November 20, 2025
This Body Dynamics class, led by chiropractor Dr. Cade Copeland, DC and functional medicine coach Cason Lehman, PTA, PLCC, opens with a simple but uncomfortable truth: most people are far more stressed than they realize, and their bodies are paying for it every day. Not just in mood or tension, but in sleep, digestion, energy, weight, and the ability to heal.
They do not treat stress like a vague feeling. They treat it as a real load on the body that can be traced, understood, and changed.
Dr. Cade and Cason describe health as something built on foundations, not quick fixes. In their daily practice, they repeatedly come back to a handful of pillars:
stress and sleep, food and hydration, toxicity and movement, and the state of the nervous system and blood. When these areas are in line, the body is “wired to heal.” When they are neglected or overwhelmed, there is always a cost.
As they both emphasize, there is no negotiating with how the body is built. Every decision nudges someone closer to repair or further into breakdown.
In this class, stress is not defined as “having a busy week.” Instead, it is any state where the body is pushed out of balance. Whenever the internal balance shifts away from normal, the body is in a state of stress.
They use a simple chiropractic model: mental, chemical, and physical stress.
Chemical stress includes medications, antibiotics, vaccines, pollution, pesticides, food additives, dyes, industrial seed oils, cleaning products, fire retardants and the constant exposure to electromagnetic fields. These are loads the body must handle whether a person is thinking about them or not.
Physical stress ranges from obvious injuries—falls, car accidents, sports trauma—to the less dramatic but constant strain of sitting all day, poor mattresses, long commutes, and loud environments.
Mental stress eventually absorbs everything else. Relationship strain, parenting, divorce, finances, work responsibilities, news cycles, constant connectivity, social media metrics, cultural conflict—over time, all of it lands as emotional weight on the system. Even a physical injury ends up affecting mood and patience.
Every category bleeds into the mental layer, building what they call a “storm” of stress in the body.
Drawing on the work of Hans Selye, they explain the general adaptation response: the body meets a stressor, mounts resistance, and then either adapts and grows stronger or slides into exhaustion.
Healthy, short-term stress—like exercise—is eustress. The body responds, recovers, and comes back better. But chronic stress without recovery becomes distress, leading toward exhaustion, sickness and early degeneration.
“It’s not stress that kills us,” the quote goes, “but our reaction to it.” In practical terms, that reaction is the body’s ability—or inability—to return to balance once the stressor passes.
One of the most striking parts of the class is when they talk about when stress actually begins.
It does not start with a first job or a mortgage. It often starts before birth.
Many couples now face fertility struggles, which is itself a stressful, medically intense process. During pregnancy, mothers frequently carry heavy loads of emotional and chemical stress, and anything that affects her nervous system affects the baby’s environment as well.
By the time delivery arrives, many births are highly managed: high rates of C-sections, epidurals, and other interventions. Cason highlights how this can disrupt the baby’s early microbiome, especially when the child does not pass through the birth canal and receive the mother’s bacteria.
After birth, the baby’s nervous system looks to the mother for regulation—what they describe as “maternal mirroring.” When a mother’s nervous system is exhausted or overstimulated, the baby often mirrors that, landing quickly in a fight-or-flight pattern.
From there, stress simply changes costumes. School pressures, social hierarchy, performance expectations, and later adulthood responsibilities never really stop. The message is sobering: stress does not begin late in life, and for many people, it never truly ends.
To make the nervous system understandable, they use a simple analogy:
If a bear jumps out of the woods, the gas pedal should slam down. Heart rate spikes, breathing quickens, blood flow shifts to muscles, and survival takes priority over everything else. In a short burst, this response is life-saving and necessary.
The problem is not that the gas pedal exists. The problem is that in modern life, it rarely comes back up.
Emails, notifications, news, financial worry, conflict and constant stimulation train the nervous system to react to small triggers as if a bear is always around the corner. Stress hormones surge again and again until the “waterfall” becomes constant.
Over time, people build what they call “the engine of a Ferrari with the brakes of a tricycle.” The stress response becomes extremely powerful, while the ability to slow down, digest, rest, and recover grows weaker and weaker.
That is how someone can be exhausted all day, finally crawl into bed, and find the mind racing as if it were the middle of a crisis. One foot on the gas, one foot on the brake: wired but tired.
Staying on the gas pedal has consequences that go far beyond feeling “tense.”
When the body is locked into survival mode, it prioritizes short-term safety over long-term maintenance. Digestion slides. Immune function is sidelined. Repair is postponed. Patience evaporates.
They describe the everyday reality of this state:
people who cannot sleep or wake unrefreshed, hearts racing without a clear reason, “sticky” weight that will not budge, constipation or constant urgency, brain fog that will not lift, quick tempers, lingering anxiety, and bodies that feel older than the calendar says.
It is not that the tools of the past stopped working. It is that the overall load has changed. The same nutrition, movement, and lifestyle choices simply do not get the same results in a system that never exits survival mode.
The parasympathetic state—the brake pedal—brings the opposite pattern.
Once danger or perceived danger fades, the body should gradually redirect resources back to digestion, immune function, detoxification, sleep, hormone balance, reproduction, and repair. Tissue damage is addressed. Energy is stored. The nervous system calms.
They use the image of a gazelle that escapes a lion, then returns to grazing without ulcers, diabetes, or sleepless nights. It does not replay the chase endlessly. It naturally shifts back into restoration.
Humans often do not. The body wants to move back to this rest-and-repair state, but chronic stress, unresolved fear, overexposure to negative news, and unaddressed lifestyle triggers keep that from happening.
As researcher Bruce Lipton puts it, cells cannot be in growth and protection at the same time. Over time, the choice between those two modes shapes the course of a person’s health.
This first Body Dynamics class focuses on three questions:
what stress actually is, when it begins, and why staying in fight-or-flight is so damaging.
The next classes will move into how to measure stress—including tools like heart rate variability—and then into practical ways to shift the system back toward balance, even when life itself does not suddenly become easier.
The goal is not to remove every stressor. It is to rebuild resilience so the body is no longer living with the gas pedal pressed down all the time.
For GoldCare members, this series becomes a way to finally understand what their body has been trying to say—and to see that exhaustion, anxiety, stubborn symptoms, and “normal” modern struggles are not random at all. They follow a pattern. And patterns, once seen clearly, can be changed.
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