Have you ever noticed how some days you handle stress with ease and other days, one small thing tips you over the edge?

This isn’t about willpower or resilience. It’s about something deeper: the space your nervous system has to meet life’s demands.

In chiropractic, we call this your GAP — short for General Adaptive Potential.

Understanding your GAP can change how you relate to your symptoms, your healing, and your body’s messages.

Let’s explore what it means and why it matters…

GAP = Your Body’s Capacity to Adapt

Every day, your body is adapting. To movement. To gravity. To work. To emotion. To digestion. To sleep (or lack of it). To relationships, deadlines, weather, pollution, posture, thoughts, all of it.

Your General Adaptive Potential refers to how much capacity your body and nervous system have to respond and self-regulate.

It’s not about avoiding stress, it’s about how much room your system has to meet it with ease.

The River Metaphor: How Your Body Copes When Your GAP Is Narrow

Picture a wide, flowing river. The water is life’s demands — constant, moving, sometimes unpredictable. The wider the riverbed, the smoother and easier the water flows.

Now imagine that river narrowing.

The same volume of water (stress) moves through, but now with more force and turbulence.

This is what it’s like when your GAP shrinks; your system has less space to adapt, there is more pressure.

The Cup Metaphor:

You can also think of your GAP like a cup.
Every demand fills that cup: physical, emotional, mental, chemical.
Eventually, the cup reaches its brim.

At this point, your body may not show obvious symptoms — but it’s living in dis-ease [read more].

A state of quiet strain.

Of “pushing through.”

Of compensation and adaptation just to do normal everyday things.

Of survival mode becoming ‘normal’.

Everything is harder for your brain, your body and your nervous system.

What Shrinks Your GAP?

Here’s the key piece: while stress uses up your GAP, it’s subluxations that actually shrink your GAP in the first place.

A subluxation is when part of your spine, especially at the upper cervical level, stops moving correctly.

It may not be painful but it distorts communication between your brain and body.

When your brain can’t accurately receive or interpret messages from the body, it can’t regulate clearly.

And that reduces your adaptability.

What Uses Up Your GAP?

Once your adaptability is compromised, it takes less for your cup to feel full or your river to feel strained.

Your GAP gets used up by:

Life’s daily demands
Past or ongoing emotional stress
Old injuries or physical traumas
Sickness, burnout, grief, high output seasons
High sensory or cognitive load
The effort it takes to overcompensate for a misaligned system

The more your system has been through, and hasn’t had a chance to recalibrate from, the quicker it reaches capacity.

How Upper Cervical Care Supports Your GAP

At KOEO, we focus on gentle, specific adjustments to the upper cervical spine, the gateway between your brain and body.

By correcting subluxations and restoring natural movement at the top of the spine, we improve the clarity of that brain-body loop.

With better communication comes more regulation.

More regulation creates more space = more GAP.

And when your nervous system has space, your body can respond, recover, and regulate with more ease again.

Understanding GAP Helps You Respond Before Your Body Burns Out

Caring for your GAP doesn’t mean waiting for a crisis. It doesn't mean waiting for pain to know something’s off.

It means recognising the signs of strain early [read more].

And giving your body the support it needs to move from dis-ease back to ease.

Supporting your GAP is about prevention, resilience, and giving your body the space it needs to respond to life from a place of effortlessness — not strain.