Health Help At Home Challenge Day 1 Pillow Problems

MissDoctorMom with Dr. Krista Ryan

HHAH Challenge Day #1 Pillows

Dr Krista Ryan: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome. This is Dr. Krista Ryan with corner chiropractic and laser clinic, as well as Ms. Dr. Mom and starting today, Ms. Dr. Mom, YouTube channel. So if you guys haven't subscribed or liked or shared, please do so that we can continue to bring valuable content to every single person on this platform.

[00:00:19] I hope you guys are super excited cause I'm going to be presenting something that, is new starting today, not just a YouTube channel, but a challenge for you. Um, this is my attempt to get every single person on this podcast, as well as on this channel too. Uh, to elevate your health and wellness and take the next steps without having to radically change your diet or exercise.

[00:00:46] We are going to be talking about habits that can, you can implement starting today that will radically change your life, decrease pain, and do a whole bunch of other things. I'm going to start a little bit with why this so important to me personally, um, I started in clinic and when I got into my clinical practice, I realized that when one person came in with a wrist problem, that I would fix the wrist and then they refer.

[00:01:12] Refer a whole bunch of people to help for me to help them with their wrists. And I realized that they didn't know that I could actually help backs too, because their experience with me as a doctor meant that I could only fix their wrists. And another thing is that other people would come in with different conditions, such as headaches, migraines, back pain, neck pain.

[00:01:33] And so I realized that my education to each and individual patient, is not even scratching the surface of what I know and what I can help people with or deliver to them in order to change their health and the health of their families for the rest of their lives. Um, I got started in this a long time ago.

[00:01:53] I started doing a whole bunch of research. Um, we had, uh, my parents and I. And my family had a large farm where we had 50 horses and people would come to me to ask me about what was going wrong with the horses, because what I would do is I go back and I do whole bunch of research. I'd look in books, I'd get all the horse books out.

[00:02:14] I'd look at encyclopedias, anything that I possibly could. Um, and when Google came by, I started looking at Google to see how I can help horses. And then that transferred into, um, my practice. And I started picking up all this knowledge about health and wellness. And to this day, I still consider myself a professional student because I love, love, love learning, and I love learning so that I can actually deliver this information to my family and the people I love first.

[00:02:43] And then to every single person that comes into contact me, contact with me second. So. Uh, what I wanted to do is I wanted to bring this challenge to you, and we're going to do a series each day. Today is day number one of our health help at home challenge without diet. And exercise. So guys, congratulations, because this is day number one, and I'm hoping to aim for about 30 days with this.

[00:03:14] And we are going to start with something that's really near and dear to my heart and is very important because I have experienced this personally, and I know how life-changing this can be. So I'm going to talk about pillows today and why getting the right pillow is super important. And I know that sounds kind of like.

[00:03:33] Weird and lame and not right. But a lot of people don't know that the height of a pillow is important and height really, really does matter. Um, now when I was in chiropractic college, I had this down pillow that I carried with me everywhere and I'd scrunch it together, stick it under my arm, stick it in the.

[00:03:54] Um, in the base at the base of my neck and I would work to get this pillow into the right position so that I could fall asleep. And I struggled with this for a very, very long time. And when I was at chiropractic college, I saw that, um, you know, chiropractic, they promote pillows big time. And so I decided to try my first chiropractic pillow. When,

[00:04:15] I tried the pillow for the first time. It took me six months to get used to how hard and firm it was. And, um, but to this day I would never do anything different. And I realized at that point that even though everybody seems to, they want a big cushy pillow, they want a pillow that's going to work with them.

[00:04:39] And we oftentimes just grab it. Pillows, Willy nilly off the shelf. And we don't take the time to discover why it is. We need the pillow that we need. And why is it that we're not comfortable or we have neck problems. And because this is January, I find that. Um, I'm from a normal Northern climate. And a lot of times the food has to come from really far away.

[00:05:05] And so we lose B vitamins in the nutrition that we're getting into our body because it's not, you know, you're not going out to your garden and picking fresh food. And because we lose B vitamins, our neck gets weaker. And so come January, I get this rush of neck pain and problems within my clinic. And I really wanted to address this issue because the majority of the time it comes from pillows.

[00:05:28] And I want to explain why. So if you were to put your head. To the side to your right. So putting your right ear to your right shoulder for an entire eight hours, you are not going to be able to straighten your head up. And if people are on this podcast and we're alive in the seventies and eighties, there used to be these massive megaphones for receptionists where the receptionist would place the phone on the shoulder.

[00:05:56] And slightly tip their head in order to hear and talk to patients. Well, we don't need that now. Cause they're, uh, headsets have come out in a lot of other, uh, advancements in our technology and, but the same idea and the same problem still exists. That if you have a pillow that you're sleeping with every night and you are in the position where that your neck.

[00:06:19] And your muscles are over contracted on one side and stretched on another. Then you're going to create a problem for yourself in your sleep at night. So I talk to patients about the height of the pillow and the pile of the pillow and what that means. So a pile of a pillow is when you squish the pillow together, as much as you can, that's the height that the pillow is going to support your neck.

[00:06:44] When you have your neck. On it. And that's called the pile of the pillow. Now pillows come in all shapes and sizes, and I'm not sure if you guys are completely aware of that. Oftentimes when we think of a pillow, we think of the ones that we get in a hotel room, which are really, really fluffy in the center.

