1. Exercise

Well, the first one, I think, is always going to be exercise. You have got to get proper exercise. We are designed to move, and our bodies stay healthy and the joints stay nourished the more we move. If you ever noticed people who aren’t moving as they get older, or they get more sedentary in life, they typically have more health challenges. Exercise is huge because exercise affects your physiology, which will affect everything.

You may have noticed that when you work out you have a tendency to sleep better. You have a tendency to have more energy. You are going to feel better. You will have less pain. You are going to have more lean body mass. Exercise affects all the different areas of the body. Even doing just one thing can affect both your physical, mental and emotional well-being. Because when you feel better and you look better, you’re just going to be better, which parlays into the next thing, which is diet.

2. Eat a Healthy Diet

Diet is extremely important, and we all know the term “garbage in equals garbage out”. If you put garbage into the body, you are not going to get maximum performance. If you put good clean fuel into your car, you’re going to get great performance. If you eat properly, make sure that there aren’t any deficiencies in your diet, get plenty of vegetables, get plenty of protein and get enough carbohydrates to run and regulate your body, a proper diet is going to maintain your health in an amazing way.

3. Have a Positive Mental Attitude

The other thing is your mental attitude, your PMA, a positive mental attitude. One of the things that I see a lot in my practice when people are feeling down and when they are sick and when they are in a lot of pain, there are usually a lot of emotional things going on in their life. They are stressed, so you have got to mitigate stress.

We are all so busy and we all have lots of things coming at us at the same time, so we need to kind of prioritize our life, focus on the things that are important, and put some of the things that are less important, that still might be stressing us, on the back-burner and not focus on them. We need to eat well, move well, and think well.

4. Get Proper Rest

We all know that rest is important to your health because if you ask someone, “When does the body heal?” most people understand that your body heals when it is at rest, not when it’s stressed out, not when you’re running around and going crazy. Your body heals when it is at rest, so proper rest will allow your body to heal.

When you’re not feeling so great, when you have a cold or a flu coming on and you feel headachy and fluish and feverish and you have that sense of malaise and all you want to do is lie down, that is your body talking to you and saying, “Hey, you’re not feeling so good. You need to take some extra rest, so your body can heal.”

If you take a bunch of drugs and medications to make yourself feel a little better at the time, then you’re going to go out and be more active and the body is not going to heal. Sometimes it can even take longer for you to heal, so rest is the number four tip and one of the most crucial aspects to healing and health.

5. Get Your Spine Checked

The last thing that I put in number five is always, as a chiropractor, you’ve got to get your spine checked. Your spine and nervous system need to stay healthy throughout the course of your lifetime. A healthy well-aligned spine will serve you well. When the spine gets misaligned, it actually irritates the spinal nerves, which are the communication center from your brain to the rest of your body.

Now, your brain controls all of your organ systems, even your immune system. If that gets injured or damaged or restricted and you don’t have full nerve energy, then your stomach might not be able to digest food as well. Your liver might not function as well, and you might not make all the proper liver enzymes at the right speed at the right time in the right quantity. The communication of your brain regulating and running your body is imperative to good health. That is the cornerstone of chiropractic care – making sure that there is no pressure or irritation to the nerves.

Christopher Reeves is always that classic example because he had a massive amount of interference on his nerves. He had interference with probably 70% of the nerve function going from the brain to the rest of the body. He never injured his legs, but his legs didn’t work because the brain could not communicate with the legs because there was too much interference. When you have subluxations or misalignments in the spine, your body is robbed of valuable nerve energy. That will impede the flow of nerve energy and change the way your body functions and slow down its ability to work, heal and regenerate.

That is the key in chiropractic. That is the holistic aspect of it. I know it’s great for pain, and I am really glad when Nancy’s neck pain goes away, and Suzy’s sciatica goes away, but there is a lot more to chiropractic than just getting rid of back pain or neck pain. It is really about keeping your spine and nervous system healthy for the rest of your life, so you can enjoy your best day every day.