Your Lower Back Impacts Your Life, Too

How Your Lower Back Impacts Your Life

More than 80% of Americans will suffer lower back pain at some point in their life. While it can be caused by any number of factors, one thing is certain: it WILL affect other aspects of your life. It can negatively impact your job, your family, your personal happiness, and most of all, your overall health. In fact, the University of North Carolina School of Medicine found that lower back pain costs $100 billion annually, 2/3 of it due to decreased wages and productivity. The importance of subduing the pain and maintaining good posture, taking proper precautions, and getting periodic checkups can improve your life drastically.

Physical Harm
Back pain greatly affects your lifestyle, causing you to become more sedentary. However, leading a sedentary lifestyle causes and aggravates back pain. It’s a vicious cycle that’s extremely hard to break out of without outside help. Sitting in an office all day without exercising causes muscles to become weak, depletes your endurance and increases your risk of injury. Seeing a chiropractor after your work day and/or on the weekends will help you to maintain strong back muscles so your office job is more physically tolerable.

Mental Fatigue
This may be the most dangerous drawback from chronic back pain. Being unable to do the things you love — jogging, working out, hiking, playing sports, being active with your kids, simply running essential errands, etc. — can cause deep depression. Constant pain makes you more irritable and more liable to lash out at those you love, even over the smallest transgression. This irritability, anger and stress will inevitably cause muscles to tense leading to even further pain.

How Many Sick Days Do You Have?
There’s no doubt that being in constant pain, especially with something as crucial and all-encompassing as your back, is a distraction. If you work in manual labor you may need to take frequent breaks during the day or even take whole days off to recover from a project. This will result in a loss of productivity, loss of wages (assuming it’s hourly work), or it could even result in firing. If you work in an office, it could lead to taking too many sick days and a loss of productivity, ending in the same result.

​The best thing you can do if you suffer from chronic back or neck pain is to schedule an appointment with a chiropractor. They will help you manage and be rid of the pain so you can lead your life to the fullest — enjoy your family, have a great mood and be energetic and ready for work. The cycle of pain is real — let me help you out of it.