Have you ever asked yourself where you want to be with your life in the future? In these instant-gratification, quick-fix, drive-thru days in which we live, people tend to focus on what is happening and how they feel right now. Not feeling good? Pop a pill to ease the pain. Hungry? Grab some fast food. Bored? Turn on the television. Tired? Get a cup of coffee. So many people make decisions and take actions based on a current event, without looking at the possible consequences. Let me ask you, have you ever known a very happy, healthy and successful pill-popping, fast food-eating, 10-hour-a-day television watching person on a constant caffeine high? Me neither. Quick fixes maybe comforting in the moment, but they rarely provide long-term solutions.
I am asking you to think about what you want to be, not in the present moment, but in the future. Let’s take your health as an example. Your health is based on many factors: exercise, diet, nerve supply, rest, genetics, etc., but the key thing to understand is your health today is the result of actions you took (or failed to take) in the past. You may think that how you are today is just a current event, but in reality it is the result of a process. This may sound elementary, but if you take this concept to heart and put it into action, it can literally be life changing. Everything you do today is going to determine how you will be in the future.
This concept of looking at life as a process and not just a single event has been discussed in chiropractic for decades. In chiropractic there is a concept of “survival values.” Things that we do each day are either positive or negative towards our health and function in the future. Positive activities, such as having a proper nerve supply, eating nutritious foods, resting, etc., are known in chiropractic as “constructive survival values.” On the other hand, negative events like vertebral subluxation, injuries, drugs, toxins, emotional stress, watching 10 hours of television a day, eating fast food, etc., are known as “destructive survival values.” In this model, your life and health are determined by the accumulation of both constructive and destructive survival values over time. When you look at things such as health as a process and not merely an event, you begin to realize the importance of constantly and continually striving to add constructive survival values to your life.
Since health is just one aspect of human performance and human performance is in large part regulated by the nerve system, chiropractic plays a key role in your health over time. By having vertebral subluxations adjusted (spinal misalignments that interfere with nerve function), you allow your body to better express information through the nerve system. This leads to better performance and better health. Each time a vertebral subluxation is corrected, you accumulate a constructive survival value towards your life and will be better for it in the future.
If you want to be better in the future than you are today, one step in the process is regular chiropractic spinal checks. Having your spine checked only when you have a symptom simply shows that you are not interested in improving your life in the future and that you are only looking for a quick solution to a current event. While it is true that the adjustment may provide you with a quick-fix, that is not the intent behind chiropractic. Chiropractic is about adding constructive survival values to your life so that you will be better in the future.
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