Introception: A Deer in Headlights

I’ve been told to listen to my body. It’s always the answer to difficult questions when considering wellbeing. How much should I push myself? When do I need to rest, as opposed to when I want to cannonball dive into a nest of blankets and doritos because I’m avoiding things?

Listen to your body

The problem is that this doesn’t work if your relationship with your body is rudimentary. The people giving the advice have a completely different communication style with their bodies than us. It’s like they are a fluent Spanish speaker telling us to ask for a bagel in Spain when we are working in English, blindfolded and playing experimental electronic music through headphones on loop. There is a ton of work we need to do in order to get a bagel. Right now their advice sounds like nonsense. 

In the 13th Warrior, Antonio Banderas learns how to speak Norse in a chatty training montage scene while sitting around a fire. When the astonished Norsemen ask him how he did it, he hisses at them (reminiscent of Puss in boots) “I listened.” The average time it takes to learn enough of a language that a patient native speaker will give you a bagel (possibly thrown in anger) is 300 hours of listening time via the immersion method according to Dreaming Spanish. Why should the language of the body take any less time, if it’s a language we don’t know?

For the last 3 decades, my brain body communication has been

“DOING THE THING NOW. REPLY Y/_”

There is sometimes a reply but it's not mandatory, it’s increasingly rare and the neocortex isn’t reading it anyway. There’s a special tray in the brain office.

“NEED SLEEP?”

“Y”

We are on the wartime telegram communication strategy. Every letter costs money.

Of course, the body knows the brain's language. It’s been listening closely, in my case for 37 years. The problem is that the body isn’t interested in bridging the gap anymore. Suddenly the brain has to make nice.

Interoception is the process of learning how to listen to the body, but in chronic dysregulation, it’s also the process of learning to have conversations with a body that’s ceased negotiations in favour of picketing. Or, to put it another way, learning to talk with someone that I have ignored, neglected, foisted all my work onto while taking the credit, openly stated in front of them that I’d like to hire someone better and given so much unpaid overtime that they sleep under the printer.

It’s as if I’m the head of an international enterprise, and I’ve just found out that the office janitor is the single point of failure for everything that happens here, and I only found out because they stopped doing anything. I don’t run the place, they do.

The only way to get the lights on is to start our relationship from scratch. But that involves admitting how badly it’s been managed to date. So I’m ashamed, embarrassed, my ego is on the floor and I have to fashion my first ever olive branch. Little wonder that first contact goes poorly.

“MORNING” I roar, from halfway across the room. The body doesn’t think I am talking to them and ignores me.

“YOU, BY THE KITCHEN,” I shout.

They look up, startled, like a prey animal.

“ER, HOW…HOW ARE...” I regroup. “GOOD FOR THAT MEETING LATER?”

No wait, that’s just task assignment! Pivot!

“OR NOT.” If I keep being this loud, the body will be able to hear me, which is good.

“YOU COULD JUST RELAX. HOW LONG DO YOU NEED TO DO THAT FOR EXACTLY?”

I pull out the timer app on my phone because I am being helpful.

“TAKE IT EASY” I bellow. I heard that at a yoga class once. It’s a restful statement and definitely ticks a box.

Oddly, the body does not reply to this missive and is even less visible as I march through my day.

In order to have the kind of dialogue where we know what the body wants and needs, we have to get past the telegram stage, and past the stage where we are trying to reach out, but the body trusts us about as much as an armour plated lion. 

What we want of course is the relationship we have with close friends. They visit, we go from offering tea to hearing about the tricky moments in a marriage or inexplicable sadness in under 15 minutes. We connect over deep feelings, tears, giggles, hugs, and spend an hour in a long rambling conversation that feels like two people wandering in the woods, not sure where they’re going, not needing to know, choosing together. Safe, unpractised, layered and true connection. 

That sounds like just the thing. It’s worth a go.

“DO YOU WANT TEA?” I approach the body with a new strategy.

The body freezes. 

The problem is that I have never really made my body tea. Traditionally I make it to stimulate the brain, put it in front of my body and then don’t drink it because I am busy. Only now do I see how cruel that is. Of course this looks like a trap.

“THIS IS NOT A TRAP.” That’s covered that.

I rack my brains for the appropriate greeting ritual. A hug!

I hug the body. This is called havening, and I watched a Youtube video that described 2 minutes as an optimal minimum.

My body twitches helplessly. It has no idea what is happening. I count down the time out loud and then stop, realising how weird this would be with anyone else.

“I will now scan you,” I say in a quiet “calm” tone.

My body, still shocked at being clamped, continues to freeze as I assess it from head to toe. I sense nothing but an image flashes into my mind of a small mammal looking at me wide eyed from a burrow.

“SO!” I need to stop roaring. I would not roar at a friend, it would alarm them. I cough, and restart. 

“So, how are you doing?”

Unsurprisingly, the body is not forthcoming.

What are the key ingredients of trust, with someone who has not historically been trustworthy?

Well time, obviously. 

Patience. Consistency. Compassion. Taking an interest without ulterior motives.

Relationships don’t happen instantly because we want them to. 

Unsuccessful lines for building a good relationship:

“We need to have this friendship locked in by Tuesday so I can depend on you to drive me everywhere. So, tell me your three biggest fears.”

Traditionally in sitcoms the guest actor playing the unreliable parent is ousted when it turns out they only wanted a relationship with their adult child to take advantage of their money/free miles/access to police files. 

The goal to be well is not an ulterior motive, but our bodies flipped the safety switch on, and rushed attempts to reverse this will feel like a “brain” thing.

A goal stops being ulterior when it serves the brain and the body. The body wants to have energy and be friends with the brain and hike in the woods carrying a tent while singing show tunes (or whatever your joyful place is). 

Cats don’t want to be backed into corners, desperately holding onto the curtain while swearing at you in feline. They know it’s not a sustainable position, they just can’t puzzle their way out of it. Before they go Butch Cassidy and Sundance all over your face, you need to use your ridiculously over engineered cortex to figure out how to get to a place where both of you have good options in front of you.

We want to get to a position with the body where being active, productive and social is a happy outcome for everyone. 

We know how to do that with cats.

Back off. It takes as long as it takes. Stressed cats feel about urgent tones of voice the way Stephen King’s kids feel about clowns.

SOFT VOICE
Be kind in a regular consistent way.

Mouse toy

It’s a great first draft for befriending the body. 

And at some point in consistent, compassionate interoception, the body starts trusting the brain.

Stomach rumbles, hiccups, sleepiness, a sudden desire for a banana, a visceral hatred of the feel of velvet, a requirement to look at a tree. A really quiet request for something, hovering quietly at the back door of the brain.

The body needs to see that however weird its communication, we are trying to listen. That our biggest priority right now is being here.

Eventually, we reach a point where our bodies are telling us, in great detail how they’re doing because they know that we want to know. And we have learned how to understand their weird antics as complex speech. At that point, the question of whether or not to push ourselves to do X becomes moot. The brain and the body decide together.