Nervous System Reset: From Combat Ready to Calm Within

In this episode of Exit Buddy: Veteran Stories to Guide You, Kathleen sits down with Army veteran and former 82nd Airborne paratrooper Patience Ulsted, who went from ballet shoes to jump boots to holistic health entrepreneur. Patience shares how chronic pain, daily migraines, and living at “10 out of 10” readiness pushed her to explore yoga, massage, chiropractic care, Reiki, acupuncture, and Ayurveda—and how those tools helped her reset her nervous system without losing her edge. Her story is a powerful reminder that you’ve already done the hard thing, you deserve your VA benefits, and part of transition is learning how to shift from combat ready to calm within.

Chapters

• 01:23 – From Restaurant Grind to “I’m Joining the Army”
• 03:16 – “You Can’t Go Airborne, You’re a Chick”
• 06:06 – Transition Injuries: Feeling 27 Going on 70
• 06:50 – The Yoga Class That Ended the Migraines
• 08:53 – Massage, Chiropractic, Reiki, Acupuncture & Ayurveda
• 11:57 – From Underpaid Spa Work to Entrepreneurship
• 14:00 – “I Can Do Anything”: What Airborne Service Taught Her
• 16:30 – Learning to Ask for Help & Be Coachable
• 19:10 – Always at a 10: Military vs. Civilian Nervous Systems
• 23:47 – Get Your VA Benefits & Don’t Live at 10 Forever 

Key Takeaways

• You’ve Already Done the Hard Thing: Use your service—especially high‑demand roles like Airborne—as proof you can handle big transitions and entrepreneurship.
• Holistic Health Is Nervous System Work, Not Woo‑Woo: Yoga and other modalities helped Patience move from constant hypervigilance to a healthier baseline while keeping the ability to “flip the switch” when needed.
• Ask for Help and Be Coachable: Getting coaching and stepping outside her comfort zone helped Patience double her business and expand her impact.
• Document Injuries & Use Your VA Benefits: You earned them—beyond medical care, there are career and entrepreneurship resources many veterans never tap into.
• Don’t Stay at 10 Out of 10 Forever: Living on adrenaline will eventually catch up with you. Learning to access “2 out of 10” is key for long‑term health and relationships.

Follow us for more real veteran stories to guide your transition, and share this episode with someone who’s still living at a 10—they may just need permission to finally reset.

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Transcript

Patience Ulsted 00:00
I felt stuck. I felt challenged. I felt like, oh, I can't do this. And it's like, no, no, wait a minute. You can. You really can. There's nothing you can't do. And I've had the opportunity to prove that to myself over and over again. So anybody transitioning, you've already done the hard thing. You've done the hard thing that most people in the world will never do.

Kathleen Smith 00:24
Welcome to Exit Buddy: Veteran Stories to Guide You. This podcast shines a light on real struggles and triumphs of veterans navigating life after the military.

Rachel Bozeman 00:34
In each episode, we dive into heartfelt stories of resilience, setbacks, a little humor, and growth as veterans transition and find new purpose in civilian life. And here for the journey, we're your hosts. I'm Rachel...

Kathleen Smith 00:48
...and I'm Kathleen. If you're looking for inspiration, practical advice, or just a reminder that you're not alone in your transition, Exit Buddy is here to help you thrive beyond the uniform. Enjoy today's story from our next honorary Exit Buddy. This is Kathleen, and I'm flying solo today. I'm really excited because we're welcoming Patience Ulsted, an Army veteran and former paratrooper who has an incredible story about transitioning from military service to becoming a holistic health entrepreneur. Welcome to the show, Patience.

Patience Ulsted 01:23
Thank you, Kathleen. I'm so glad to be here.

Kathleen Smith 01:25
And we are a very pet-friendly show here today. So I see that we have a friend, a kitty cat, and I have my puppy dog, so we are just going to be all warm and lovey in the studio today. So Patience, tell us a little bit about why you joined the military and what was your specific goal. Because I understand you had a goal, but you also had a few challenges thrown in your way.

