’s world, we sit all the time. We sit at our computers. And in, in our jobs, we sit, uh, for entertainment. We sit in our cars and nowadays there’s gonna be a lot more sitting than you ever were used to.

And it’s one of the worst things we can do for our spine and even for our overall health. And so we wanna make sure you’re getting up and moving around as much as possible. The other thing is sleeping, making sure you’re sleeping properly, sleeping on your stomach is not healthy for you and it shouldn’t be done.

Make sure you’re either sleeping on your side with a proper pillow to support your, to support the neck, or you’re sleeping on your back again with the proper pillow to support that proper curve in the neck, and that will help hold the adjustments that you’ve had so far as well.  Another thing we’re gonna, uh, look at is eating too much sugar.

And a sugar is a chemical, but it’s a stressor on the body. Anytime we increase stress in the body, it’s caused increased stress on the nervous system and spine. So eating sugar is definitely something we want to avoid as much as we can. Eating sugar also causes a downregulation, or in other words, lowers the function of the immune system.

So think about this, if you’re sitting all the time. And you’re eating sugar, you’re gonna get what is what I heard today anyway, is known as quarantine 15. And as most people know, it is a lot easier to put these 15 pounds on than it is to take ’em off. So try to avoid doing that as much as you can as well.

The other thing you wanna avoid is watching the news as much as most people are doing. You, I get you wanna watch it and you wanna understand what’s going on in the world. And we shouldn’t through put our heads in the sand, but we should not inundate ourselves with it. We need more positive input into our minds.

And when we’re constantly watching the negativity, that creates stress on the body as well. And anytime you have stress in the body, it’s going to cause these misalignments or subluxations in the spine, which cause nerve interference and eventually puts us into that fight or flight. Mode. And anytime you’re in fight or flight, you’re gonna downregulate or lower the immune system as much.

And so what we don’t want is, is that taking place, especially now more than ever. So these are just some things that you can stop doing now or do them much less than you already are or were doing. And that will help hold the adjustments that you worked so hard. And then when you do come back in.

Hopefully sooner than LA later, we will get you back up to speed and we’ll go through a process to, to reestablish all the adjustments that you did have before. Thanks again for listening. I appreciate it. Remember to like and share these, they need to get out to the world because most people think right now that there’s nothing they can do about their health and they’re wrong.

They need to be able to start taking control back and allowing, doing the things that they need to do to make sure that they are as healthy as possible. So again, share this. I appreciate it, and I’ll see you next time.