Body language: Your best bet for good health

It seems as if listening has become a lost art. Certainly, with all the distractions bombarding us at any given moment, it is almost impossible to give anything or anyone our undivided attention. Mastery eludes those with an inability to focus. Unfortunately, when it comes to our inability to focus on listening, we miss out on being masters of our relationships. This not only includes the relationships with our spouse, kids, and co-workers, but also includes our relationship with our own bodies.

Just as our family life suffers when we ignore our spouse and children, our health suffers when we ignore our body. Our body is an amazing system with superior intelligence and it has a lot to say. The problem is that we are generally so busy being busy that we just don’t listen, the results of which can be disastrous for our health.

A million messages…

One reason listening to your body seems so elusive is precisely because it has so much to say. At any given moment, your body receives millions and millions of data bytes from all of your sense organs.

It not only includes your eyes and ears, but also information from your skin, internal organs and a host of other bodily systems... too numerous to list. The tsunami of data that your body collects in a day would probably overload all of Google’s servers. There’s so much data that your brain has dedicated a separate processor just to handle it all.

The awareness processor

This processor is a spot in your brain pressed against your skull right behind your forehead directly between your eyeballs, only slightly higher. Called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex [VMPFC], it is responsible for our embodied self-awareness—our perception of all the bodily information.

Alan Fogel, the author of The Psychophysiology of Self-Awareness: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Body Sense describes embodied self-awareness as “the ability to pay attention to ourselves, to feel our sensations, emotions, and movements” within the present moment.

While we may have a dedicated processor for our embodied self-awareness, the VMPFC has a bit of competition.

Twist in the story

There is another processor that sits right on top of the VMPFC. It is called the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex [DMPFC]. The DMPFC is in charge of handling our conceptual self-awareness, which involves more abstract judgments and assessments about ourselves. When our conceptual self-awareness dominates, it can trick us into thinking that what we are feeling emotionally is actually what our body is experiencing physically.

For instance, that second helping of dessert or the intoxication of too much wine may seem to “feel good” to our body. But it really only satisfies the conceptual awareness of the DMPFC.

An overactive DMPFC can lead us to make choices that are not good for our overall health. When we work too hard, become self-sacrificing people pleasers, eat too much, lie around on the couch, or engage in a host of other addictive behaviours, we may become model employees, good buddies or a lot of fun at parties, but our body pays a huge price [thanks to DMPFC].

Also, at any given moment, we can either listen to the VMPFC [embodied self-awareness processor] or the DMPFC [conceptual self-awareness processor], but not to both at the same time. So, when the DMPFC is active, the VMPFC gets ignored. And when we ignore our embodied self-awareness processor, our relationship with our body [and our health] really suffers.

Reconnecting with your body

You can mend this relationship simply by tuning out some of the static and listening to what your body is actually saying. This may be difficult at first, but it gets better with practice and time.

Further, as you listen to your body, you may discover that your body is actually pretty angry with you. And you may not like what it has to say—it may begin sending you all kinds of uncomfortable messages like: "we are working too hard” [fatigue, joint and muscle pain], or “we are eating too much" [bloating, reflux, nausea], or “we have had enough alcohol” [headache, dizziness, numbness].

It may even get really nasty and some of the emotions that were hiding behind these behaviours like disappointment, grief, anger, despair and loneliness may rise to the surface.

Do not despair. As you begin to listen and respond to the messages your body sends, you can expect to start feeling a whole lot better. Not only that, but the more you listen to your body, the listening also becomes easier. And once you and your body get to know each other again, things will smooth out.

Listening helps

With the assistance of imaging technology that allows reading brain activity and recording brain growth, neuroscientists are now convinced that the brain grows like a muscle. In other words, the more you use it, the stronger it gets. This suggests that the more you listen to your body, the stronger your embodied self-awareness processor [VMPFC] will get.

This is a very good thing because the VMPFC maintains two-way communication with the rest of your brain.

Thanks to this communication, the VMPFC can facilitate active neurochemical and neurohormonal changes in the body’s tissues including the sensory receptors in our muscles, skin, gut, and cardiovascular system.

As a result, the simple act of listening to your body creates physiological changes that will enhance cellular healing and make healthy behavioural choices easier.

A study by the California Institute of Technology [Caltech] too supports this. Caltech scientists observed that people with a more active VMPFC seem to make healthier food choices. In the study published in the Journal of Science [May 2009], researchers noticed that when people chose foods based on nutritional quality and perceived health benefits, regardless of taste, their VMPFC literally became alive with activity. In contrast, people who chose food based entirely on how it tasted, had a quiet VMPFC.