[00:07:00] Um, but when you look at actual chiropractic pillows that are built and structured for the neck itself, Um, you don't have that big fluffy center. What they do is they often take a lot of the center out, um, so that your head isn't tipped or pushed upward so that you're not leaning your head towards one shoulder, like a receptionist would do in the seventies or eighties.

[00:07:24] So what you want to do. To help herself at home is to make sure you have the right height of the pillow and who teaches this stuff. Um, if I could go back to my kindergarten days or if I could get into kindergarten and teach all this stuff, I would probably be teaching kids how to look for the right pillow.

[00:07:42] What that means and how that can help them for the rest of their life, especially because we are people that don't move enough. And so we don't get up in the morning and stretch your neck from side to side. So you want to be able to get up in the morning and not have a kink in your neck. Um, and you don't want to have pain for your entire day.

[00:08:02] So what this means is that. When you go home and lie down right now, or tonight, um, you lie down and you check your neck muscles. So, um, you go from the very base of the ear to the base of your shoulder and you actually want to check for any tension. So a tight muscle will feel really hard. Um, like. Um, like a pencil eraser now a loose muscle is nice and squishy.

[00:08:32] Uh, it feels like really, really soft meat, um, like raw, soft meat. And, um, and you're want to look for that tension. So check both sides because it does does matter again. If one side is not equal to the other and has more tension on one side, then you are going to wake up in the morning with a very. Very stiff and sore neck.

[00:08:55] And I want to prevent that for every single person, because that's a communication lines for your brain, that your brain communicates to the body through the neck musculature. And if you get an abnormal position, it can cause like it cause. Sometimes misfiring or miscommunication, um, down the branch of whatever nerve you might be pinching or compressing by the way we're sleeping.

[00:09:19] And so we certainly don't want to do that. We want to maximize our potential for the next day, by setting ourselves up in a good sleeping posture at night. Um, so basically, um, I want every single person to compress pillows, check to see the pile of the pillow, and you want to check different Heights. So some pills compress from anywhere between a quarter of an inch to three inches.

[00:09:48] And that's a big discrepancy in a lot of times. Um, the majority of people that I run into my clinic usually need about an inch to maybe two inches. If you're looking at kids, maybe an inch to, uh, or, or a quarter inch to half inch, uh, which is really typical for that kind of population. So check your pillows, check your neck out and see what the difference is when you put your head on different pillows.

[00:10:15] And again, the hotel pillow is not that big fluffy pillow. That's fluffy in the center is going to push your head up, even though the pile of the pillow. Right. Might, um, compress down to the right size. So you want, so if you guys go home and you have one of those big pillows that have a lot of pile on them, right in the center where your head would go and it's pushing your head up.

[00:10:37] So that's actually making tension at the very base of your skull. Um, just thread something into the pillow to compress that area. I'll often have my patients go and they'll just sow too little. Um, sections to the pillow and that will actually compress the middle part of the pillow. And then they'll the pile of the pillow or the foam or, um, feathers or anything that's within the pillow will kind of move to the outside and will support the neck a little bit better and all of us want to do this.

[00:11:10] And we want to make sure that we have the right pillow because we want to get up in the morning. Now we can't just have the right pillow. We want to be in. Position so that our neck musculature is nice and relaxed. Now this. This podcast. And this episode is really, really talking to the people that sleep on your back and on your side.

[00:11:32] Uh, but not necessarily stomach sleepers. We're going to cover that in our next episode. And we're also going to cover strategies that you can do. Um, to help with side sleeping and back sleeping so that you can make your whole body relax and not just the neck. Um, but today is all about getting the right height.

[00:11:54] Uh, so check your head, um, and check the neck musculature and the shoulders, which with each height of pillow and S and you want to check it against. Other pillows so that you can find the right height, that's the best for your body. And that may vary. So go home, compile all the pillows together in your house and just go through the list and just feel it the muscles and see which one might.

[00:12:22] Be right for you. And then try that tonight, because if you get into a better position and you don't wake up in pain and you don't wake up sore, um, it changes your attitude for the rest of the day it changes your health for the rest of the day and it allows your body to communicate better. Um, so it's very, very important.

[00:12:42] And sometimes I did mention B-vitamin sometimes it is recommended or necessary to actually help our, um, our body by adding some B vitamins in, because again, certain B vitamins can actually turn on our neck musculature. And if the, if that neck muscular is turned off, because it's the winter and our farm fresh vegetables, aren't existing in our community.

[00:13:10] Um, Then you're not going to get the B-vitamins then I do suggest supplementing until those farm-fresh vegetables start getting into the community and you can actually go pick fresh vegetables in your garden. So I hope this podcast is super helpful. I, if you have any questions or concerns come and just contact me.

[00:13:29] Uh, don't forget to like, and subscribe because I have a ton of information that I've picked up over the years that I have used personally and within my family in order to elevate my health and wellness as, as well as those people that I love around me. And I want you. To feel empowered and become your own miss doctor, mom, if your doctor's missing, I want people to be able to go to you and ask for ask advice.

[00:13:57] And so, uh, I want every single person have these tools and I can only do that through giving you. Um, this content. So guys have a great rest of your day. I'm super excited. Um, if you like this episode, and if you like what we're doing and where we're going, please drop a link and drop a comment below, and don't forget to hit the thumbs up and subscribe, and also share this content with people that you know, that might benefit if they're struggling with neck pain problems.

[00:14:29] And again, this is day number one. Of our health help at home challenge. And the challenge is to elevate our health by avoiding diet and exercise. So guys have a great rest of your day and live with passion.