U.S. MILITARY

WARRIOR TO THE END: United States Marine Corps Captain Katherine Hendricks Thomas lost her lengthy and courageous battle with Stage IV Breast Cancer in April of 2022. She is remembered for her dedication to bettering the lives of veterans and active-duty military.

ing and balanced fashion, while carving in space for activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. It is here that the body restores, improves, and evens out hormone levels in the blood, back to their optimal levels. That's the beauty of balanced training: it pushes your envelope and then hits the reset button!

Mindful movement is a unique way to build mental toughness. It creates opportunities for mastery, experience, and a platform from which to build physical stability. Interestingly, most of us are not physically stable without very intentionally working to become so. We sit too much, slouch a bit, and create muscular imbalances that we do not notice, because we often zip through our days without paying attention to present tense sensations in our tissues.

We all live in an obesogenic environment, where it is easier to find fast food than fresh vegetables, and we are all constantly overstimulated. It is easy to dismiss just how stimulating our environments typically are, because we get used to an unhealthy norm. That cell phone is really not supposed to be next to your pillow at night.

I recall sitting with a friend in a shopping mall a few years ago. We sat down at a little table near the food court and were trying to chat and catch up a bit, while she snuggled her toddler in her lap. We were surrounded by flat-screen televisions that were all blaring different stations to entertain food court patrons. Her little boy looked around in alarm, then buried his face in her shoulder and started weeping. I felt like joining him.

His young system was not used to blaring techno-noise, and his reaction to the shrillness was to retreat to his mom.

I remember thinking that he was setting an example for the adults in the room, who had all gotten used to ten television sets blaring overhead while they ate a rushed meal of fast food. This is not normal for our physical bodies! The pace of modern life is frenetic. Our bodies read this "Go, go, go" message clearly, and the stress embeds itself in our minds and bodies. Our stress response is a completely natural phenomenon, and the human body operates intelligently to produce appropriate reactions to life's surprises.

Upon registering some sort of threat, the brain sends hormonal signals to the adrenal glands, which secrete cortisol and adrenaline to empower the body to handle it. In a healthy negative feedback system, the cortisol signals the hypothalamus to shut down the response provided the threat has disappeared. This stress response is supposed to happen at an intensity level in relation to the threat. It is instructive and animal, and is necessary for performance, self-preservation, and survival.

Everyone's response to stimuli differs, and what is stimulating to one person biochemically, may not be to another. That does not mean our systems aren't registering the stimulation, however. Those ten televisions were keeping my nervous system on the alert, even if I did not view them as threatening in the same way that my friend's toddler did. The problem with the human stress response does not become apparent until the stress becomes chronic, and the bloodstream contains too much cortisol. Chronic stress occurs