Season 1 Episode 4 - The Mind/Body Connection
Hey, it's Katy and I'm here to help you befriend your mind, body and soul. If you stick around with me long enough, you might find that you're a mindful soul too. Hello friend! Today we are talking about the mind -body connection and if you're here, I'm assuming that you are interested in living a long happy life.
I know I am. This includes both our physical and our mental health, of course. Both of those things require our intentional focus. If we're going through our life and not paying any attention to our physical or mental health, that's probably when we're going to start hitting some problems and have a less long and happy life.
Right? And so here's the thing, we all have mental health. You don't have to have a diagnosable problem to have mental health. Like you have a brain, you have mental health, we really have to reduce the stigma around mental health and the fact that it fucking exists.
We all have it. We all have to take care of it and you don't have to have an illness to want to take care of your mental and physical health. So I'm not talking about being an elite athlete or a perfect, always happy saint of a human being.
This doesn't fucking exist. In fact, sometimes when I see some of these health shows that are biohacking and all this stuff, you can go to the extreme at trying to be physically and mentally healthy.
I'm not talking about that at all. Right? I'm just talking about living a generally long and happy life. So to do that, we have to take care of our whole picture, which is our mind and our body. And so, historically in medical treatment, they separate physical health from mental health.
And mental health itself is very new on the scene. In the last 100 years, we're really studying and looking at mental health and understanding the mind and all of that. And so typically, if you have a physical health issue, you go over to your medical doctors and you see your primary care or specialists on that side.
If you're struggling with anxiety or depression or relationship issues, then you go over to these other providers who are your mental health providers. And what we're really learning over the last, I don't know, 20, 30 years, is that this is a problem.
Our mind and our body are not separate, which seems super obvious because like, Obviously, the brain is part of a body and the brain connects to our nervous system that goes down and controls everything in our body.
So we're going to talk a little later about how emotions are full body system responses. So there's this huge movement towards something called integrated care in healthcare. Looking at the holistic picture of a human and understanding this integral connection between our mind and body.
Like we know when we're stressed and we're struggling emotionally, our immune system goes down, we're much more likely to get sick. And our physical health directly impacts our mental health. If we're not feeling well physically or we have an injury or a chronic illness, then our mental health is going to suffer.
We feel more depressed or down anxious, right? In a future episode, I'm going to share a personal story where I had this experience of really getting clear on this mind -body connection when I was dealing with some physical health issues and also mental health things that came along with that.
But that's for another day. So why is understanding this mind -body connection so important? First of all, we live in a hyper -logical society. So our species has gone through the scientific revolution.
We also live in a patriarchy that tends to be extra logical, like ignore your emotions, right? Ignore your feelings and just focus on the logic and the facts of things. And there's benefits to logic.
We need to be rational. Science is amazing. But we've gotten a little out of balance in our ability to pay attention to the body. And the body is where we feel emotions. So our brains and signals all the way down into every system of our body when we feel an emotion.
It impacts our heart rate, our digestion, our muscle tension, our temperature, so many different things. And so being in a hyper -logical society, we've been shaped to ignore our intuitive wisdom. So when we speak about emotions, part of that is like our gut feelings, and our intuition.
And so we wanna be able to acknowledge both the logical and the wisdom of emotion, which is in our body. Many earlier mental health treatments are very logic -mind focused. So think of cognitive behavioral therapy.
If you've ever heard of that, it's one of the most common forms of therapy. It's great, I love it. And it's about our thoughts. what are you thinking and how are your thoughts impacting your behavior, how you feel as well, but your behavior, and it's very much about changing your thoughts.
So if you can change your thoughts, there's your logic, right, then you can change how you're feeling and the behaviors and actions that follow. And that's absolutely true. However, what we're coming to understand more and more is that our emotions, our body actually influences our thoughts too.
So there's this, you really can't even separate it, this relationship between our body and our mind that they impact one another, right? So other treatments or therapeutic modalities like somatic experiencing, which is something that I've been trained in as well, is more body focused.