Patience Ulsted 01:53
Oh, well, I had a vision for my life when I was young, and I didn't realize that there would be challenges—as with anything, life throws challenges your way. So I had been working and trying to put myself through school, working two and three jobs, and just didn't feel like I was making any kind of headway. So I had a moment. I was waiting tables, and all of our friends were waiting tables, and my roommates were waiting tables. And on Monday nights, we'd have a Monday Night Football, play poker, bring beer kind of get-together. And I was standing on our balcony looking into the apartment, and I had this aha moment: this is your future. And at the time, I was 21 and I'd been trying to hustle since I was 17 to finish school. Most of our friends were in their 30s. There were a couple in their 40s, and I was like, oh, I need to do something drastically different. And the next day, I went and joined the Army, and I left two weeks later.

Kathleen Smith 03:02
Now I understand that the Army wasn't your first choice. You actually wanted to join another branch, and you actually wanted to do something very specific, but somebody sort of told you, girls don't do that.

Patience Ulsted 03:16
So where I lived, there were all the recruiting stations in this little strip mall: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. And I first went to the Air Force door and it was locked, so I knew I didn't want to be a Marine. And the next door that was open was the Army recruiting office. So I walked into that door. I met my Army recruiter. He said, Let's take some tests. And I took the tests. He says, you're great. Let's go. So I did. I went down to San Diego and signed all the paperwork, and did all the onboarding. I was living in California at the time, and I left two weeks later. But no, I was going to join the Air Force, but they were closed—maybe they were on a lunch break or something. So that sealed my fate again. I went Army and I went airborne. So after basic training, there's advanced training. And in advanced training, I was talking to this other soldier who was very—we called them high speed. He had his Ranger roll hat and his high and tight haircut, and he knew he wanted to be an Airborne Ranger. And I was thinking, yeah, airborne sounds cool, like a real challenge. And somebody behind me heard me say that, and I don't to this day remember that person's name, but he goes, You can't go airborne, you're a chick. And he was like, Oh, fine. Watch me. It's like he reached up and knocked the chip off my shoulder. And the first opportunity I had, when the 82nd Airborne Division recruiters came to our training, I signed up and I went and ran with them every day. And I did the training, and after advanced training, I went to Airborne School. And after Airborne School, I went to the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. And I never saw that guy again, not even to say, like, look what I did. But he changed my whole future—some anonymous guy in the chow line.

Kathleen Smith 05:20
That's always so great. It's amazing what prompts us to go in a different direction or gives us a little bit of a kick that we need. So you've gone through airborne, you're a paratrooper, you've done this amazing career, and then you start transitioning into civilian life. And many of us, when we switch from one career to another, when we switch from one life to another, we try to do the same thing over and over again, rather than looking for inspirations to do a different thing. So tell us a little bit about your transition and what inspired you to be more interested in holistic health?

Patience Ulsted 06:06
That's a great question, Kathleen. I couldn't physically do the same things that I could do when I joined the Army after hitting the ground hard, jumping out of airplanes. My body felt broken, and I couldn't run. I really didn't have a lot of stamina, and I did have a lot of pain. I had regular daily migraines, along with physical joint pain all over my body. So I had to find another way to make it in life. I was only, I think, 27 at the time when I transitioned out, but I felt like I was 60 or 70 years old. I just felt broken. So that led me to holistic therapies, and specifically yoga. It led me to yoga, and not in any intentional kind of way—just like the Air Force door versus the Army door. But I was getting my degree, and I had to take a PE credit, and they were offering a yoga class. And I thought, well, Madonna's doing yoga. It's cool. I could do it. So I took this yoga class. This was long before Lululemon leggings and spandex tops. I was in just shorts and a T-shirt—and I actually think I might have been in my Army shorts and my Army T-shirt. And just the laying on the floor and breathing and moving my body in these really easy ways shifted something for me. I remember getting home after that first class and my children were still small—they were both still in diapers—and I was laying on our couch with my youngest sleeping on my chest, and just thinking, wow, this feels really good. I feel good. And wondering, I wonder how long this will last, but I haven't had a migraine since that class. And I'm not here touting yoga as the cure-all for migraines, but for me, that was my experience. I haven't had a migraine since that class and that feeling good hasn't left. It actually sparked something inside of me to go learn more about this mind-body connection, learn more about what I can do to make myself healthier and to make myself feel good, and to have myself feel like me again in this body. So that's what sparked that path.

