Have you ever watched a scary movie and despite telling yourself it’s not real, your heart starts racing? Alfred Hitchcock was a genius at exploiting the mind body connection by playing upon psychological fears and leaving the audience shrieking based upon suggestive scenes.
Mind Body Feedback Loop
The mind body connection is a feedback loop based on communication between your thoughts and feelings. The mind influences the body and the body influences the mind. Feelings are a physical sensation experienced in the body.
This interconnectedness has been scientifically proven due to an area in the brain related to thinking, which has links to involuntary body functions such as heart rate and blood pressure.
The feeling that cannot find its expression in tears will cause other organs to weep. Henry Mandsley
Stress can cause weight gain or loss, high blood pressure, or heart attacks, by releasing the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline.
When you are nervous, you can feel butterflies in your stomach, increased heart rate, and shallow breathing.
Public speaking is one of the top fears for many people. This tends to result in a dry mouth which is the body’s natural defense mechanism, making it more challenging to speak.
Survival Brain: Ancient History Impact
The mind cannot differentiate between real and imaginary. It reacts by recreating the same emotions and feelings.
Quite often, feelings can trigger the memory of an event. This stimulates the primitive brain which contains the amygdala, in charge of survival.
Although this was the result of an old story, your system becomes hijacked by ancient history and you’re no longer living in the present.
When you are stressed or fearful, the amygdala gets triggered and signals to determine if this is a threat to survival. The survival response can become triggered and you go into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Everyone has at least 1 typical response based on the original source of the adverse or traumatic experience.
The more frequent or longer each episode, the more stress and energy remain in your body. Over time, an overactive nervous system can be quite harmful to the immune system.
Stories Are Stored In The Body
Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past. Besel Van Der Kolk
If your story is filled with emotional pain, this can manifest in your body. If you choose to ignore your emotions, this can back-fire and cause harm to your body and mind.
Do not suppress your emotions as you need to feel to heal.
When we experience difficult emotions, we tend to run away by using numbing behaviors to avoid the discomfort. These unhealthy distractions temporarily numb the pain, only to compound the distress when we are no longer engaging with them.
The numbing most associated with harmful behaviors are alcohol, drugs, food (overeating or undereating), and gambling. But even healthy behaviors can be detrimental in excess such as exercise, orthorexia (only eating healthy food), workaholism, and binge watching.
By leaning into these unpleasant feelings we’re able to unlock hidden messages. The secrets held within enable us to navigate the rough seas and learn what we need. In a similar way we can communicate with our beloved dog or cat, we eventually recognize what the signs mean.
Through observation, we’re able to decode the messages and properly care for our mind and body.
Mind And Body Hold The Key For Relief
The wisdom of the body is the healer of trauma. The body keeps the score but it also holds the key to healing. Peter Levine
When you feel confident, your posture improves as you stand straighter, and your breath and heart rate are more measured. This confidence can expand into feeling powerful and resilient in your mind and body.
Some people have benefitted by using power poses, the most well-known being the superwoman pose. There seems to be a correlation between the poses and impact on your mind, improving how you feel about yourself mentally and projecting confidence to others.
There is a powerful, fast-acting technique based on the mind body connection called Havening®. This psycho-sensory technique combines neuroscience with touch to mimic the soothing sensation a child receives from a mother's touch. Havening® helps to release painful or negative memories. You learn how to create a safe haven and self-soothe, placing your vitality in your own hands!
Follow the wise adage of calm body calm mind.
Are you ready to have a calm body and mind👇
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