If you’re anything like me, not a day goes by that my smart phone doesn’t ask me to update some software or application. Sometimes, if you don’t do the updates, an app stops working. The same is true for our bodies. When was the last time you updated the software or the hardware for your body? Your body’s software is the communication system—your nervous system; the hardware, the body itself, the bones and flesh that encase the nervous system.

The challenge is, from an evolutionary standpoint, most of our systems haven’t been updated in over 10,000 years. So, is our environment the same as it was 10,000 years ago? Absolutely not. 10,000 years ago we were an agrarian society, hunting and gathering. Our systems were designed for brief stresses to escape danger, and then once that danger passed, your body returned to its natural balanced state. You can see this in animals today. If a lion chases the gazelle, and the gazelle doesn’t get caught, it shakes off the experience rather quickly. 

However, do we live in an environment where stresses go away? Absolutely not. We are in an environment now where we are under a constant state of stress. The stress is 24/7 for us, it never ends. There is a constant state of anxiety around money, second mortgages, gridlocked traffic, 24/7 email, nonstop bosses, video conferencing at all hours of the day. The stresses that are placed upon our system are never-ending. And as a result, our systems never regulate back to the state where they are fully in balance.

Scientifically—medicine, alternative medicine, holistic medicine, chiropractic—all of us agree upon this: if the body is in a continual state of stress, it leads to dis-ease. The state of being in stress on a continual basis allows [causes] the body to degrade, to not perform as optimally as it should, and the body stores this tension, it stores these challenges. Over time, living with these hormones of stress can lead to the ulcer, the heart attack, the cancer, the joint dysfunction, the spinal dysfunction; it changes our posture, it changes our alignment, and it changes how we approach and view the world.

The old model of science would have us believe that this is our destiny. Gravity is always pulling us down, and one day we will get to the bottom, and then we’re done. But...what if there were something different? What if we could still take the stress that’s in our environment on a day to day basis, and rise above it? What if there was a way to adapt to the stress? To not only survive it, but to thrive in it? What would your life be like if you were able to do that?