And so how does our body store things like stress or trauma or difficult emotions? And how do we actually tap into the body through movement, through breathing, and tapping, like there's many different ways to directly tap into our nervous system through the body in order to shift an emotional experience and really starting from there?
Because you can't outthink a strong emotional reaction sometimes, especially if you have had trauma. That is hardwired into the nervous system, and you can't out rationalize it or think it. So we have to really tap into the body and start with the wisdom that's there.
I board certified in dialectical behavioral therapy, which is a very skill based form of therapy. But one reason why I love it is it is actually emotion focused. So it It pulls in elements of cognitive behavioral therapy and looking at your thoughts, checking the facts on your thoughts, you know, that logical rational piece.
But it's very more leaning on understanding which emotions are coming up, normalizing and understanding those emotions so that you can work with those emotions, which again are a body based experience.
Another reason why it's important to understand the mind body connection is that our ability to take care of our physical health is going to improve when we can understand this. We're way more intentional and think about how many times have you pushed through or ignored an illness or an injury?
Maybe you're sick, but you keep working or you know you have a mild injury, but you keep exercising and so you push through that illness or injury, but then you just get stuck there longer. or there's more complications that come up.
And so if we don't understand this connection between our mind and how that impacts our body and the choices we're making mentally and emotionally, then we're going to get sick more, we're going to get injured more often.
Anyone who has ever exercised knows that pacing is the name of the game, right? If you push yourself too fast and too hard, you're going to get injured. And so knowing how to connect with the body, know what the body's needing.
Does it need me to pull back a little right now? Does it need me to slow down? Does it need me to rest? Is a really, really important practice that we're not usually taught in our society. We're just taught to push through and go, go, go.
So this mind -body connection helps us work with our body, our illnesses and injuries and exercise much more effectively than when we don't have that mind -body connection. And so another benefit of really understanding the mind -body connection, which I've mentioned a little bit before, is understanding how directly our thoughts and mental health impacts our physical health and vice versa.
Like there is a chemical connection. Our thoughts are simply neurotransmitters firing in our brain, right? And they create a chemical cascade towards our emotions. And so our mental health, what we think and how we feel, how we cope with the emotions that are coming up, is going to directly impact the health of our vital organs, of our immune system, of all the other chemical systems in the body.
And again, I'm going to share a personal experience in an upcoming podcast that might make this a little clearer. Mindfulness is a mind -body connection practice. It is all about connecting with our body and having this awareness of what's going on with our mental and emotional health as well as our physical health so that we're not kind of ahead separated from our body.
Mindfulness is about paying attention on purpose, non -judgmentally and with curiosity. So a lot of people say, I don't need more mindfulness in my life. I am already way too aware. I pay way too much attention to way too many things and it drives me nuts.
That's a sign that you need more mindfulness because it's not about just paying attention. It's about how are you paying attention? Are you doing it from a non -judgmental, way? Right? So with mindfulness, we zoom our awareness out and it's almost like looking down on yourself, right?
And observing and noticing, what am I thinking? What am I feeling? How does my body feel in this moment? Is it tired? Is it hungry? Is it hurting? Does it need me to pause? Does it need me to actually get it moving a little bit more?
Right? So if we're not paying attention on purpose and zooming out to notice these things non -reactively, then it's going to be 10 times harder to tend to your needs in a way that's effective. So that can work with our body and exercise, right?
There's this term called proprioception, which is our awareness of how our body is moving. How are you placing your feet as you run? How are you pacing your breathing? It's awareness of our body in space, really.
And sometimes we have to teach ourselves how to have that awareness so that we can work with our body more effectively. The other piece here is mindfulness with our thoughts and our emotions. So we can zoom out and look at our thoughts, watch our thoughts, be curious about our thoughts.
Are they helpful? Are they facts or are they assumptions? Are they catastrophizing? So that we can direct our mind in ways that is going to be more helpful, help us feel better, help us be more effective, because our thoughts do have a huge impact on how we're feeling.
