Written by Hadi Jalali | Published on April 9, 2023 | Last revised on on April 9, 2023
How to Listen to Your Body, Part 2
In part one, I discussed the value in paying attention and listening to our bodies. I examined how we often think we’re listening, but are actually making assumptions based on old preconceptions—and living on autopilot a lot of the time.
If you haven’t read part one, I recommend you do before reading on. This will all make more sense!
Here, in part two, I talk about:
- Practical methods for how to listen to our bodies;
- Different angles to consider when listening;
- And how, instead of taking science as fact, we can use it as a foundation for responding to our bodies.
How to listen to the body
Dropping preconceptions
Terms like hunger, thirst, and stress are conceptual interpretations. We saw this in part one. They’re ideas, or containers, for familiar physiological processes coming into our awareness. Let’s unpack that:
- They’re ideas or containers: they’re words (or phrases) our culture has agreed upon to mean something specific.
- They’re familiar: if they weren’t, we wouldn’t know what to call them. That makes unfamiliar sensations scary. Imagine if a small, specific spot in your belly hurts and doesn’t go away after a week…
- They’re physiological processes: they’re the activity of the body as a biological system.
For example, we “know” we have a body, even though we rarely feel all our limbs at the same time. Instead, we have a mental map of it—a preconception. We only notice parts of it at a time: bursts and waves of sensations here and there.
We take complex patterns of sensations, and we put names on them. We do this to make communication easier, both with ourselves and others. It makes more sense to say “I’m hungry” than “I feel a vacuum below my sternum”. But the more familiar we assume we are about our body, the more we lose touch with its subtleties.
So to listen, we first have to set aside our preconceptions and ask, how am I feeling? And feel the raw sensations without trying to “package” what comes up into a familiar concept.
How are you actually feeling?
When paying attention to a raw sensation, notice its qualities:
- Location:
- Where is it located?
- Is it close to the surface of your skin, or is it deeper inside?
- Form:
- What shape is it?
- How wide is it?
- Does it expand or contract?
- Movement:
- Is it still or moving?
- Does it appear in waves?
- Does it go in circles?
- Pattern:
- Is it constant or throbbing?
- Does it feel diffuse or sharp?
- Is it light or heavy?
These qualities are still concepts and preconceptions. It’s impossible to not use concepts in language. But they’re more specific and categorical than how we typically describe what we sense. they help us move past our habitual ideas and investigate how we feel.
These qualities are also not exhaustive. Use them, but don’t limit yourself to them if you want to go further.
Open your perspective
Listening to sensations in isolation is the first layer in listening, but it’s a bit dry by itself. It’s like reading a text message from someone, rather than hearing them speak on the phone.
So the next layer is to consider sensations in a larger context:
- Environment:
- Who am I with?
- Am I indoors or outdoors?
- How bright is it?
- What’s the temperature?
- Does it feel dry or humid?
- Timing:
- What time of day is it?
- How far into the week, month, and year are we?
- State of mind:
- How’s my mood?
- How bright does the world feel?
- How light do I feel?
Taking our environment, time, and state of mind into consideration provides context. Feeling our internal sensations is only part of the larger picture, which includes the world around us, as well as the tone of our minds.
Now for the final layer. When we listen to our bodies for a particular outcome, we also have to consider everything over a span of time.
Say, I want to determine whether I feel hydrated enough. If I’m dehydrated, it may take anywhere from a few hours to several days for my body to rehydrate. So I need to listen to my body over several days while increasing my intake of liquids. And not just an hour after drinking an electrolyte beverage.
This span of time may be much shorter for other outcomes. For example, to test if l-theanine can reduce my coffee jitters, I would only need to listen to my body for a few hours.
Listen for resistance
When listening, we might favor noticing certain sensations and overlook others. We might also gloss over certain sensations, ignoring them as soon as they come up, and moving onto others. There could be many reasons for this:
- Unfamiliarity is sometimes uncomfortable, and we may unconsciously avoid paying attention to unfamiliar sensations.
- Due to past trauma, certain sensations may make us feel uneasy. So in order to feel safe, we avoid giving them our attention.
- Chronic pain tends to numb. We may not even notice that we aren’t noticing sensations in an area, if that area has been in pain for a long time.
We might also actively resist paying attention to certain sensations. In this case, it may be worth asking why:
- Does it feel shameful to listen to these sensations? What does this shame feel like? Try to investigate its qualities as you did earlier.
- Does it feel like a waste of time? What’s so different about these sensations that they’re not worth my time?
A personal example to make sense of all this
Let’s pause here for an example, because I realize how some of this may seem abstract.
