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Dr. Carli Axford, founder of Spinal Flow Technique, describes how Stress impacts our bodies: 

To understand how we can create balance in our body, minds and lives, we should look at why our bodies are out of balance. I blame one thing: stress.

According to the medical dictionary, “Stress is the body’s normal response to anything that disturbs it’s natural physical, emotional, or mental balance.” People talk about feeling stressed out about their work, the economy, global politics, deadlines, their relationships, and just about everything else. While most of us know stress is a problem, it is not something outside of us. It doesn’t exist in the environment or in external situations without our own thoughts or actions governing how it impacts us. Our thoughts, our choices and the story we tell ourselves create stress that ends up having a physical impact. Think of the racing heart rate, shallow breathing, surging adrenalin, and other symptoms of the body’s stress response.

Our body is naturally designed to deal with short bursts of stress, such as crossing paths with a tiger, tribal warfare, avalanches, driving in Kelowna, housing shortages, high unemployment, excessive immigration, and other critical situations that provoke a stress response. In these situations, the nervous system intelligently switches from the parasympathetic response (rest, digest and heal), into the sympathetic response (fight:flight:flee) to preserve our life.

The body temporarily shuts down functions that are not necessary for immediate survival when we are in Fight:Flight mode. This inhibits the ability to digest, reproduce, breathe and heal, in order to help us escape the danger or solve the problem quickly. The human body is not designed to sustain this condition of heightened tension of Fight:Flight for a long time. 

In nature, an antelope that has just escaped a tiger will tremble and shake to discharge any excess energy, until its body returns to normal. People don’t tend to do this. After all, we’re conditioned to stay composed and look like we have it all together. So what happens? This stress is stored in our body, because it has nowhere else to go. 

In our modern life, it is not the tiger but an accumulation of physical, chemical and emotional stressors that create the same stress response. The tiger has been replaced by work, relationships, money problems, trauma, bad news on television, opinions on social media, exposure to microwaves and abnormal electromagnetic fields, fear of alienation, peer pressures and other hazards of modern life. Some people have had this stress in their body for many years and the body continues to respond as if there is a tiger. 

Increased stress levels and the stress response is triggered hundreds of times throughout the day and night, compounded by the lifetime of stress that has built up and is still stuck in the nervous system. Our body does not distinguish between a tiger and a toxic cigarette, or a tiger and a fight with our partner, or a tiger and financial stress, or a tiger and a car accident. It rightly perceives all of these things as stressors and the automatic stress response is triggered. Our body often remains in fight:flight until the stress is no longer there. For many people, that stress never goes away. Any additional perception of threat reactivates this “alarm reaction” from the amygdala in our brain, creating new and additional layers of blockage.

When the stress remains in our body, compounded by our thoughts, the body starts to adapt. It is remarkable how the human body protects us from injury – it is designed to protect us so we can survive. It’s not broken, it’s not damaged; it’s Stressed! Our body is so very clever how it adapts in order to protect us.

The modern way of life can be stressful for our bodies. Many of us accumulate layer upon layer of stress, not realizing it stores in our body and creates pain, dis-ease and illness. 

I believe chronic stress is the most common cause of disease and illness in our society right now. When the nervous system is in a constant state of fight:flight, it is not only the base gateway that suffers when the tailbone tucks under. 

Stress and our body’s instinctive fight:flight response places strain on the entire nervous system. It impacts the FOUNDATION gateway (back and leg functions); the POWER gateway (reproduction and digestion); the CENTRE gateway (breathing and heart); the PASSION gateway (face and neck and our expression); the PAUSE gateway (connection between our brain and body); and the AWAKEN gateway (life force needed to heal and thrive). Every aspect of our life, health and body is impacted. 

When the nervous system becomes blocked, our digestion is restricted, so we don’t receive the same nutrition from food; our muscles tighten, and our body becomes stuck and inflexible. People experience lethargy, malnutrition, leaky gut, migraines, back pain, joint pain, sciatica, depleted energy, increased anxiety, depression, poor concentration, memory loss, insomnia and more.

When we feel stress, the heart is forced to work harder, blood pressure increases, the breath becomes shallow and rapid, blood sugar rises, adrenaline and cortisol production surge, the immune system weakens, the production of sex hormones decreases, and the flow of life force becomes impaired. 

This is what chronic stress looks like. It has become like a new physiology for the majority of people who come to see me, and it’s not a natural state for anybody. When we live in constant Fight:Flight, normal healing cannot happen.

In order to transform our wellbeing, the seven gateways are key to the knowledge and understanding of our bodies. My experience tells me it’s important to know where our body has stored stress, where it’s created blockages in the gateways, where it’s created postural changes, and what type of stress has caused it, so that we can understand what we need to do differently.

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