The Nervous System and Chiropractic: What You Need to Know Part 6: Neuroplasticity – How Your Nervous System Learns and Adapts
Welcome back to The Nervous System and Chiropractic: What You Need to Know. In the previous part, we explored central sensitization—how subluxations and restricted joint motion can put your nervous system into a constant high-alert state, leading to widespread pain, fatigue, and other dysfunctions.
Now, we turn to neuroplasticity, the nervous system’s ability to learn, adapt, and rewire. Understanding this concept is key to seeing why repeated chiropractic adjustments aren’t just temporary fixes—they help your body build long-lasting improvements in movement, function, and overall wellness.
Part 6: Neuroplasticity – How Your Nervous System Learns and Adapts
What is Neuroplasticity?
Neuroplasticity is the brain and spinal cord’s built-in ability to change, adapt, and reorganize themselves in response to new input and experiences. Your nervous system isn’t fixed—it’s constantly reshaping itself in response to the signals it receives each day. This remarkable process is what allows you to learn new skills, recover from challenges, and fine-tune how your body and mind work together.
The purpose of neuroplasticity is survival, adaptability, and efficiency. It’s your nervous system’s way of making sure you can keep up with the demands of life. Each time you repeat a movement, thought, or response, your nervous system strengthens those pathways, making them easier and faster to use. Over time, this streamlining creates efficiency—turning repeated actions into automatic habits that require less effort and energy.
Because of neuroplasticity, your nervous system is always adjusting. It allows you to:
Adapt to new movements and physical challenges
Recover from injuries by building new neural connections
Improve coordination, balance, and posture through practice and repetition
Refine your stress responses so your body can handle pressure more effectively
The ability to adapt is powerful, but it’s also gradual. The same process that helps you learn a new language or skill also shapes how you move, stand, and even respond to stress.The nervous system doesn’t change all at once—it learns through repetition, timing, and consistent input. Understanding how these patterns are built, and how long they’ve been in place, helps explain why lasting change takes time and practice.
Timing, Practice, and Rewiring the Nervous System
Neuroplasticity doesn’t happen overnight. Just like building muscle or learning a new skill, retraining your nervous system takes repetition and time. The longer a problem has been there, the more deeply the old pattern becomes wired in.
Think of it like walking the same path through a grassy field. The first few times, it’s hard to see where you’re going. But if you walk that same route every day, the grass gets pressed down and a clear trail forms. Your nervous system works the same way. Every time your body moves or responds in a certain way—especially if joints are restricted or subluxated—it reinforces that “trail” in your brain and spinal cord. Over time, that becomes the path of least resistance, even if it isn’t the healthiest one.
When chiropractic adjustments correct subluxations, restoring motion and sending new, healthy signals to the brain, your nervous system begins to form a new path. But at first, it’s like trying to write with your non-dominant hand. You can do it, but it feels awkward and takes effort. With repetition, the new pattern becomes easier and eventually feels natural again.
Just like it takes weeks or months at the gym to build strength, it also takes consistent input over time to strengthen new neural pathways. Every adjustment helps guide your nervous system toward better timing, coordination, and balance—retraining it to choose the healthy path automatically.
As your nervous system builds new pathways, it also trims away old ones that are no longer used—a process called “neural pruning.” This helps make communication faster and more efficient. That’s why consistent, repeated input matters: your brain strengthens what you use and releases what you don’t.
In short, change takes time, but every step counts. The nervous system is constantly reshaping itself to help you survive, thrive, and conserve energy—whether those changes benefit your health or create patterns that hold you back.
Neuroplasticity Can Work For or Against You
The nervous system doesn’t judge whether the patterns it strengthens are good or bad—it simply reinforces whatever input it receives most often. This is why neuroplasticity can either help you thrive or keep you stuck.
When joints are moving well, mechanoreceptors send abundant, accurate information to the brain. Over time, this creates efficient movement patterns, better balance, improved coordination, and healthier stress responses. In this case, neuroplasticity is working for you, laying down positive pathways that support long-term function and resilience.
But when joints are restricted and subluxations interfere with communication, nociceptors become overactive, flooding the brain with distress signals. This excess input shifts the nervous system toward a protective state—tight muscles, pain sensitivity, and fatigue—instead of optimal performance. Over time, the brain rewires itself around these faulty signals, reinforcing muscle tension, altered posture, and stress responses.
Neuroplasticity is always at work, which means your nervous system is constantly adapting—whether in helpful or harmful ways. The goal of chiropractic care is to redirect this adaptability so your brain and body build patterns that support health, resilience, and efficient function, rather than allowing stress and dysfunction to take root.
How Neuroplasticity Relates to Central Sensitization
Neuroplasticity is the reason the nervous system can adapt—but it also explains why central sensitization can become so persistent. When the nervous system spends weeks or months in a high-alert state, it begins to learn that heightened sensitivity as its new normal. The pathways that carry pain and stress signals become more efficient and more easily activated, even in the absence of real danger or injury.
Over time, this “practice” of staying on guard strengthens those neural connections, just like rehearsing a habit. The brain and spinal cord start interpreting normal input—like light touch or mild movement—as potential threats. This is neuroplasticity at work in the wrong direction: the nervous system has rewired itself around protection instead of balance.
