Your nervous system runs everything.
Every breath. Every heartbeat. Every step you take without thinking about it. Every thought, every feeling, every reflex. All of it travels through the same network of cells and nerves that connects your brain to the rest of your body.
It’s the most important system you have. And most people don’t think about it until something goes wrong.
This page is here to change that.
A Quick Map of the Nervous System
Your body actually has three nervous systems. They’re separate by category but interdependent in practice — none of them works well without the others.
The central nervous system is your brain and your spinal cord. The brain is housed inside the skull. The spinal cord runs through the 24 movable bones of your spine, the vertebrae.
The peripheral nervous system is the network of 31 pairs of spinal nerves that branch off the spinal cord and reach into every tissue in your body. These are the wires that carry information back and forth between your brain and everything else.
The autonomic nervous system is the “automatic” one. It runs the things you don’t consciously control — heart rate, breathing, blood flow, digestion. It has two sides: the sympathetic (the “go” pedal) and the parasympathetic (the “brake”).
When all three are working well and communicating cleanly, your body adapts, regulates, and recovers. That’s what a healthy nervous system looks like.
How the Spine and Nervous System Are Connected
Here’s what most people don’t realize: your spine isn’t just structural support for your body. It’s part of your nervous system.
That’s a relatively recent shift in how the science is framed, and it’s central to how we practice.
When your spine moves the way it’s designed to, the small muscles around each vertebra send movement signals to your brain. Those signals tell the brain what’s going on, where the body is in space, and how to coordinate everything else. It’s a constant feedback loop.
When parts of your spine aren’t moving well, those signals change.
In Dr. Rob’s words:
“Instead of sending nice healthy signals, movement signals, what happens is it starts to send a more threat-danger signal to the brain. Then that activates different areas, and the brain sends kind of a threat-danger response. That’s how the muscles get tight to splint and protect that area.”
When the spine stops moving the way it should, the body starts behaving like it’s under threat. Muscles tighten. Posture shifts. The whole system slips into a low-grade defensive mode.
What a Subluxation Actually Is (And Isn’t)
You might hear chiropractors describe a vertebral subluxation as a “vertebra out of place” or a “pinched nerve.” That’s not what’s happening, and we don’t say it.
A vertebral subluxation is a dysfunctional joint that disrupts how the nervous system processes information. It’s not a structural slip. It’s a functional problem with how a segment of the spine moves and how the brain receives signals from it.
Left alone, your body adapts to it. And the adaptation is what matters.
- Scar tissue forms around the joint.
- Neuroplasticity kicks in — the nervous system literally rewires itself around the dysfunction.
- Inflammation rises.
- Tissues weaken over time.
Every day a subluxation is there, your body is adapting to it. Which is why someone who’s been dealing with this for ten years has a longer road back than someone who’s been dealing with it for ten weeks.
What Causes Subluxations: The Three Ts
Three categories of stress lead to spinal dysfunction. We call them the three Ts.
Physical (Trauma). This shows up in two forms. Macro: falls, car accidents, sports injuries. Micro: sitting at a desk all day, head down on a phone, repetitive movements done over years.
Emotional. Stress doesn’t stay in your head. It locks the body into a stress response, tightens the muscles around the spine, and stops it from moving the way it should. Twenty years ago, physical trauma was the dominant cause we saw walking through the door. In the last decade, emotional stress has overtaken it. People are more stressed than they’ve ever been, and the spine reflects that.
Chemical. What you eat, drink, breathe, and what your body has to process — it all affects nervous system function too.
Most people are dealing with some combination of all three.
Why a Healthy Nervous System Matters
Your body is designed to adapt and to heal. The nervous system is what coordinates both of those jobs.
When the system is balanced, coordinated, and resilient, your body handles stress well and recovers from it. When it’s stuck in a stress response — when it can’t get out of “go” mode — recovery breaks down. Tissues start to break down with it.
Nervous system resilience is something we can actually measure. One of the scans we use during a new patient exam looks at heart rate variability, which gives us a window into how efficient and adaptable a person’s nervous system is at that moment.
It’s not about symptoms. It’s about how well the system underneath those symptoms is working.
How Chiropractic Affects the Nervous System
A chiropractic adjustment is a precise input to a specific dysfunctional segment of the spine. The goal is to restore movement to the joint, which restores accurate signaling to the brain, which gives the nervous system a chance to come out of its threat-response and back into normal coordination.
Research from neuroscientists like Dr. Heidi Haavik (a chiropractor with a PhD in neurology) has mapped a lot of what happens when a dysfunctional spinal segment gets adjusted — including measurable changes in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in attention, decision-making, and motor planning.
One detail from that research is worth highlighting. If you adjust a segment of the spine that’s already working normally, the change registered in the brain is zero. The adjustment has to be on the dysfunctional segment to produce any neurological effect.
That’s why we don’t adjust on day one. We examine first. We figure out exactly where the dysfunction is, and we build the care plan from there.
Understanding, Not Just Believing
Most of the people who become long-term patients here describe a shift in how they think about their health, not just relief from a symptom. That’s intentional. The more you understand what’s happening in your body, the more agency you have over it.
A healthy nervous system is the foundation. The spine is part of that system. And how your spine moves — or doesn’t — shapes how the rest of you functions.
See What’s Happening in Yours
Landriault Chiropractic practices principled, nervous-system-focused chiropractic in North Bay. Our new patient assessment is built to give you a clear, objective picture of how your nervous system is functioning right now — not based on symptoms, but on actual measurements.
Consultation. Postural and structural exam. X-rays where indicated. And three Insight scans that look at the autonomic nervous system, postural energy, and overall nervous system efficiency.
Then we sit down with you and walk through what we found.
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