FF 08: ‘Chronic fight and flight – how Sympathetic Dominance affects your health’ with Kelly Beanland

Flourishing Families

Chronic stress can cause a shift in a mother’s fight or flight response. Learn more with Newcastle chiropractor Dr. Dorte Bladt and her chiropractor friend, Kelly Beanland.
Stress is an inevitable part of life. It can be both good and bad depending on what sort of stress it is, and how we deal with it. Kelly Beanland, chiropractor at Family Chiropractic Charlestown, explains how chronic, bad stress can cause a persistent fight and flight reflex, and how this can cause health problems, what it may look like in both children and adults and what to do about it at home.
Intro: Flourishing Families with Dr. Dorte Bladt, the Switched On Kids chiropractor and her passionate friends sharing the secret of inspiring wellness to help your families thrive.
Dr. Dorte Bladt: Good morning. I’m really happy to have Kelly Beanland here with me to do a podcast this morning. Thanks for coming.
Kelly Beanland: Thank you for having me, Dorte. I’m excited to be here.
Dr. Dorte Bladt: Excellent. Can you tell us who you are?
Kelly Beanland: I’m a chiropractor. I’ve had the utmost honour and privilege to be adjusted since I was an infant. My Mum took us from a very young age so I became a chiropractor seven years ago and I now work at Family Chiro in Charlestown. I have a special interest in seeing kids, families, young babies, pregnant women, so that’s exciting for us. I’ve trained in Gippsland as well after I first graduated from RMIT, so I’m a Victorian. I grew my practice there and now I’m in sunny Newcastle.
Dr. Dorte Bladt: Sunny Newcastle, except for today when it’s not very sunny.
Kelly Beanland: It’s a disgusting 40 degrees.
Dr. Dorte Bladt: Tell us, you have a particular interest in something called Sympathetic Dominance. What exactly does that mean?
Kelly Beanland: Yeah, I do. We’ve decided to start look at the nervous system in a very functional way and in a holistic way. As a chiropractor yourself, you would have seen a lot of signs of Sympathetic Dominance but a lot of people haven’t really connected the ideas. So we started to connect a few ideas on how stress physiology starts to change every system in our bodies over time, not just the classic stress signs of “I don’t sleep” or I get “tight shoulders” but neurophysiological changes – that’s a big word and I’ll explain it more in a minute, but what can happen to our gut system, what can happen to our hormonal system and how that can affect our bodies as a whole. So yeah, it’s very interesting work and I’ve started to enjoy doing that the last five years.
Dr. Dorte Bladt: You started that from working with Wayne Todd.
Kelly Beanland: Yes. I had the very great opportunity to do my first placement with Wayne and Angela Todd in Gippsland with Todd Clinics and I grew my knowledge base and how I became the practitioner I am now. Wayne put together what we call SD Protocol.
Dr. Dorte Bladt: What exactly does it mean, the sympathetic dominance?
Kelly Beanland: Sympathetic Dominance refers to how hard a system functions. It starts to look at our voluntary versus involuntary systems. We’ll put voluntary aside for a second and let’s just talk about our involuntary cycles. That separates into another two arms, being sympathetic and parasympathetic. So if we think about our parasympathetic, a lot of people think of that as a rest-and-digest part of our nervous system. This part of our nervous system does most of its work while we’re actually asleep and in our healing phases and when we’re more resting, so when we’re not in an aggravated or what we call fight-or-flight part of our nervous system.