text: Holistic Health and Fitness Coaching
  decreases arthritis pain, chronic pain, migraines, and acute pain. Often, it seems that it is not that
  the pain level is decreased so much as that a person’s ability to tolerate the pain is improved.
  * Mental health benefits: incorporating religious and spiritual perspectives into Soldiers’ lives can
  decrease their risk of posttraumatic stress, major depressive disorder, alcohol-related problems,
  and suicidal ideation.
  * Health benefits: religious people smoke less, exercise more, and have a healthier diet.
  POWER OF THE MIND
  13-25. What Soldiers think and believe about themselves strongly affects what they can achieve physically.
  The H2F approach treats the Soldier’s physical and mental readiness as requiring equal amounts of attention.
  In fact, it regards them as inseparable.
  13-26. Examples of the power of the mind are well known. In the 1940s, Henry Beecher found that saline
  injections with no medicinal potential reduced pain for wounded Soldiers. He coined the term “placebo
  effect” to describe the phenomenon. In the 1970s, Herbert Benson began to study what he described as the
  “relaxation response”—the body’s natural state of relaxation—and how this response can be activated
  through the mind. Study participants who use mind-body practices experience genetic and molecular changes
  not experienced by people in study control groups.
  13-27. The field of psychoneuroimmunology studies the relationship among the nervous system, the
  immune system, and the endocrine system. Thoughts and emotions have a measurable biochemical effect
  and can change the body chemistry. Neuroplasticity research demonstrates that the nervous system can
  change in response to the environment, personal behaviors, and the natural world. Even brains undergo
  constant changes. For example, parts of the brain can shrink in response to chronic pain, and those same parts
  can regrow with the use of mind-body techniques such as meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy—
  therapy focused on changing behaviors by modifying thoughts in a positive way.
  13-28. Some mind-body practices do not require referral for clinical or professional intervention. These
  practices can include art therapies such as music, visual arts and dance. They also include autogenic training
  and other forms of self-hypnosis, biofeedback devices that measure physiological activity such as heart rate
  monitors. Lastly, mind-body practices include breathing exercises, imagery, journaling, meditation, and
  progressive muscle relaxation.
  H2F Coaching
  Delivering improved readiness system in H2F requires a new paradigm of coaching,
  teaching, and mentoring and contemporary performance readiness content. This
  content integrates and condenses the domains of H2F into tactics, techniques, and
  procedures that represent a culture shift for the Soldier: skin in, neck up