Listening to your body is a skill worth practicing (but not for the reasons that you think)
The mind loves to get all the attention.
If you've ever arrived at your destination without remembering how you got there, you know what I’m talking about.
Sometimes the mind gets so wrapped up in itself, it practically forgets the body even exists.
Driving, walking, typing, even sitting for long periods of time in a position that’s horrendous for the back and neck – the mind doesn’t even notice what the body is doing.
But what if you were actually short-changing your mind by, for lack of a better term, not helping it shut itself up every once in a while?
What if listening to your body could help your mind do its thing more effectively, and get you from here to there more efficiently?
What if listening to your body could give you a different perspective on your day-to-day world and shine a light on what up til now has been imperceptible?
Listening to your body can do exactly these things, and more.
What listening to your body can do
The idea of listening to your body that I’m thinking of is less about digging into your body to find an answer.
It’s more about strategically diverting attention away from the mind.
And where else can the thoughts go, other than the body?
It’s challenging to do a 180-degree-turn-of-thought on the spot, and it’s virtually impossible to just shut it down completely.
Diverting attention to the body allows for the mental chatter to dissipate, but the presence to remain.
The mind shifts towards a passive form of sensing and away from an active form of thinking.
This creates the space that gives new ideas a chance to surface, no longer crowded out by rapidly-flowing pre-existing thoughts.
Creating this space can help you destress more efficiently.
It helps give you more comprehensive feedback into various aspects of life.
And while the body can be an indispensable source of wisdom during a decision-making process, this kind of listening skill goes way beyond simply trusting your gut.
It’s true that you can never turn your mind off completely, but by strategically turning your attention to your body, you can do a few things:
Give yourself time to assess and prevent an overly-hasty conclusion or judgement
Turn down the volume of an in-the-moment, stressful inner voice
Tap into an alternative point of view on how various inputs impact your life
Refresh your mind throughout the day by giving it opportunities to turn “off” and reboot
Building a connection between the software and hardware of your body creates focus, patience, and energy.
What’s neat is that the concept of “listening to your body” is not new.
Many religions from ancient cultures include practices that link the body and mind, and many have made their way into modern life.
| Culture/Religion | Practices |
|---|---|
| Ancient Hindu (India) |
Yoga, Pranayama, Ayurvedic rituals, Chanting mantras |
| Buddhist (India, China, Southeast Asia) |
Mindfulness meditation, Loving-kindness meditation, Walking meditation, Mandala creation |
| Taoist (China) |
Tai Chi, Qigong, Nature immersion, Traditional Chinese medicine |
| Indigenous Shamanic (Global) |
Drumming, Vision quests, Plant medicine rituals, Sound healing |
| Ancient Egyptian (Egypt) |
Breathwork, Purification rituals, Symbolic movement, Sun rituals |
| Native American (North America) |
Sweat lodges, Vision quests, Nature-based meditation, Storytelling |
| Ancient Greece (Greece) |
Physical exercise, Stoic practices, Music and dance, Ritual baths |
| Sufi (Middle East) |
Whirling meditation, Chanting (dhikr), Breathwork, Poetry and music |
| Zoroastrian (Persia) |
Fire rituals, Meditation on light, Ritual handwashing, Silence and reflection |
Modern science supports many of these practices and we’re continually uncovering more evidence of the body-mind connection by measuring brain waves and inspecting the MRI scans of experienced meditators. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC526201/)
I know I’m not alone when I feel amazed by how much humans figured out all those thousands of years ago, much of which we are still trying to discover today.
Listen to your body to slow down the mind
I wonder if our ancestors also knew how much the mind likes to play tricks on us?
Actually, “tricks” might be the wrong word - “shortcuts” is more appropriate.
And while the mind might argue that it’s only taking these shortcuts to help us survive and pass along our genes, the shortcuts can without a doubt feel like tricks once you spot them and see how they lead us astray.
They may have served us well at some point in the past (and still do, in some ways) but now they tend to mislead us much more than we’d like (or even recognize).
This is recent news to us homo sapiens.
In the 1970s, two Israeli psychologists produced a sequence of highly influential studies on how the mind takes shortcuts when it comes to decision-making and judgements.
It turns out that these shortcuts make us very bad “intuitive statisticians” (guesstimating, essentially), predictors, and judges of the behavior of others and ourselves.
We are hardly the “rational actors” we once believed ourselves to be.
The work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky changed the way we think about thinking, and thanks to additional contributions from people like Richard Thaler and Nicholas Nassim Taleb, we have a set of useful rules of thumb to refer to during times of decision-making uncertainty.
The idea behind these rules of thumb, or heuristics, are important to think about because they are the proven reminder of how much the mind can deceive us.
