Why Do We Rest?

After reading the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, I thought it would be a useful to explain one of the processes that we take seriously at the Top Chiropractic office – resting.

What is Pre-Resting?

The beginning of almost every appointment starts with a period of 10-15 minutes of what we call pre-resting. Pre-resting is important as it enables your body to acclimatise to the new environment and allows us to obtain accurate and reliable thermal scans. These scans are critical to your care as they establish a constant or a baseline reading of your nervous system.

Patients arrive at the office from different places and in various emotional states. These conditions all influence the appearance of your scans. If you have rushed into the office, you may be hot, and we will observe an increase in the amplitude of the scans (other factors may also influence your scans in this way - see the blog on the 2, 4, 6 rule). Alternatively, if you have been sitting in an air-conditioned car and are therefore cool, this will reduce the amplitude of the graph and influence the reading so that it appears that you are better than you are. By allowing your body to rest and acclimatise to the temperature in the room, we remove this variable and increase the accuracy of the readings of your spine on that day. The increased accuracy allows us to make the best decision about the state of your body; if your body is in an adaptive state, or if your body is in a non-adaptive stated and therefore needs to be adjusted.

What is Post-Resting?

Once your spine has been adjusted, we ask you to post-rest to allow your body to stabilise the adjustment. As your body has been in a misaligned position, often for a long time, your body will take time to ‘hold’ in the new correct position. One way we prolong this holding time is with this post-rest period. This rest period also gives you body time to start making the neurological changes that we monitor using the thermal scanning process which tells us if the correction has been effective and if we are seeing adaptability return to your body.

The resting process is something that, in modern day, we no longer have time for. The vast majorly of people are sleep deprived and never take any time out of their day to rest and relax. This often leads them to being in a sympathetic dominant state. In this state, the body is not concerned with healing and regeneration, but survival alone. Resting gives people the chance to leave that heightened sympathetic mode and fall into a parasympathetic state where the body can start to heal and recover.

If you have any questions about upper-cervical care and if it may be right for you, please send us an email and we will schedule a call to answer any questions you may have.