Listen to Your Body

By William Bevans | New Hope Counseling Group

We often experience things in life through two aspects which are our minds and our bodies.

Our mind tells us how to react and respond to the things we face while our body is the real

representation of how we react and respond to them. Your mind has the ability to deceive you by creating false narratives that you can believe are true while your body reveals the facts. We have lived life from the principle of mind over matter (which is necessary at times) but with this same principle we disregard what the body is saying. In many cases we are not aware of the severity of something until our bodies tell us how bad it is.

When was the last time your body gave you a signal that you ignored until you realized that

you couldn’t ignore it anymore. In sickness, we get symptoms before we have a sickness. In

mental health we have symptoms before we have a diagnosis. In general practice we have

behaviors that turn into habits. Our bodies tell us a lot about everything we do and we have to learn to listen to our bodies. We don’t get enough sleep at night because of schedules and

choices and our bodies let us know that we need more sleep. It has become our practice to treat that symptom with coffee, soda and candy to get through the day. We choose to eat and drink what we want because “we have a right to”, while our body is telling us to stop or change things but we don’t listen until a problem forces us to listen.

We know that we are in hectic situations in life at work, with family, friends or even with our

health but we still refuse to listen to our bodies. We know our stress levels are high yet we do

nothing to fix it until our body forces us to. We eat and get full but continue to eat because there is more on the plate or it’s just simply too good to stop. We know we work hard and long hours and have a hectic work life, yet we won’t take a vacation or break to recover, rejuvenate and recharge. We feel pain and discomfort in our body from work, stress and life in general but won’t get a massage to release the negative toxins in our body. We can feel the extra weight we have put on in our daily routines but we won’t use the gym membership we already pay for each month.

Our bodies are always speaking, we just aren’t always listening. When we learn to listen to

our bodies as much as we listen to our minds, we will be able to live a much more balanced and healthy life. The body tells you when you are sick, stressed, tired, overwhelmed, and many other things if we will simply listen to it. For some reason we don’t listen to our bodies when they tell us things until our mind is over-capacitated by it and forces us to stop due to breakdown. Let’s do better by being more intentional with how we respond, react and listen to our bodies. Learn to take that break, take that vacation, make that change, get that massage, go to the gym, or change that diet so your body can stop screaming at you that change is needed. We only get one body and we need to take care of it and listen to it.