Common Cognitive Biases and Heuristics
| Bias/Heuristic | Description |
|---|---|
| Availability Heuristic | We judge the likelihood of events based on how easily examples come to mind. |
| Anchoring Bias | We rely too heavily on the first piece of information when making decisions. |
| Loss Aversion | We feel the pain of losses more strongly than the pleasure of equivalent gains. |
| Confirmation Bias | We favor information that confirms our existing beliefs and ignore contradictory data. |
| Framing Effect | Decisions are influenced by how information is presented, not just the facts themselves. |
| Overconfidence Bias | We tend to overestimate our knowledge, abilities, and predictions. |
| Black Swan Effect | We underestimate the likelihood of rare, high-impact events and fail to prepare for them. |
| Status Quo Bias | We prefer things to stay the same by default, avoiding change even when it's beneficial. |
| Hindsight Bias | We believe, after an event has occurred, that we would have predicted it beforehand. |
| Self-Serving Bias | We attribute successes to our own efforts and failures to external factors. |
| Recency Bias | We give more weight to recent events and experiences when making decisions. |
| Negativity Bias | We pay more attention to negative experiences than positive ones of the same intensity. |
| Bandwagon Effect | We tend to adopt beliefs or behaviors because many others do the same. |
| Survivorship Bias | We focus on successful outcomes and overlook failures, leading to distorted conclusions. |
| Halo Effect | We let an overall positive impression influence our judgment of unrelated traits. |
| Fundamental Attribution Error | We overemphasize personality traits and underestimate situational factors in explaining others' behaviors. |
They are, in large part, why practicing this skill is needed.
When one of the above situations (or others) comes up, diverting attention to the body puts a buffer between information-gathering and information-processing.
When we start to make a decision or judgement, the processing part of the brain kicks in and we get so narrowly focused that we miss things; sometimes obvious things.
Have you seen that video of the gorilla?
When we take mental shortcuts and start to process a decision without all of the information, how likely are we to arrive at a correct answer?
Instead of making a decision in the midst of tunnel vision, the pause lets us cognitively sit back and get a panoramic view.
When you send attention to the body, your brain is of course still on - you’re still gathering information - but instead of actively thinking and connecting dots, you continue to gather information.
A common example is meeting someone new for the first time.
Our brains, trained through millennia of surviving in small bands, are super-quick to make a determination about someone based on minute and often imperceivable attributes.
These subconscious observations are available for our conscious to grab hold of and start to draw conclusions - and we often do, which is why practicing the art of pausing before judgement* can help you create more accurate determinations of people, without jumping to conclusions.
Diverting attention to the body is a great way to introduce that pause.
(* “Judgement” isn’t a negative term here, as in being judgemental. It’s referring to forming opinions, positive or negative.)
So, in this part of the skill, listening to your body is not about digging in to find an “inner wisdom” or “gut feeling.”
It’s about instinctively holding off on beginning to process a decision until you take the time to gather sufficient information.
One way to do this is by diverting your attention to the body, which lets you keep your mind open and hold off on judgements.
Listen to your body to turn down on-the-spot stress
Another use case for sending attention to the body is during times of acute stress.
When the mind starts to race, shifting your attention to something physical, like your breath (or feet, if deep breathing would be obvious and inappropriate), can slow thoughts down before they build up too much inertia.
The mind is not a good multi-tasker (in fact, it really doesn’t multi-task at all), so if you learn to shift attention to your body, the racing thoughts cannot continue uninterrupted.
They can certainly fight for attention and pop back into your mind.
But the pause created by diverting attention somewhere else creates a pause that slows down momentum.
Since it’s likely you’ll want your active mind handy during a stressful situation, injecting the brief pauses, not “turning things off completely” is the goal for this skill.
With practice, the effort to do this becomes nearly imperceivable, almost as automatic as the cognitive biases that our mind relies on.
Listen to your body for an alternative point of view
Here, the skill is about asking the body to help you arrive at a conclusion, not just slow you down.
This is especially important in areas like self-improvement, nutrition and exercise because it’s hard to get verifiable data on how the changes we make truly affect our day-to-day experience.
If we can’t check into all biomarkers regularly, how can I know if that supplement, or training regimen, or new protocol is actually benefitting me?
It’s not just about gut instinct: it’s about literally sitting for a minute and asking your body how it feels.
There are some things you won’t be able to discern (I don’t think I can feel how my cholesterol is, for instance), but there are plenty of others that you can.
Many years ago this helped me solve my lunchtime decision dilemma.
Even if I planned where I’d go or what I’d make for lunch, I was never in the mood for it when the time came.
I’d start to think of alternatives and come up dry, then procrastinate lunch and get hangry, and so on. Not great.
When I decided to actively not think about it and listen to my body instead, it was clear that my stomach was an uncomfortable knot because of the black coffee I’d been drinking all morning.
My mind was telling me “nothing seems appetizing,” after mistranslating the body’s “the stimulant is working and has shut down all hunger chemicals for now.”
By listening to the source, it became clear that my coffee habits and lunchtime habits were linked.
An obvious conclusion now, but to an overcaffeinated and undernourished brain, it was apparently elusive.