Kathleen Smith 08:45
It sounds like it wasn't just yoga. What else did you go after to explore this mind-body connection?

Patience Ulsted 08:53
I had a good friend who owned a spa in our little town of Poway, California, and she always seemed like the most serene woman I had ever met. So I asked her, where did you learn how to do this? And she told me where she went to massage school. And she told me what else she did. And I decided, I'm just gonna take a break from getting my degree, and I'm gonna go to massage school. Why not? And just like that yoga class, that first class hooked something in me. It felt so profound to have the healing power of touch that I needed to learn more. So I continued that trajectory. From there, I started working with a chiropractor—that was one of my first stable jobs outside of massage school—and I started getting adjusted regularly. So yoga, massage, chiropractic. I learned Reiki, and within two years became a Reiki Master, and then within five became a master teacher—so learning about the energetics of the body, the alignment, the physicality, how the tissues all work together. And then from there, after about 10 years in practice, I felt like I started seeing clients who I couldn't help—I didn't know what to do for them—and I started referring to acupuncturists, and that inspired me to learn more about acupuncture. And then I went to acupuncture school. So it's been a lifelong learning. I still feel like I'm learning. Five years ago, I dove into the deep pool of Ayurveda, and how that all connects with Chinese medicine and the body work and the chiropractic. It's just fascinating to me.

Kathleen Smith 10:51
So it's interesting—many of us can rely on Ayurveda or yoga or chiropractic, acupuncture, or definitely some of the modalities that I have utilized over my lifetime to keep my health, mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, all of that. But there's a big leap from having all of this to being an entrepreneur and actually creating the business model. And having taken part of many of those modalities over the last—somewhat years, we're not going to say how many—I've seen many people go out of business. I've seen many people who have not managed it properly, but you decided to take the leap of becoming an entrepreneur, and have been quite successful. So how was that shift for you between having it be part of your body, you being a practitioner, but then going to, shall we say, the master level of this and being the entrepreneur?

Patience Ulsted 11:57
Another great question, and I think it's kind of like that chip on my shoulder with airborne—you can't do that. I did work with several other companies on my way to doing my own thing, and I always felt like I could do that better. Or why would somebody do that? One of my first jobs out of massage school was at a little day spa in San Diego, and I was very excited about it. And maybe it was my naivete or it was an intentional misdirect, I don't know, but what I thought was going to be $25 a treatment, how I would get paid ended up being $25 a client. So I would spend hours and hours with one client, taking them from the body work to the steam sauna to the holistic spa lunch to the facial. And after four or five hours of work, I would get paid $25 and I thought, oh, this is ridiculous. And I knew that I wanted to really affect people deeply—not just a surface treatment, not just a spa treatment, but have them have the experience I had, which, in hindsight, I describe it as a complete nervous system reset. And I didn't find anybody that was doing that. I found people who came close, and I found companies who had the right idea, but the full vision alignment didn't quite hit. So I decided that I was going to do it myself. And it wasn't without challenges—like any journey, it had its speed bumps—but it's going well, and I enjoy the people I work with. I enjoy the work that I do.