I recently finished a three-day, water-only fast. A few hours after I broke my fast, I had a strong shift in my energy levels. I felt fantastic—significantly better than I’d felt in some time. My body was awake and energized, and I felt motivated and clear-headed. This hadn’t happened after my other fasts over the years. Or, the shift in energy wasn’t significant enough for me to remember.
Regardless, it was a great state to be in, and I didn’t want to let it fade. So I started listening to my body to investigate:
- What did this state of high energy feel like, close up? Which parts of it felt mental, and which parts physical?
- Did my energy change after I ate or drank anything in particular?
- How did my energy change throughout the day?
- Was my sleep any different that night?
I was especially curious if, over the following days, anything I ate lowered my energy. I suspected dietary intolerance, or that I ate too much of something, or not enough of certain nutrients.
I don’t think it’s possible to do this type of investigation without listening closely. “Feeling high energy” is a broad sense, even though it has distinct characteristics.
I continued with my usual routines. Over the following days my energy levels lowered down to my old “normal”. Since then, I’ve been experimenting to see how I can get them back up. I haven’t made any conclusions yet. For now, I’ve stopped eating milk products, and have limited my gluten intake. Cheese and Greek yogurt were my only sources of lactose. As for gluten, I’ve cut out bread, but I still eat home-grown wheat and spelt sprouts.
How to frame bodily signals
Now that we have a general notion of what “listening to the body” means, we can move onto making sense of it.
Seeing our limits (and avoiding headaches)
It’s important to first note that both listening and interpreting have limits. And that these limits aren’t stable—they change throughout the day as well as throughout our lives.
Our capacity to listen may depend on how awake or present we feel, which can vary throughout the day. It also changes drastically with pain, making us more sensitive to notice pain and less sensitive to other sensations.
Interoception, the process of interpreting sensations, is subjective. The very particular way you feel a sensation only feels that way to you. And like our capacity to listen, it’s dependent on many factors, and is subject to change.
Given these limits, let’s not get so serious that we give ourselves a headache while we try to make sense of things. Listening and interoception do improve with time and deliberate practice. Curiosity will go a long way in making the process playful and enjoyable.
Considering the mind-body connection
We’re all familiar with intuition to some degree—the sudden knowing that arises without deliberate conscious thought. It often shows up as gut feelings. It gives a strong sense of certainty or insight about a situation or people in particular. I bring it up because I see interoception as a precursor to intuition.
We shouldn’t disregard intuition in favor of logical analysis. Rather, the two often complement each other. This is important because the mind and body work as one:
- The nervous system connects all organs and systems of the body to the brain.
- Each of these organs and systems puts out chemicals into circulation. The brain interprets these chemicals, and triggers the release of others. In turn, other organs and systems read these chemicals.
- Emotional centers of the brain are connected with the nervous system, immune system, and endocrine (hormonal) system.
- A network of nerves (called the cardiac plexus) surrounds the heart. These nerves have predictive capacities, and connect to the brain. In the words of Dr. Gabor Maté, “the heart has a brain”.
- The gut, which we think of as a digestive organ, is also an immune organ and a sensory organ. It reads the environment using a network of neurons (called the enteric nervous system). It can respond by altering digestion, blood flow, and hormones. The gut actually sends more messages to the brain than vice versa. Essentially, “Gut feelings” are a reading of the environment.
Western science sees these links. But sadly, western medicine doesn’t yet accept the mind-body unity.
Intuition is a valuable tool, but we have to be aware of its limitations. It’s affected by our past experiences, cultural conditioning, and present state. We may also mistake other senses and urges as intuition—especially in regards to food. So it’s essential to train our intuition using interoception.
Listening to and interpreting bodily signals (interoception) strengthen the mind-body link. And the deeper this link, the better we get at responding to our environment with ease (intuition).
How to respond to bodily signals
Questioning assumptions
To decide what to listen to—what needs our attention—our assumptions are a great place to start:
- I drink a lot of water.
- I eat enough vegetables.
- I chew well and don’t swallow my food too quickly.
- I feel good after eating comfort food.
- I never eat out of boredom.
This is important because we often overlook what we consider “normal”. Say, I’m convinced I drink enough water, but am actually always mildly dehydrated. I’m likely less sensitive to the sensations that signal dehydration. This is very common.
Going through the process of questioning our assumptions can help us find a new level of “normal”, and lead us to set different benchmarks.
Say, my benchmark for eating enough fruits and vegetables is constipation. As long as I’m not constipated, I assume I’m eating enough fruits and vegetables. In most scenarios, that would be a low benchmark. I probably eat the bare minimum in fruits and veggies. And I have no idea how much better I’d feel if I ate more of them. My “normal” is likely dysfunctional compared to someone who eats more plants.
