Tuesday, 1 November 2011

Cracking Your Brain

You know when you have a weird tense feeling in your shoulders/neck... and it's not exactly pain but it's uncomfortable? Then when you crack your neck it feels so much better? Well that's kind of what I'm feeling with my brain. Yeah. I wish I could crack my brain. It feels uncomfortable and I wish there was a way to relieve the discomfort like cracking your neck does.

I researched a bit into cracking your neck a while ago. It's one of my many habits; granted, I don't do it because of real habit but rather because it relieves the discomfort in my neck. Apparently cracking your neck is bad to do because the more you crack it, the more it increases the discomfort in the long run. It creates a cycle in which you crack to relieve but cause more discomfort so you have to crack again, and again, and again. Unfortunately, I happen to be one of those people in that vicious cycle. After reading that I tried to stop but honestly the discomfort gets too much to resist having that relief sometimes. The reason for the cycle has something to do with the big muscles getting relaxed and causing other muscles to have to shoulder the burden or what not. I kind of forget the specifics of it but that's the general idea.

Cracking your back however doesn't seem to have any proven negative effects. Of course if it is done wrong and with too much force it could injure you. If you couldn't guess, I crack my back a lot too. Another set of cracking I do is my knuckles and fingers. This one's quite the popular one as a lot of people believe it is bad to crack your knuckles. The belief is that it will hasten the onset of arthritis. Research so far hasn't proven this theory yet. One doctor even has a habit of only cracking the knuckles on one hand. Neither hand has shown any sign of having more or less negative effects than the other. It has been shown, however, that cracking your knuckles can decrease the strength of your grip. When I read that I was like zomg because I've noticed for couple years now how much of a pussy grip I have (cracking my fingers go back a long ways too).

One that I didn't research or come across is cracking your wrists. I'm not talking swiveling your wrists and having it make little clickity clack sounds. I mean pushing my hand down so it makes about an 80 degree angle with my arm. I don't get the wrist cracks as often as the other ones but I do get them more often than I would like.

I have way too many cracking shit in my body. Jeez.

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