Kathleen Smith 14:00
Let's talk a little bit more about entrepreneurship, because we see a lot of veterans, a lot of veteran programs on entrepreneurship, and in many of the veterans and transitioning military folks that I counsel, a lot of them are looking at running their own shop or going for the corporate job, and there seems to be this sort of divide—you do one or the other. And having been an entrepreneur myself over the years, it's definitely an interesting road to take, no matter what you decide to do. So what did the military provide you as far as a framework or a foundation on being able to have your own practice, have your own shop, your own business? And are there any things that you drew upon whenever you hit one of those speed bumps from your military background to say, I can do this—other than another chip off your shoulder being knocked off?

Patience Ulsted 15:02
That's exactly it, though—it was I can do this. One thing that I learned from basic training and Airborne School is that I can do anything, and that's exactly how I felt about those accomplishments. I was not an athletic young person. I was a ballet dancer—in the pink tights and the black leotard—that was how I used my body when I was young. So now suddenly we're running miles and miles and wearing combat boots and carrying a ton of equipment on the back, and my concept of myself was very challenged. So after doing that and doing it successfully—I won awards in basic training, I won awards in AIT, I won awards at my unit—I realized, wow, I can do anything. There's nothing that I can't do. And that has pulled me through a lot of things where I felt stuck, I felt challenged, I felt like, oh, I can't do this. And it's like, no, no, wait a minute, you can. You really can. There's nothing you can't do. And I've had the opportunity to prove that to myself over and over again. So anybody transitioning, you've already done the hard thing. You've done the hard thing that most people in the world will never do. So allow that to pull you forward.

Kathleen Smith 16:30
So obviously, you did do all of this by yourself. And one thing that I know is really difficult to do, especially from the military, is learning how to ask for help and learning to say you don't know. So how did that mentality come about during your transition and setting up your own business?

Patience Ulsted 16:53
It was key, and I'm not sure how it came about. I just know there was a shift for me. I was a I-can-do-it-all-on-my-own, don't-help-me-thank-you, don't-offer-to-help-me person. To get where I want to go if I don't know how to get there, I need to find somebody who's been there, who's got what I want. So I must have been in San Diego. I took a leadership development course. It was a weekend workshop—Friday, Saturday, Sunday. It was encouraged to ask for coaching from the course leader, to stand up, ask for coaching and get coaching. And it was supported by all the people in this course. And there was a part of me that really ate that up, that just wanted that affirmation and that external validation. And I started asking for help. I started asking for coaching. I started taking coaching. I started learning that being coachable is a valuable thing. And I was thinking about this just this morning, about what a wild time of my life that was. It took me very far out of my comfort zone. It grew my business like I didn't even imagine. I had seen incremental growth—the expected percentages year over year. At that time I had my own private practice in downtown San Diego, but by the end of that year, from the time I took that course to a year later, I had doubled my business and I had brought on two other practitioners, all while being at this very uncomfortable growth edge of putting myself out there. So I guess I will say this: if you're ever invited to do something that seems really challenging, and your sense of self is like, I will never do that—maybe try it. Maybe go there. Maybe just say yes and see what will happen. Because it changed everything for me.

Kathleen Smith 19:10
And as the helicopters are flying over my head and shaking my house, we will move on to the next question. So obviously you had a very inside perspective to what happened to the nervous system when you transitioned from the military into the civilian world. So we've had several people on the show who've sort of talked about the physicality of the change, and some people who were unfortunately very injured and very damaged during their service, and some reported it and were able to get their VA benefits, and other people decided to suck it up and not report it and not be able to get their VA benefits. So again, this is another little plug too: please register your injuries and get your VA benefits. But going back from your perspective, can you sort of tell us a little bit more about the difference between the military nervous system that you observed and the civilian world nervous system, and what maybe our listeners need to think about—even though most of them are going, oh, this is really sort of woo-woo. And I'm like, no, it's not woo-woo. It's your nervous system.

