By Dr. Zachary LaVigne, B.S., D.C.
Somewhere along the way, your body fell out of sync with the planet it evolved on. The good news is, it’s not your fault. The bad news is, it’s still your problem.
Picture your ancestors, back before cities, before agriculture, before anyone had invented the concept of a Tuesday. They woke when the sun came up, moved most of the day, ate when they found food, and slept when the sky went dark. Every internal system, from hormones to gut bacteria to spinal pressure, was tuned to a world of light and dark, movement and rest, feast and fast.
That body is the one you are living in right now.
The Mismatch
Evolution is famously slow. The human genome has not meaningfully changed in tens of thousands of years, but the environment around us has changed with almost absurd speed.
Take light. For most of human history, darkness meant sleep. Melatonin rose, body temperature dropped, and the repair work of the night began. Now we stare into blue-spectrum screens at 11 p.m. and wonder why our mornings feel brutal. Your brain still thinks light means daytime. It just has no frame of reference for a glowing rectangle.
Sitting is another one. Your spine was designed for movement, for load, for the subtle adjustments that happen when you squat, walk, and carry. Eight hours in a chair compresses discs, shortens hip flexors, and tells your nervous system that stillness is normal. Your body registers that as a quiet emergency.
And food. The body evolved fasting cycles and metabolic flexibility because three meals plus snacks were never guaranteed. Now we eat from waking to sleep, often food containing stabilizers and dyes that did not exist even 80 years ago. The gut is adaptable, but it is also deeply ancient. It does not always know what to do with Red 40 or 60 grams of sugar.
The Part We Can Control
We are not going to stop using electric lights, and most of us cannot quit our desk jobs. The goal is not to cosplay the Paleolithic era. The goal is to give the body enough of what it evolved to expect so it can function inside the modern world.
Move in ways that load the spine and joints. Get natural light in the morning and dim your environment at night. Let yourself get actually hungry before you eat. These are not wellness trends. They are maintenance for a very old machine.
Chiropractic care fits here directly. When the spine loses range of motion from sitting, injury, or the daily grind, the nervous system loses adaptability. The brain and body communicate through the spinal cord, and that communication works best when joints are moving freely. Regular adjustments restore the mechanical conditions your body was built to expect and rarely gets anymore.
The Real Frame
Your body is hardware running software written for a completely different operating system. It mostly works, but there are glitches. Fatigue that does not resolve. Pain that migrates. A vague sense that something is slightly off.
You cannot update the hardware. But you can give it better inputs. The body is ancient, resilient, and remarkably good at adapting when you meet it halfway.
It knows what it is doing. It just needs a little help remembering.