Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.

But it wasn’t always that way.

When I was a kid, no holiday ranked above Christmas. The anticipation of Santa bringing gifts and new toys made it nearly impossible to sleep. The Advent calendar made that anticipation front-and-center as we counted down until the “big day.”

Let’s face it, what could rank above Christmas for a kid? Immediate gratification of new stuff and time-off from school all added up to make Christmas the highlight of my year.

As I’ve gotten older (and hopefully more mature, but that is still debatable according to my wife), I’ve come to like Thanksgiving best.

At Thanksgiving we are not required to give a gift. There is no expectation of getting something new, or receiving a present.

Rather, it gives us a time to be thankful for what we have, both personally and collectively.

Now I don’t want to assume that you have had the “best year ever.” In fact, if we got together this year, it probably meant that you did not have the best year ever. After all, who wants to spend time at physical therapy trying to correct an injury?

But even in having some challenges this year, hopefully we are able to still be thankful for our health.

It is truly a miracle how our bodies function.

One of my favorite instructors at PT school (Steve Tepper) once said something that has stuck with me for the past 30-years. He was teaching us cardiac physiology at the time when he said,

“If you had to think about all the changes that have to take place in your body to get out of bed in the morning, you would realize that it is amazing that any of us can do it.”

But we often take for granted seemingly simple tasks, like getting out of bed in the morning.

If you had to think about what that entails, it would be something like this:

1- Formulate a movement plan in your mind to move the covers off you.

2- Execute that plan, by sending a message along your nerves to the appropriate muscles.

3- Coordinate those muscles to throw the covers to the center of the bed, not the side you wanted to rise from.

4-Now you need to get up. Formulate a new plan to get your body up sitting up on the side of the bed.

5-Drop your legs over the side and sit there for a moment…so you don’t feel dizzy.

So far, you’ve made conscious decisions about getting out of bed. But what about all those little things that have happened to allow that?

“What little things?” you ask.

How about the fact that your hearing allowed you to register the alarm clock, even though you were asleep. You didn’t have to think about hearing (not the same as thinking about what you heard). Your brain automatically processed the sound and alerted you that it was time to get up.

And how about your eyes? Did you think about constricting your pupils when you first opened your eyes and the light came in? Or did that happen automatically?

Now let’s not forget about breathing. Did you have to stop formulating your get-out-of-bed plan in order to remind yourself to breathe? How about getting your diaphragm to contract? That diaphragm contraction just got you a fresh supply of air…also, automatically.

What about your heart rate…and blood pressure?

Just going from lying down to sitting forces immediate changes in your cardiovascular system. Gravity pulls your blood toward your feet, leaving less to get to your head. Gravity is also pulling your blood down from inside your head.

But no worries, because your pressure sensors in your blood vessels are talking to your spinal cord, and in turn, a message to constrict those vessels is sent and implemented in order to prevent your blood from all ending up down in your feet. It would be hard to stay upright and conscious if all your blood was pulled to your feet.

At the same time, your heart rate steps up several beats per minute in an effort to maintain a high enough blood pressure to get blood up against gravity and into your brain.

All of these things are happening without you thinking about them!

The exceptions are those of you with autonomic nervous system troubles, because of which many of these “automatic” responses are not happening automatically…but that is a discussion for another day.

For the vast majority of people, the autonomic nervous system is your “unsung hero.”

It does all the mundane tasks required for you to go about your daily activities, focusing on what you want to do, rather than on what you have to do in order to stay alive…such as breathe, contract your heart, circulate your blood, filter your blood, digest your food, absorb nutrition from the food, transport those nutrients to cells in need, etc….

So this Thanksgiving, I want to just give a little shout-out to all the miraculous little events that occur for you every minute of every day to keep you functioning and doing what you love to do…or what you have to do…or even what you hate to do.

Let’s be thankful that your autonomic nervous system worked today.

It’s just a little reminder of how amazing your body is. Knowing some of this, you will be able to be thankful for all the small things that happen in the background, not just those things of which you are more consciously aware.

I hope you all have a Happy and Healthy Thanksgiving and can enjoy time with friends and family!

P.S.- I wanted to leave you with a movement tip to prevent you from getting into a tough spot during your holiday preparations.

So here you go:

Remember that your racks in your oven can slide out of the oven.

When you are retrieving the hot food from your oven, slide the oven rack forward so that you don’t have to bend over the burning hot oven door to reach your food.

Doing this also brings the weight of the food much closer to your body and limits the stress on your back, neck, and shoulders.

Hopefully that little tip will prevent each of you from having need of me after cooking your Thanksgiving meal.

Cheers!