How to Get out of your Head and into your Body

Neuroscientist Dr Andrew Huberman says, “You can’t heal the mind with the mind.” In order to transform and optimise our mental health, we’ll need to go somewhere else . . .

I spent ten years in the fitness industry. I’ve loved high-intensity exercise ever since I can remember. I’ve relied upon it for different reasons throughout my life: at times, a distraction; other times, a sense of purpose.

In a past life, I wanted to be an AFL player. I spent hours and hours training. Push came to shove when I was given the opportunity to train with a VFL team in late 2013. Sadly, I was cut halfway through the pre-season trials. As actor and former WWE wrestler, the Rock, would say, “It was the best thing that never happened to me”, becoming an AFL player. From a psychological perspective, however, not making the team hit me for six. “I” was an AFL player, a footballer; my identity was enmeshed with my footballing abilities. Getting cut meant not being good enough, which meant that I, as a person, wasn’t good enough. This existential unravelling took me years to recover from. It shook the ground beneath my feet, giving a green light for unreconciled childhood issues to boil to the surface from the depths of hell. It wasn’t long before diagnoses put forward by therapists became self-identifiers.

In a desperate, albeit subconscious, attempt to fill the stark and naked hole left by the ending of my football career, I became addicted to exercise. Eventually I fell in love with CrossFit. With retrospect, I knew the hole remained. However, if you’d questioned me on it back then, I’d have denied it vehemently.

As a “CrossFitter”, I trained twice a day. Despite being well-versed in various training methodologies, CrossFit was novel and exciting. Although I’d worked in the health and fitness industry since I was nineteen, starting out as a Personal Trainer, CrossFit wasn’t something I’d ever seen or experienced before. I was mesmerised. I became addicted. Three years of full-time study, attaining a degree in Sports Management (with an Economics major), now meant nothing. CrossFit was a stunning, blonde-haired lady in red amongst a sea of suited bureaucrats, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I loved the training, and I loved the community of people it attracted. It didn’t take me long to become certified as a CrossFit coach.

The main reason I fell in love with CrossFit was because of the pain. Yes, the community was fantastic, irrespective of the gym (and I have both worked and trained at many different CrossFit gyms around the world). At the time, however, I was struggling mentally. CrossFit acted as a conduit to escapism. As being in my mind was so painful, the only way to get out of it was to inflict pain upon my body, thereby distracting the psychological pain, ironically, with a different pain, a physiological pain.

The Language of the Body

Along with Investment 101, Dating and Relationships, Mindfulness for the Young and Money won’t buy Happiness, Emotional Intelligence was another subject my school—and the entire state-wide educational curriculum—failed to impose on late 90’s kids like myself. Growing up thinking that porn was what sex was supposed to be like and that emotions were “girly”, I lacked the words to describe my inner landscape. That I couldn’t tell others what was going on inside meant that I felt disconnected. Simply put, I couldn’t have an honest conversation with myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, nor that I wasn’t encouraged by my family (specifically my mum who always asked me how I was and sat by me as I stumbled over words that had nothing to do with my emotions). Rather, I hadn’t spent enough time with myself to get to know myself (not that I knew that’s what I was supposed to do). Ambition alone won’t get you anywhere in Beijing if you can’t speak a word of Mandarin. Still, I didn’t need to get to know myself because CrossFit was doing more than enough for me!

It would take the next eight years of failing and asking questions to really fall in love with the language of the body. Although spending time with yourself does, in my opinion, make you more sensitive to the outside world, the trade-off is a more authentic lifepath. Knowing more about who you are, you can tweak aspects of your life to optimise it. