Listen to your body!

In our society, more and more, the mind predominates.

In our operations center we manage thousands of stimuli every day that reach us through the mail, mobile messaging applications, social networks, the media, the people with whom we interact.

Our mind is constantly overstimulated, which can lead to stress, anxiety and general exhaustion.

The prominence of our mind, moreover, is detrimental to the activity of the body, relegated for many to a mere container that contains the organs and allows us to move — less than we would need — from one space to another.

And the sedentary lifestyle of the technological era has been added the collateral effects of the various restrictions of the pandemic.

More hours of television and screens, even to talk with our loved ones, less care and toning of the body.

A very simple example: instead of walking to the local cinema, which would take maybe a thousand steps between going and coming back, we click with a finger without leaving the sofa.

Not to mention the hours we spend sitting in front of the computer for our work.

Sooner or later, the body will complain about our mistreatment, it will send us messages that, if open, can be crucial for our quality of life.

On the other hand, if we silence the discomfort or pain with analgesics or any other means, such as alcohol, to make the symptom disappear, we will be killing the messenger.

The psychiatrist and researcher Bessel van der Kolk explains in his classic

The Body Counts

the risk of not listening to the calls of our vehicle for life: “As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you will be fundamentally at war with yourself… A crucial question is let you know what you know.

That can take a tremendous amount of courage. "

Through back pain, the body asks us to change our posture, it tells us to move.

A recurring headache invites us to slow down.

The discomfort and fatigue of heavy digestion is the body's warning that we are not doing well.

The body speaks to us so that we can give ourselves a break or make changes in our lives.

If we silence it or ignore it, because we are focused on the mental, we run the risk that the next time we decide to attend to it it will be too late.

About this, in her book

Reconnect with your body, the body

therapist Anna Sólyom establishes the following analogy: “Just like when a car starts to fail or makes strange noises, we take it to the workshop because we don't want to get stranded on the road. Pain messages are worth listening to.

Pain is our friend, our best ally, since it seeks our survival, to correct what we do wrong to prolong the life of the organism (…).

We are before a teacher that nobody wants ”.

Let's look at four daily measures to learn to listen to our body and make friends with it:

Body scanner.

A widely used technique in mindfulness is meditation focused on each part of the body to know how it feels.

Lying down, let us take our attention to different areas and "listen" to what they tell us.

A daily walk.

The simplest tool to break sedentary lifestyle is our legs.

Our mobile phone has applications that allow us to set a daily goal, such as 5,000 steps.

Nourish the body and mind.

The Japanese apply the 80% rule, eating a little less than their hunger, to promote the lightness of the body.

On the other hand, we must not cut the hours of sleep that our system requires for a good daily reset.

Honor the messenger.

Instead of drowning out the symptoms with pills, if we listen to our body, it will tell us what it needs.

Jenny Moix, professor of psychology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​sums it up in these words: “Our body needs to be considered, cared for, pampered.

We usually forget about it, only pain reminds us that it is there.

As if it were the cry of our body for us to pay a little attention ”.

—Eps

Francesc Miralles

is a writer and journalist who is an expert in psychology.