When you live an embodied life, you acknowledge and decipher physical sensations. They can help you stay in touch with your inner natural rhythm and enhance self-awareness. Each message from your body tells you something about your experience, and you can use subtle body signs to improve your wellbeing.
The signals from your body are internal guidance designed to improve your health and happiness. Your body delivers constant messages informing you about your welfare. Each ache and flutter in the stomach, for instance, reveals data to help you live your best life. It might show you are excited, nervous, or have consumed foods that don’t suit your digestive system.
If your body-mind connection is weak, you may neglect your emotional and physical health. Learning how to live an embodied life will help you recognize your needs and meet them.
Living in an embodied way means you are sensitive to the sensations you feel and use them. You decode their meanings and take advantage of them. These 10 tips will help you recognize and make the most of your inner guidance.
Balance your body clock
Your body clock is your natural timing function. It governs hormone secretion, the sleep cycle, metabolism, and blood pressure. It responds to the light in your environment, making you sleepy or alert, and is common among most living organisms.
Insomnia, lack of energy, and brain fog signal your body clock is unbalanced, and several factors could have disturbed it. These include jet lag, night shifts, alcohol, drugs, and studying late.
You may need to address behaviors that affect your internal rhythm to rebalance your body clock. Experts suggest people reset their body clocks with healthy lifestyle habits. Observe light exposure, for instance. As each evening progresses, you can dim the lights in your environment and expose yourself to natural light first thing in the morning.
If there’s insufficient daylight to increase alertness, you could use a sunlight alarm or natural daylight lamp to boost exposure. It helps to stick to a regular main mealtime and bedtime, limit alcohol and caffeine intake, and not nap during the day.
Recognize how foods affect you
Food fuels your brain and body with data and material for healthy functioning. Eating varieties that provide sufficient nutrients and suit you will boost your wellbeing. Many people are sensitive to food like gluten, which causes brain fog, digestive issues, and mood issues in some individuals. As foods might affect your health, you can benefit from noting messages from your body when you eat them.
Likewise, you can build a more embodied life by acknowledging how the amount of food you consume affects you. You could become overweight if you overindulge and underweight if you eat insufficient amounts. If you are mindful as you eat, you’ll notice when you satisfy your hunger with balanced portions.
Note how events affect you
You face plenty of events every day, and some affect you more than others. Those that elicit strong emotions come with physical symptoms like a racing heart or withholding of breath. Sometimes you may not be fully aware of what they denote. Practice recognizing sensations in your body that coincide with events, though, and you can better understand your feelings.
Palpitations, for instance, often show excitement or anxiety, and you might hold your breath when you experience shock, fear, or awe. It’s worth raising your awareness of emotional reactions you might otherwise ignore that influence your wellbeing. Realizing certain events make you stressed can help you avoid them or learn how to manage them better.
Consider how your habits influence you
While some habits help, others can harm. Regular evening strolls might help you unwind before you go to bed, for instance. But watching action movies could stimulate your mind and keep you awake at night. Notice whether your habits make you feel good or have adverse effects, beginning with those you carry out in the morning.
Do you worry about problems as soon as you wake? Do you get up late and rush? Is it hard to find things you need in the morning? These or different habits may set a negative tone for the day, and adjusting them could prove beneficial.
Check the rest of your habits as you go through the day and make sure they work for you rather than against you. Note whether they make you tired, energetic, or frustrated and change those that are unhelpful.
Notice how you respond during interactions
How you interact with people can help you understand your needs. Your body shows your feelings and can aid the formation of healthy relationships. People sometimes play down so-called negative emotions when they interact, for instance, but acknowledging their discomfort can serve them. When you note all your feelings, you can manage your relationships better.
By way of illustration, you may feel frustration rise as a constriction in your stomach while conversing and not stating your view. Expressing your feelings will raise authenticity and self-expression.
Understand how the environment affects you
People are naturally sensitive to their environment and built to seek safe, comfortable, and pleasantly stimulating surroundings. Sometimes they forego these basic needs, though.
When you need to have a difficult talk with someone, for example, your task is best carried out in an inviting, comfortable space. You’ll know if your surroundings aren’t conducive because you’ll feel uneasy. If you are in touch with your physical and emotional responses, you will efficiently choose healthy environments to suit any purpose.
Notice how your gestures and stance influence your emotions
Studies show your posture can affect you. Expand your awareness of how your gestures, and other actions, influence your feelings, and you can use the gems you discover.
Perhaps sitting in a hunched position tires you, and stretching provides energy. Experiment, focusing on different gestures and their accompanying emotions, to discover if you can alter your mood with simple physical behaviors.
Recognize physical patterns
Once you notice your posture and physical movements sometimes affect your emotions, you can uncover patterns to test their impact. You might slouch whenever you sit, for instance. If so, does it help you relax? Make you tired? Slouch now and recognize how it makes you feel.
Or you may bite your inner lip when you are anxious. If so, consider whether the action always follows anxiety or adds to or causes anxiousness. Other physical patterns to explore include how much you spread out, or make yourself small, in the environment when you stand and sit and how you move and hold your body when potent emotions are present.
Tap into your intuition
Intuition is embodied, which is why people often describe a gut feeling or say their hair stands on end when they sense an insight. You are likely to experience intuitive perception when you subconsciously recognize a familiar situation requiring alertness.
Intuitive embodied responses show something is afoot in your surroundings. You might feel uncomfortable around someone you’ve just met for no apparent reason, for instance, and later discover they are dishonest.
One way to identify intuitive perception, as opposed to a non-intuitive response, is to note sudden, unexplainable feelings. Of course, this doesn’t guarantee they are intuitions. But the more you recognize them and check whether they provide otherwise unknowable data, the easier it will be to tell the difference between them and other feelings.
Strengthen recognition of your emotions
It may not always be easy to differentiate between emotions and identify what you feel. You could, for instance, mistake fear for anger. Accurately assessing your feelings will boost self-awareness. You can benefit from knowing how to identify where your emotions appear in your body.
As a guide, think of your emotions as energy. Where you experience energy corresponds with specific emotions. Happiness, a study of emotions in the body shows, is a whole-body experience. Depression involves a general lack of physical energy, particularly in the lower half of the body, which might explain why depressed people often feel lethargic.
Notably, research reveals there’s a good reason people sometimes mistake fear for anger; their energy arises in similar parts of the body. One major difference, however, is anger affects the arms.
Shame and sadness accumulate in the chest and head, but shame alone extends down the torso. To learn more about where your emotions reside in your body, experiment. Jot your experiences of emotions and where you feel them in a notebook, and you’ll become more familiar with identifying how you feel.
Recognizing your emotions can improve your wellbeing and raise your emotional intelligence. If you decide to live an embodied life, your self-awareness will grow. You’ll understand yourself better and find it easier to express how you feel.