Red light reflex

I'm reading a great book right now called Somatics by Thomas Hanna. He explains how much of the physical decline we call "aging" is actually avoidable. I love that he uses wooden figure models to illustrate his point, so I thought I'd draw some of them here.

This is the "Red light reflex". It's the human "startle response", a primitive reflex of survival. Every animal does it, it is unconscious, emanating from the primitive regions of the hindbrain, and happens in about 60 millisesconds. Accumulated anxieties and distress cause our muscles to contract into this posture without our knowing it. To me this is the logged out in the middle of writing a long email, I don't understand the assignment that's due tomorrow, I shouldn't have watched CNN, we need to sell the house, I haven't saved enough for retirement, the market is in shambles anyway posture.

The thing about accumulated distress, and the fact that we don't realize our muscles are contracting like this because it happens unconsciously, is that it becomes habit. And many of the aches and pains we attribute to "aging" are simply the result of long term bad habits. In Somatics, Hanna teaches how we can engage our voluntary motor control (conscious doing) to override these habits and bring us back into alignment.