To test our benchmarks, science is a great place to start. But it has limitations.
Science is not enough
In spite of the emphasis we put on science here at Habits.fyi, I have to emphasize that it’s not the whole picture. Let me explain.
I want the various systems in my body to work optimally and in harmony with one another. That’s one of my main reasons for engaging in health practices. The result I aim for is to feel “good”. I want to have the physical and emotional capacity to engage with the world, and not feel limited by pain, illness, or discomfort.
To get there, I try to understand how things work… to a certain extent. Being told that something is “good for me” isn’t enough; it only raises questions:
- What makes it good?
- How does it work?
- What differentiates it from that other thing that’s also “good for me”?
- When would it be useful?
- How does it interact with everything else I’m doing?
I’m drawn toward scientific research because it often answers such questions. Knowing the science behind nutrition, exercise and lifestyle gives me a foundation to make choices. Choices that are likely to help me achieve my goals.
But only likely. As I mentioned in part one, most science doesn’t prove anything. Rather, it demonstrates a level of confidence for a given result. It’s a great base to build our health practices on, but it’s up to us to see what works for us.
For example, scientific research suggests that Ubiquinol may increase energy levels. It does so by improving mitochondrial function. But if my lack of energy is due to a food intolerance, Ubiquinol may not resolve anything for me.
Taking charge
It’s finally time to put all of the above to work.
We drop our preconceptions, pay attention to the raw qualities of our sensations, and consider them in the context of our outer and emotional environment.
We notice our resistance to certain sensations, and, understanding that learning to listen may take time, we accept our limited capacity to make sense of it all at the start.
We understand that intuition plays a part in all of this. Finally, as we question our assumptions and take science as a starting point rather than fact, we’re ready to act.
Here, acting means talking back to our bodies. We’ve heard what our bodies say, and we intervene to make a change. There’s no ultimate manual for this stage, but here are some steps you may find useful:
- Categorize what you’ve detected in your body, if possible.
- Refer to science-backed resources (such as this very site!) to see how you can intervene. Review your options, and pick one to try. Trying more than one will make it harder to determine which intervention was effective.
- Set up an experiment for yourself:
- Try the intervention you’ve chosen, and keep at it for at least two weeks—unless you feel it’s impacting you negatively.
- Listen to your body attentively during this period. Unless you have a great memory, write down your insights.
- You may respond to some things quickly, but food and lifestyle interventions generally take some time to show their effects. And since they act on us gradually, we may not appreciate their effects (positive or negative) unless we’ve been paying close attention and keeping track.
- At the end of the trial period, compare your current state to how it was at the start. How different are your sensations? How has your baseline changed? Can you come to a convincing conclusion about these changes?
Let’s imagine I have trouble with sleep. When I first go to bed, it takes me some time to fall asleep. And if I wake up to use the bathroom, I have trouble falling back asleep again.
Here, I have to pay attention to how my body is when I’m in bed:
- Most nights, I’m relaxed. I don’t sense any muscle tension or feeling of agitation. Two interventions come to mind: magnesium and caffeine.
- Magnesium is recommended for sleep, in part because it relaxes muscles. But I’m aware that it only helps if I’m deficient. Since I eat several servings of leafy greens as well as nuts, I doubt I’m deficient.
- I had my last cup of coffee at 11 am, but drank green tea until 3 pm. Even though I’m not agitated, I may need to stop drinking tea and coffee earlier than 3 pm.
- I’m not mentally agitated either. I’m able to calm my thoughts before I sleep, so anxiolytics (e.g. ashwagandha or bacopa monnieri) may not help either.
- Moving onto my environment:
- My circadian rhythm may be dysregulated. It’s been cloudy the last few days, so it’s possible that I didn’t get enough morning sunlight.
- I’ve been sleeping with the windows closed. A colder room may help me sleep more deeply, so I’ll aim to air out my bedroom for a few hours before bedtime.
I’ve thought of three possible interventions, all very low-risk. Because of the importance of sleep, I’ll try all three for two weeks. During this time, I’ll track my bodily signals:
- Do I fall asleep faster?
- Do I wake up less throughout the night?
- Do I feel more relaxed? More tense?
- How do I feel immediately after waking up?
- How rested do I feel the rest of the day?
This will help me determine if this triple-combo intervention is successful. If it is, I may start extending my caffeine cutoff time to see if anything has changed. If nothing changes, I’ll continue drinking green tea till 3 pm.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading! My aim has been to find a practical framework for relating to our bodies with a long-term vision informed by science. And I hope you’ve found some of it thought-provoking.