Central sensitization, then, can be understood as maladaptive neuroplasticity—a learned state of overprotection that keeps the body in defense mode. The same mechanism that allows the brain to recover from injury or learn new skills can also reinforce patterns of pain, tension, and hypervigilance when stress and faulty signals persist.
The key to recovery lies in helping the nervous system “unlearn” those protective patterns and create new, accurate connections that support safety, relaxation, and proper function.
Because neuroplasticity is always active, the nervous system is constantly learning—whether it’s learning pain and protection or healing and balance. The good news is that this adaptability works both ways. Just as the nervous system can be trained into hypersensitivity, it can also be guided back toward healthy function through consistent, corrective input. This is where chiropractic care comes in, using the power of neuroplasticity to help your body build stronger, healthier communication patterns that support real-life improvements in how you move, feel, and function.
Real-Life Benefits of Neuroplasticity in Chiropractic Care
Neuroplasticity allows the nervous system to learn and adapt based on the input it receives. Chiropractic care takes advantage of this natural ability by providing consistent, corrective signals that help your body retrain itself. Over time, this leads to a variety of real-life improvements that go far beyond just reducing pain.
1. Improved Posture and Movement Patterns
Restricted joints and poor alignment can create inefficient movement and tension patterns.
Regular adjustments restore proper joint motion, retraining the nervous system to coordinate muscles more effectively.
Over time, this leads to better posture, smoother movement, and reduced strain on muscles and joints.
2. Greater Energy and Physical Resilience
When the nervous system is functioning efficiently, your body doesn’t have to expend extra energy protecting joints or compensating for restricted motion.
You feel more energetic throughout the day and recover faster from physical activity or stress.
3. Enhanced Cognitive Function
Chronic nociceptor activity and sympathetic overdrive can fog thinking and reduce focus.
By retraining the nervous system through consistent adjustments, the brain can redirect energy toward higher-level functions like memory, decision-making, and concentration.
4. Better Adaptability to Stress
Neuroplasticity helps your nervous system respond more efficiently to both physical and emotional challenges.
Chiropractic care supports these adaptive pathways, making it easier to handle daily stressors without triggering protective overreactions like muscle tension or fatigue.
5. Reduced Risk of Long-Term Dysfunction
The nervous system is always rewiring itself, which means unhealthy patterns can become ingrained over time.
Repeated, positive input through chiropractic adjustments helps guide neuroplasticity in a healthy direction, preventing the gradual buildup of tension, pain, or inefficient movement habits.
6. Overall Functional Wellness
With improved communication between the brain and body, patients often experience benefits that go beyond pain relief: better coordination, improved sleep, more stable mood, and enhanced overall vitality.
Overall, Chiropractic care leverages neuroplasticity to create lasting improvements. It helps your nervous system learn healthier patterns, allowing your body to move more efficiently, think more clearly, and respond more effectively to stress—supporting both immediate relief and long-term wellness.
Why Early Care Often Requires More Frequent Visits
The longer a subluxation has been present, the more time your nervous system has had to adapt around it. Through neuroplasticity, the brain and body gradually learn to operate within that altered pattern—compensating with tight muscles, restricted movement, and protective tension. Over months or years, these patterns become the “path of least resistance,” meaning your body naturally returns to them until new, healthier pathways are firmly established.
At the beginning of care, chiropractic adjustments provide new input to the nervous system and restore motion to restricted joints, but those new signals need repetition to become the new normal. That’s why more frequent visits are often needed early on—to reinforce proper communication between the brain and body and help your system “unlearn” the old pattern.
This process can take longer if you spend much of your day in the same posture or repetitive activity, or if weak and tight muscles aren’t being retrained through corrective exercise and stretching. When movement patterns and muscle balance improve alongside chiropractic care, your adjustments begin to hold longer and your nervous system stabilizes more efficiently—allowing for lasting change and long-term wellness.
Looking Ahead: From Neuroplasticity to Whole-Body Health
Understanding neuroplasticity gives us insight into how your nervous system is always learning and adapting. Every adjustment, every restored joint movement, and every positive signal you give your nervous system helps it build healthier patterns. Over time, this rewiring leads to better posture, improved coordination, enhanced focus, more energy, and greater resilience to stress.
But neuroplasticity isn’t just about isolated changes—it affects the body as a whole. When your nervous system functions optimally, all your organ systems, muscles, and mental processes benefit. This sets the stage for whole-body health, where chiropractic care is not just about relieving pain, but about supporting your body’s natural ability to function at its best.
In the next and final part of our series, we’ll explore Whole-Body Health and Why Chiropractic Care Matters, connecting everything we’ve learned—from subluxations and mechanoreceptors to central sensitization and neuroplasticity—into a complete picture of vitality and wellness.
At Wellness Within Chiropractic, we’re honored to care for patients from Hoschton, Braselton, and across Jackson County, GA. Dr. Carrillo is passionate about helping families and individuals achieve vibrant health through gentle, effective chiropractic care. If you’ve been searching for a chiropractor you can trust, schedule your appointment today and experience the difference.