Is Your Body Trying To Tell You Something?

When it comes to healing from dysregulation, the story told by your body is more important than the story you tell with words.

Your body’s messages mirror and maintain patterns in your nervous system.

“Body memories” can be sensations, the beat of your heart, the tightening of your stomach, or the way you reflexively brace or collapse when adversity arises.

These memories can arise in the times you’ve experienced traumatic stress and can continue to play out outside of your conscious awareness.

Rather than asking, "How can I control my body?" experiment with, "What is my body trying to tell me with these tight shoulders, an aching chest, or a knotted stomach?" and then see if you can allow space for those sensations.

The vagus nerve cells are 80 to 90% afferent: they send messages from the viscera, gut, lungs & heart to the brain.

Messages like butterflies in the tummy, an aching heart or a gut instinct are all sent to the brain via the vagus nerve. Our ability to read and understand these internal bodily cues is called interoception. 

Only 10-20% of the vagus nerve fibres run from the brain to body, yet so much emphasis is placed on the brain as a central command centre having control of the body.

If you put all the neurons together in you enteric nervous system within your gut (also called the second brain) they would be about the size of a cats brain! It’s rich in information - yet how often do you use it to guide you?

One study I referred to a couple of weeks ago when I was teaching interoception resources to the Nervous System Certification Course students, was about a group of financial traders working on a London trading floor. Researchers found that the interoceptive accuracy of traders to read their bodily signals predicted their relative profitability (Kandasamy et al., 2016), and incredibly, how long they survived in the financial markets! 

Learning to tune in to & read bodily sensations rather than trying to reason feelings away using logic also leads to increased emotional resilience.

• It calms down the amygdala when we feel fear, anxiety, anger, stress, and it increases activity in the insula: this important area plays a role in nervous system regulation, emotional awareness and awareness of others. 

• You can stop trying to micro-manage your feelings by over doing, over thinking and worrying about things that may not happen when you recognise and allow sensations.

• You can access greater wisdom from your feelings. Research has shown that better decisions are made from listening to your intuition (Kandasamy et al., 2016).

• Accurately readily bodily signals is the foundation of self -awareness and increased emotional intelligence (Pollatos et al., 2005).

• You can learn to drop the old story: the sensations from the body reconnect us to what is happening in the present moment, this can be profoundly helpful when we're triggered. 

The brain likes to predict that our current feelings of fear mean that we’re bound to fail like we did in high school. This keeps us stuck in patterns and habits. Sitting with feelings in the present just as they are means the story can dissolve.

Research is showing that the brain is more like a logistics warehouse. Learning to tune in to the body with a receptive awareness of feelings can help you to regulate your nervous system, as well as reorganise and re-pattern the early experiences that impact your intellectual, emotional, relational and spiritual self.

Ready to learn more & change old habits?  Join my upcoming >> Vagus Nerve Masterclass. <<