REGULATION
Bodily Intelligence
Recognizing the Body’s Inherent Regulation
The Intelligence That is Inherent
Right now your body is doing thousands of things to sustain, nourish and protect you. The systems of your body are working in coordination with each other to accomplish this. Your regulation is dynamically shifting every moment. Your heart rate adjusts to activity, your digestion coordinates around the particular food you ate and the setting in which you ate it. Your body is shifting based on the time of day it is. None of these things have needed any of your conscious input for them to occur. These processes are happening continuously and automatically all the time.
Observing Bodily Regulation
The reality of your body's intelligence is observed every day. If your skin gets cut the body quickly mobilizes resources to heal it. If you go too long without eating your body adjusts how it uses energy as a way to compensate for this unexpected change. If you don't sleep well one night the body needs to adjust resource allocations to account for the restoration it didn't get at night. It is constantly adapting to keep you safe and healthy. The body simply adjusts to the conditions you repeatedly provide to it. Symptoms and sensations you get are not random. They are signs of the state from which your body is regulating.
When Symptoms Get Misread
When you experience bodily discomfort or pain these are expressions of the body under strain. The specific type of strain can take many shapes and forms, but ultimately it comes from the internal interaction of intelligent regulation responding to internal challenges. The issue is that many of us have learned to automatically label the surface sensations of this process as a problem instead of as important bodily feedback. When this is superficially viewed as an inconvenience it becomes tempting to address the symptom by suppressing it, distracting yourself from focusing on it, or creating stimulation to bypass it. These strategies may weaken baseline awareness over time and start to erode trust in your body's regulatory intelligence.
Attuning to Your Daily Patterns
When you start recognizing bodily sensations as opportunities to refine intuitive awareness to the body these same experiences take on a much different shape. By tuning into these consistently you can start to see important patterns. You may notice how your body shifts throughout the day, and how you handle different social interactions, recreational activities and workplace interactions. You might also observe bodily patterns related to the food you eat, and the health products you take. You are then able to make more appropriate associations with your bodily state in determining what is supporting it and what is further amplifying strain. With this you can take the sensations the body is producing as important regulatory feedback to help you adjust your daily patterns.
Finding Your Baseline
Once you are able to consistently observe the body without immediately treating individual symptoms as something to proactively suppress, correct or bypass, you then can get a better feel of what your baseline is. This is very important, as without a baseline, all your assumptions about the body come from a state of distorted orientation that can further weaken the accuracy of how you are reading your own bodily state. Understanding the state your body routinely settles back into allows you to better assess what is needed in the moment.
A Practical Approach
To improve your bodily awareness it's helpful to keep a simple interoceptive log that you can fill out during the day. This isn't something you should put deep thought into. It's a simple way to track your body that can help you see patterns more clearly over time. The logs can help you look back and observe patterns more accurately as opposed to judging something that is happening in the moment. We tend to lose sight of our trajectory and overall progress when we are consumed by the demands of the moment. These logs can act as a record to look back on and reflect.
Non-Interference Improves Intuition
The internal regulatory strategy and action of the body is not something you can improve upon directly with forced intention, positive thinking or affirmations. These can act as forms of interference that block the development of bodily intuition and accurate pattern recognition. What you can do instead is improve awareness of your body's patterns over time and use them as guidance for taking appropriate action that supports its regulation.
What Comes Next
Once it becomes clear that the intelligence operating in you is constantly adapting to keep you healthy and safe, it's important to learn what influences the resources that this intelligence has to work with. What your body can do depends significantly on the resources it has available to draw on.
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