Patience Ulsted 20:29
It is not woo-woo. It is your nervous system. And just because you can't see it doesn't mean that it's not real. In military service, on post, in uniform—from my experience—we walked around at a 10 out of 10, always ready, always ready. When I first got to the 82nd Airborne Division, all of my unit was getting ready to go to Haiti. So I got there, got my paperwork, got into the commander's POV, went down, got my equipment, got my shot, got my live rounds, got my rules of engagement, and was dropped on the flight line with 40 people from my unit that I didn't know with the rest of my unit already on the way. So when we say we're always ready—yep. I basically crossed the threshold to that post and was like, okay, you're going in a combat zone. And anybody who's in uniform can relate to that statement. You're ready to go with the drop of a hat. Civilian life is not like that. It's not even close. So coming out of service and going to California—not just back into civilian life, but to San Diego, California, which in my experience is probably one of the most laid-back communities in the entire world. Shorts and flip-flops at dinner are the norm. It was a culture shock, and to realize, oh, not everybody's ever visited that 10 level of readiness, much less can even consider that someone else might be there. They have no idea what's going on over here. So I had to adapt. I had to create some range within myself. And I think that's what those holistic therapies did. That's what the yoga did. It took me from being at a 10 all the time to being able to come back down to a 2. I can go back up to a 10 if I need to at any moment, but I can also come back down to a 2 and cuddle my daughter's cat who's with us right now, or just walk into the grocery store and not feel like the person who's walking in behind me is going to do something. I don't have to be ever vigilant.

Kathleen Smith 22:51
Yeah, it's a big shift. And I've seen a lot of people who've come out of the military, and they are adrenaline junkies. They do want to be 10 out of 10 all the time, and I can understand that that's part of some people's personality. It's also something that might not be conducive to a commercial environment, the social life outside of the military, but it's always nice to do a bit of a gut check or nervous system check. So now we've gone the gamut. We've gone from you telling them you can be a paratrooper, to learning about the nervous system and starting your own business. Reflecting back on your time after the military, what is one piece of advice you would give for our audience as they prepare for their transition?

Patience Ulsted 23:47
Get your benefits. I know you've already touched on that, but you've earned them. It is a benefit. It's for you. It's created by our country for the people who serve. And you've earned it. So please, get everything documented in your medical record, and go sign up for your VA benefits immediately. It will only serve you in the long run. There are so many programs that I didn't even know existed—beyond medical care, beyond getting a rating for whatever disabilities you've walked out of the military with. There's career assistance, there's entrepreneurial assistance, there's so many things that the government offers you because you served. Please do that. And number two, to your point about prior service or military service being adrenaline junkies—I'm not going to say I was fortunate to have had migraines, debilitating migraines, and physical pain, but that's what set me on the journey. And being geared at a 10 all the time, being on high all the time is going to deplete your adrenals and eventually, sooner or later—and nobody can predict when—your body's going to say enough. So I would also encourage, before your body says enough, before your body throws up that brick wall, go explore the lower range. Go find out what it's like to gear from a 10 to a 2. You don't have to stay there. You can come back up again. But expand that range for your health and longevity. It will serve you all.

Kathleen Smith 25:36
Great advice. Yes, I think even those of us who are military spouses sometimes are 10 out of 10 all the time, and exploring that lower range is always helpful. Patience, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for bringing your cat. We love seeing animals here in the studio. Thanks again for sharing your story.

Patience Ulsted 25:57
Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure.

Kathleen Smith 26:01
It was so great to have Patience join us in the studio. Having conversations with her before, she said something that has really been inspiring to me, which is having been in the 82nd Airborne and jumping out of planes and slamming into the ground, and how painful that is. And anytime I was going through some kind of emotional work, and how painful that was. Her inspiration to me was always that she would much rather jump out of planes than face the emotional work. There's going to be a lot of emotional work as you transition out of the military. Just take the time, reset, and listen to this episode—maybe another time. I loved hearing all of the key components that Patience shared about our nervous system reset. So let's just focus on that for right now. In the meantime, thanks for listening. Be sure to follow us for more episodes, and be sure to subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletters. You'll find a link in the show notes. You can connect with our guests. You can connect with other listeners and create your tribe here at Exit Buddy. Bye for now.