How many of you have had the experience of your low back, or neck, or maybe a knee or foot suddenly act up and hurt for no seeming reason at all? That seems to be the most common cause of joint pain and suffering I see in the office – nothing at all. So what is this “nothingness” that grabs us and twists our back out and kicks our joints all “out of joint”? We know there has to be some cause but we have no idea what it is.
The official term for this “nothingness” is Proprioceptive Incompetence. What that means in real person talk is that the control of the normal balance between your muscles has gone haywire for a moment or longer allowing your joint tissues to become over-stretched, pinched, or injured.
That’s nice, but what caused it to happen?
There are various things that set you up for this problem such as poor posture, sitting too much, chronically unbalanced activities, gut problems from a poor diet, even bad shoes. Too little exercise, too much exercise, the wrong exercise – all set you up for these spontaneous joint problems by creating chronic muscle imbalances. But that still does not explain why the joints choose that particular moment to act up. Most of us have some (or even all) of the setup conditions all the time and yet are fine most of the time. What caused the nervous system to go haywire for a moment and lose proper control?
Try this little experiment – place your left hand over your right in your lap – now quickly try to touch your nose with your right hand while simultaneously trying to pull your right hand down to your lap with your left hand. Do you notice the muscle tension and pinching pain in your arm joints when you push hard?
There are two control systems for muscle contraction in your body – the voluntary conscious motor control for causing muscle movement (like to walk or stick out your tongue), and the unconscious motor control for posture, balance, and coordination. It is the unconscious control system that is the problem. By definition it is always busy working and responding to things you are not aware of. For instance, if you wanted to reach for a glass of water in front of you, before you even began to move your abdominal and low back muscles will tighten up to hold your back steady before your arm moves. The unconscious system anticipates what stabilizer muscles will be needed to keep you balanced before you start to move.
This unconscious system is always busy anticipating what is needed next and tensing up appropriate muscles in preparation for what it thinks you are likely to do next. But what happens if, like in our experiment, we have conflicting desires? The system has no choice but to tense up muscles that may conflict with each other and produce joint strain. (This is preferable to not being prepared and having you fall over and really hurt yourself.) The kicker is that this system is busy responding to our unconscious and subconscious desires as much as our conscious ones…and we have absolutely no control over this system. (This system even tenses and shifts our muscles while we dream at night, daydream, or even just visualize engaging in an activity.)
Once upon a time life was simpler, our desires were simpler, and we had far fewer conflicting desires. Old time Chiropractors rarely had to deal with back problems caused by these conflicts. Mostly we dealt with lifting injuries, slips and falls, and the like. Now 80% of the patients I see have stress / conflict causes of their back and joint pain. (Stress is primarily caused by internal conflicts and these conflicts manifest in the muscles.)
Every feeling you ever have is coupled with a postural muscle contraction pattern. If you are joyful your head tilts back, your shoulders drop, and your chest lifts. If you are belligerent and angry your jaw tightens and thrusts forward as does your neck, your chest muscles tighten and your shoulders roll forward. If you are sad you shoulders drop, your posture slumps, and your head tilts downward. Every feeling has a posture attached to it. It is your body anticipating your active relationship with the world based on how you feel.
But what happens when you have conflicting feelings? What happens if the feelings are not even conscious? Your body still tries to anticipate what posture you need and tense up accordingly – even when you have more than one feeling going on…even when the feelings are beneath your conscious awareness.
What happens when this takes place is you get tweaked out of place. Joints pinch, swell, and get painful. If you also have muscle imbalances set up from poor muscle tone, old injuries, reflex irritations from other internal organ problems, metabolic imbalances, and so on – then you really get tweaked and it can take days or weeks to bring things back to balance.
If the feeling conflicts are long-term unresolved problems you can end up with chronic instabilities in your spine and joints. Since this same unconscious control system also controls the blood flow to each muscle and organ, as well as immune function, conflicts can cause poor blood flow and inflammation in various areas of your body producing problems like headaches, digestive problems, most any symptom you can think of.
Everyone is aware of the effects of stress on our health. But what most people are not aware of is that 80% of the stress that unbalances our body comes from internal conflicts, not our outer life.
I first became aware of this mind-body health connection back in the early seventies while I was studying Psychology at UC Davis (I was a physics-psych double major). I got involved in some of the early work in mind-body medicine back then and learned first hand just how powerful the mind is in affecting the health of the body. Within the confines of that specialized and focused environment we were able to do some amazing things. But once I got out into the real world I found that everyday life took over. Regular folks just don’t have the time to immerse themselves sufficiently to get the results we were seeing while I was in school.
I thought I had found the answer to bridging the gap when I got into Network Chiropractic back in 1990. It seemed to bring the mind-body conflicts up to the surface and release them so the body could heal spontaneously. Unfortunately I found, that while releasing the conflicts made people feel much better for a while, the release did not solve the basic lack of skills that created the conflicts in the first place. People would just recreate the same conflicts elsewhere in their lives.
After several years of intense soul searching and several transformational spiritual experiences I finally was graced with the revelation I was seeking on how to bridge that mind-body gap. The answer actually went much deeper than I knew how to handle at the time as it dealt with the very reason and purpose to life. It has taken me over 15 years of constant work to even partially understand the vision I was given. I will go into this next time in what I call “The Puzzle of Life.”