And the same goes for our emotions when we zoom out with mindfulness, even with a distressing emotion, we're going to notice, how does my body feel? Anxiety is here. I feel it in my chest. There's a tightness.
My breathing is rather or I'm feeling like I need to, I'm feeling antsy, right? And so we can become aware of anxiety, non -judgmentally. It's not a good or a bad thing. It's just an experience in the body.
And from there, we look at what does my body need? Maybe I need to engage in some deep breathing. Maybe I need to engage in some distraction or self soothing. Take a warm bath, take a walk outside. And without this mindful awareness, we're an autopilot and we're believing everything we think.
We're reacting to our emotions or fighting with our emotions and that just leads to more suffering and less effectiveness overall, right? So I wanted to give you some ideas for practice exercises when it comes to this mindful awareness of the body and this mind -body connection.
If you've ever done meditation, a lot of it is this, right, where you're doing a body scan and you might start at the top of your head and scan your awareness down through your body, noticing muscle tension, noticing, you know, any pain or sensations that you might be feeling, noticing your breathing, your chest and your belly rising and falling with each breath.
So if you've ever done meditations, you've probably experienced some of these exercises. For right now, I'm going to ask you three questions and I'm going to pause after each question for you to see if you can notice what I'm directing you to notice.
Okay? Okay? So can you feel your hair touching your head? you Can you feel the space between your eyes? you Can you feel the bottoms of your feet? you And so, as you're noticing each of those things, you're just curiously scanning.
You're just curiously noticing. And these very simple practices can strengthen this awareness and this mind -body connection so that over time you can implement some of these mindfulness skills that I'll be talking more about to be way more effective in your life at managing thoughts, managing emotions, reaching your goals, navigating relationships, because our mental and emotional wellness really becomes a foundation for so much, including our physical health.
So the last thing I wanted to share with you today is the research that's been done on the benefit of practicing mindfulness if you experience things like chronic pain or chronic health conditions. So again, people might think, oh, I need less awareness of my pain.
I need less awareness of this chronic health condition because it's causing me distress. And again, it goes back to how are you paying attention? So there is countless research articles that show people who practice mindfulness have much less distress when it comes to physical pain, chronic pain, chronic health conditions.
And the reason why that happens is that mindfulness practice brings in a neutrality and a non -reactivity. Because when we react to pain, and I use the term pain. broadly, I always use that term because it can be used for physical pain, emotional pain, right?
There's a million ways that we can experience pain or discomfort in life. But when we react to our discomfort or pain, all that does is increase our suffering. It creates more tension and energy around that thing.
That phrase that what you resist persists, that's like physics, right? So if we can learn to notice physical pain, hmm. Okay, I'm feeling this sensation in my arm. It's uncomfortable. I don't like it.
We can acknowledge those things, but we stay neutral and curious about it. These are my pain receptors that are firing right now. They're sending a signal to my brain. And this is like assuming you've had all potentially risky health conditions weeded out and you know what that chronic pain is from, then you know it's not immediately, it's not life threatening or anything like that.
You can just notice the experience and not fight it as much so that you can move through those moments with more ease. Think about when you're sick and you're just like, fuck, this sucks. You're struggling with it and you're fighting with it.
Your misery goes up. But when you can sort of accept and sink back into, okay, I'm uncomfortable right now. This is just this moment. So mindfulness is also awareness of the present moment. Knowing that the moment always passes, it comes and goes.
And we can learn to tolerate painful moments much more smoothly. So I hope this episode was insightful and helpful to understand a little bit more about the future. the mind -body connection and why it's so important for us to understand and how mindfulness can really help us in increasing our awareness on our mind -body connection so that we can better take care of our physical health, our mental and emotional health and live that happy, happier.
It's never going to be always happy, but happier, more satisfying life. All right, that's it for today. I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. Talk to you later.
