One of the conversations at the last Mental Fitness Community event revolved around the significance of using the body, frequently referred to as somatic approaches, to help navigate our emotional landscape. This notion is an especially relevant one in the treatment of trauma and PTSD. American Psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk is a particular proponent of this and his popular works, “The Body Keeps the Score” invites us to discover how the body is critical to the healing of our minds. Of course, science and scientists seldom agree and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman-Barrett, hotly disputes Van Der Kolk’s claims through her own research.
In our daily interactions we are often confronted with the notion that our mind rules our body, that it is all, “mind over matter”, and as my kung fu coach used to quip in the 90’s, “I don’t mind and you don’t matter!”. We are told that if we simply focus enough on something we can make it work and this is taken to the extreme with the concept of manifestation which suggests that we can will our desires into reality.
There is clearly some substance behind this and there are plenty of examples of seemingly miraculous or superhuman feats or which are attributed to the iron resolve of the individual(s) concerned, whether it be social/ political resolve such as Rosa Parks civil rights campaigning, or physical feats such as Wim Hof walking shirtless through snow and ice. What we are capable of does seem to be intrinsically linked to our belief and our willpower in pursuing the belief.
Considering attitudes to mental health a, now largely frowned on, method of trying to tackle people with depression or anxiety is to tell them to, “man up!”, or to, “pull yourself together!”, both of which echo this notion that what is in your head can be simply changed into something more productive.
And conceptually this is true, it is the root of cognitive therapy, and you only need to actively monitor your thoughts and feelings for a day to find that there are ups and downs and that something can happen which can completely shift your mood for better or for worse and that any fog can indeed lift.
But it isn’t always as simple as this, and as a felt experience, it rarely is. Even when we are armed with the knowledge that if we change our thinking we can change how we feel, we cannot reliably break ourselves out of our present mood, a technique sometimes referred to as “breaking state”.
So, if mind over matter is sometimes true why isn’t it always true? Why do some people seem to find that relationship easier to navigate than others? And is it the right approach to have anyway?
The heart of the issue lies with the mistaken concept that almost all of us in the West seem to embrace, which is that our minds and our bodies are somehow separate things. That we could conceptually detach our brain from our body and function as “ourselves” floating in a jar of embryotic fluid (thank you Futurama! And worth checking out Tim Urban’s “waitbutwhy” which explores this theme in the quest for teleportation). And again, for most of us, this is actually how we feel. We feel that our experience of life is witnessed like some sort of movie screen within our head, behind our eyes, a mini “us” sat in the sofa of our mind, taking it all in. In turn our body is some sort of vehicle which “we” pilot around in exploring the world. And like our motor vehicles, we are perhaps not always as careful at taking care of it as we might, fuelling it with bad food and drink, not resting it properly, and maybe not taking it out for a good run as often as we ought…
But our bodies and our minds are not separate, they are different aspects of an integrated whole and we cannot neglect one aspect and expect that the other will be ok. There is a constant feedback loop taking place between body and mind with the goal being to maintain the state of “homeostasis”, which is balanced and stable in the face of external factors. Sensations in our body trigger a response in the brain, and this in turn generates thoughts in our mind. These thoughts then feed back into the body sensations. How we feel is a combination of our felt bodily experience and the thoughts we attribute to that felt experience.
You can explore this for yourself looking at what happens in your body when you are excited for something as opposed to what happens in your body when you are anxious about something. The neurophysiological signs of excitement and anxiety and almost identical. So, you might feel a tightness in the stomach, an accelerated, shortened breathing pattern. But how you feel will depend on the thoughts going through your mind, which will in turn be affected by the circumstances you are in. Sat at the top of a rollercoaster before the plunge? Whether you think you are about to die or are so excited you want to explode the bodily experience will be the same.
Trauma and PTSD can complicate the association between our body and our thoughts, causing parts of us to react as if the danger of the traumatic event is still present in each and every moment, a total disconnect between the concept of a rational mind being able to overcome an obstinate body. Trauma can lead to an inability to connect properly with bodily experiences which means that signals are being fired from the body to the brain but they are not being interpreted properly which creates a very challenging lived experience.
Those who suffer from intense anxiety often feel overwhelming bodily sensations which can cause them to feel they are about to suffer from a heart attack with a tight chest and palpitations.
Simple observation of your own experience on any given day will evidence that the sensations and experience of our bodies trigger and shape our thoughts and our thoughts in turn can create sensations in our bodies.
So, this is what I would like us to explore this week and invite you to consider your own felt experience and whether there are patterns you can learn more about which might unlock a fresh perspective? How can we re connect more honestly with the experience in our bodies and might it help us rebalance the experience of our minds?
Yorumlar