You’re halfway through a meeting when someone questions a decision you made. Your face stays composed and your answer comes out reasonable, even generous. Somewhere underneath it your jaw has set and your breath has moved up into your chest, though you won’t notice either until later, if at all.
Most of the capable women I work with have become very good at this. The body registers something, and the mind takes over before the signal gets a hearing. If you’ve ever been told to trust your body and thought, trust it to do what, exactly?, this is probably why.
The second before the story
There’s a short gap between the moment your body responds to something and the moment you have a thought about it. Sometimes it’s a fraction of a second. In that gap the body has already done a lot of work: your shoulders lift, your breath shortens. Then the mind arrives with an explanation, and the explanation tends to win.
Researchers call the ability to perceive these internal signals interoception. Wolf Mehling and Cynthia Price, with colleagues, developed one of the most widely used ways of measuring it, the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA-2). What I find most useful about their work is that it doesn’t treat body awareness as a single skill. Two of its scales describe almost exactly what I see in practice. One, called Not-Distracting, looks at whether you tend to ignore or push past uncomfortable sensations. The other, called Trusting, looks at whether you experience your body as a safe and reliable source of information.
Those two are connected. If you’ve spent years overriding discomfort to get things done, it makes sense that your body wouldn’t feel trustworthy. You’ve had very little practice listening to it.
Why so many high achievers stop listening
Carl Rogers had a name for the rules we absorb, often very early, about when we’re acceptable. He called them conditions of worth. Be useful. Get it right. Don’t need too much. Keep things calm for everyone else. Over time these stop feeling like rules and start feeling like personality.
The trouble, as Rogers saw it, is that conditions of worth sit between you and your own experience. You start checking how you feel against how you’re supposed to feel. Tiredness becomes something to push through. Hurt becomes oversensitivity. Rogers believed every person has an inner capacity to sense what’s good for them, which he called the organismic valuing process, and that conditions of worth slowly drown it out.
Advice that tells you to “listen to your body” becomes even more confusing, framed as though it were simple. For someone who learned early that her needs were inconvenient, listening is uncomfortable. Discomfort is exactly what she’s had years of practice skipping. Most women who tell me they’re bad at body awareness aren’t bad at it at all. They’re very good at something else, and that something else has usually been rewarded.
How to trust your body again
Pat Ogden, who developed Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, puts a lot of emphasis on tracking. That means following what happens in the body moment to moment, with curiosity, before rushing to interpret it. You don’t need to be in therapy to borrow the principle. Trust with your body gets built the way it does between people, through small moments of paying attention and finding that what you noticed was real.
A few things that tend to help:
- Notice afterwards, too. If you missed the signal in the meeting, check in on the walk home. Where does that conversation sit in your body now? Late noticing still counts.
- Name the sensation before the meaning. “Tight throat” comes before “I was anxious.” Describing first gives the body a hearing before the story arrives.
- Watch what you do with the signal. Maybe you reach for your phone, or start drafting a reply in your head. There’s no need to stop it. Seeing the pattern is useful in itself.
- Keep it small. Thirty seconds of attention, repeated often, does more than an occasional hour.
Your body has probably been registering things ahead of you for a long time. It isn’t asking you to drop everything each time it speaks. Often it wants a moment, one second before the story takes over. Learning to trust your body starts there, and it can start this week.
If you’d like somewhere to begin, my free guide, What Does Your Body Actually Need?, walks you through reading those early signals at your own pace. It takes about ten minutes.
If this is familiar, the free guide What Does Your Body Actually Need? covers this ground more slowly. You can sign up below.
What Does Your Body Actually Need?
A short guide to signals you have learned to ignore or dismiss, like hunger, tiredness, the need to stop
- Four signals your body sends before words arrive, and what each one is asking for
- A ten-minute check-in you can do sitting still, with nothing to fix
- What to do when the answer is one you would rather not hear
Ten minutes to read. It arrives in your inbox straight away.
No pressure, no inbox overwhelm, just a starting point.