So if we’re not including information from the body, we rely solely on the mind, which will revert to one of the aforementioned mental shortcuts, and come to a seemingly-rational conclusion about what is going on even if it doesn’t have all the pertinent information.
Practicing this skill also offers the more general benefit of a broader and more comprehensive view of yourself and the world around you.
Opening up the two-way communication channel between body and mind, instead of relying only on the mind, doubles your perception.
(They’ve been saying that for centuries!)
Listen to your body to run mid-day system reboots
This style of listening to your body is about creating a moment for your mind to slow down and asking your body for a direct response.
Without a doubt, the mind can run endlessly throughout the day if unchecked.
Like a laptop with 100 windows open, our internal operating system gets bogged down and becomes fussy.
It hits our cognition, and how we physically feel.
Yet, we can become so accustomed to a busy mind and uncomfortable body that it goes unnoticed.
That’s why taking moments of pause throughout the day and shifting your attention to your breath and body is an exceptional way to stay fresh, focused and non-stressed during the day.
Since the mind isn’t going to just shut off, and since it’s challenging to spontaneously generate new thoughts (especially if your mind is racing with the day’s most pressing issues), sending thoughts to the body becomes the only other option.
Think of it like a mini-meditation, even if you don’t meditate.
Taking 60 seconds at different points of the day to divert attention to somewhere other than your own thoughts just seems to provide some kind of internal reset.
The goal is to shift attention and listen, not necessarily “talk” to your body.
You might be surprised at how little you have to wait in order to get some valuable insight.
How to listen to your body
Like any new skill it will feel strange, uncomfortable and unproductive.
And like any new skill it requires some training, and practice via repetition.
The hardest thing about it is that it’s very simple.
It’s not easy, per se, but it’s not complex.
There’s no grand aha moment or rush to expect.
All you’ll find is a very subtle quieting of the inner voice, the absence of something that increases, which is harder to notice.
You will probably feel the inner voice pop up a lot, that’s fine.
Pretty quickly, you will get a feel for where you can send your attention.
Just remember, the idea isn’t to talk to your body - it’s not saying to yourself “breathe deep, in and out” or asking “how do my feet feel in my shoes?” - it’s about shifting attention away from the chatter of your mind.
You’re not looking for an answer, just creating space.
Getting started
You’ll know you’re doing it right when you start to invent some of your own methods to this concept.
For practice, you can:
Do a 30-second body check-in
Take a seat somewhere comfortable.
Feet first: Notice how your feet feel against the ground—warm, cold, heavy, light?
Now your seat: Feel the pressure of your butt in the chair.
Breathing: Just tune into your breathing. Don't change it—just notice it for a minute.
Eyes last: Finally, notice your eyes. Are they tense, relaxed, tired? No judgments, just observing.
I know, I know, it’s kind of “woo-woo,” but it works.
Stand and do a "French Press" visualization
like the coffee brewing method where a plunger pushes grounds through hot water, slowly pressing down through your body from head to feet, helping clear mental clutter
I learned this from Steve Sisgold’s book, Whole Body Intelligence. Thanks, Steve!
When meeting someone new, you can:
Focus on the handshake and eye contact - usually, this makes you warmer than +90% of people that person has met recently.
Divert attention to your feet as they speak. This will help you 1) listen to them better and 2) observe more about them without making judgments, and ultimately create a better understanding of their character.
This is useful in interviews and other professional settings, as well as social settings.
For reducing in-the-moment stress, you can:
Divert attention to the chest. A lot of times the feeling of stress emerges here anyways - instead of ignoring it or fighting it, putting your attention on it (instead of the bubbling inner voice) can prevent a rapid judgement. Your boss might actually be unfair - listening to your body doesn’t change that - but it helps you frame the behavior in a way that maximizes your ability to respond appropriately.
For requesting physical feedback, you can:
Do a body scan.
Head and face (tense or relaxed?)
Neck and shoulders (stiff or loose?)
Chest and stomach (calm or tight?)
Arms and hands (tingly or heavy?)
Hips and lower back (comfortable or achy?)
Legs and feet (tired or rested?)
Just notice what's going on. No need to solve anything right now.
For mid-day reboots, you can:
Simply do the practice exercises (or a different one you create) a few times per day. Combine this with a walk - i.e. feeling your feet on the pavement, hips rotating, arms swinging; the wind on your face and hair - for a superb mid-day reset.
Your body is a great source of information that is worth listening to, and makes the information from external sources even more valuable.
Try it out this week!
If you are:
Making decisions or meeting new people, pause and shift your attention to your body to create cognitive space, expand perspective and double-check if mental shortcuts are actually helping
Feeling stressed, shift your attention to listen to your body in order to slow down the mental whirling that causes anxiety
Incorporating new lifestyle changes, pause and sit with your body, listening to how it responds to the changes you’re making
Working through a busy day, take a moment to divert attention to the body, which closes some mental “tabs” and reboots the operating system
Listening to your body is a skill worth practicing.
Pretty soon, your mind will say thanks.
