Wellness vs. Maintenance

Wellness and maintenance care is often thought to be the same thing. However, the objectives or goals in these types of health care are vastly different, as are their results and benefits. What is most important to understand is all areas of our life – if we want them to continue to function properly – require regular maintenance.

To fully appreciate why our life requires maintenance, we first must understand the natural law known as “The Second Law of Thermodynamics.” When read for the first time, its definition may seem confusing, but “everything” will become clearer if you understand its meaning. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is actually a specific example from the universal law of Entropy, which is used as a measure of disorganization. Entropy tells us that everything naturally moves toward a state of disorganization over time because the organization requires energy.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says, “The state of entropy in an isolated system,  which is not currently in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.”

So what does this actually mean? Let us take a car as an example. When it is first manufactured, a car represents a lot of organization and therefore has a very low measure of entropy. However, a car will gradually become more and more disorganized over time, moving toward a higher measure of entropy (unless it is being stored in a climate-controlled environment). The car reaches its greatest state of disorganization or entropy when it arrives at the junkyard and is fully disassembled.

What is important to note is that The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to an “isolated system,” which means that we are not adding extra energy to the system. In terms of the car – this means we are not adding the energy of maintenance. However, if we apply maintenance (adding energy and organization) to the car, we increase the car’s life expectancy, but we significantly improve the car’s performance during its life.

These same laws apply to every aspect of our lives! Our car, our house, our teeth, our health, our relationships, and yes…our spines! So in any aspect of our life that we are not applying regular maintenance (adding energy and organization) over time, it will break down and lead to a crisis if you don’t maintain your kitchen…crisis! If you don’t maintain your bathroom…crisis! If you don’t maintain your relationships…crisis! And of course, if you don’t maintain your spine…crisis!

Because the vast majority of people today were not aware of the necessity of spine and nervous system maintenance from birth, it is very likely that even with regular maintenance, a person will still experience occasional relapse. Why? Imagine trying to maintain your teeth if you hadn’t brushed them for the first thirty years of your life. Of course, you would need to go through an extensive process of correcting the problem first to get your teeth to a place where they can be maintained, but even then, with regular maintenance, it is likely that you would still experience some problems over time.

Now we introduce “Wellness”! The profound difference between maintenance and wellness is that maintenance looks to “maintain” the current state by adding just enough energy or organization to maintain the current state. Whereas Wellness looks to find even better states of organization through a process of “constant and never-ending improvement.”

Suppose we use our kitchen as an example. We can look to maintain our kitchen in its current state of organization, and over time we will realize that it requires more and more energy to maintain the kitchen in its current state. Whereas if we use a Wellness approach toward our kitchen, we would not only be maintaining its current state, but we would continue to look for ways to improve the level of organization, thereby saving on the energy needed for maintaining it.

The exact same rule applies to every aspect of our lives if we look to maintain our car, home, health, teeth, relationships, and yes, our spines. Over time, we will find that it will naturally require more and more energy to maintain its current state. However, we can continue to look for and implement new strategies to actively organize our lives with Wellness care.

When we look at this in terms of our spine and nervous system, we realize that using a Wellness approach toward our care is not only a wise investment it is a better way of life. When we look at what today’s research says concerning wellness care, we realize that maintaining the spine in a Wellness model offers our body the opportunity to learn new strategies for dealing with all the natural stresses in life. In fact, people who have been actively maintaining their spine in a Wellness model show increased healing and repair processes at levels not seen in otherwise healthy people.

Where do you see your health in 5 years? In 10 years? Do you want to maintain your current level of health, or would you prefer to see your health continuing to improve every year for the next 10 years?

Commit to a process Wellness, of constant and never-ending improvement, with your Chiropractic care, and your dividends will be Optimal Health for life!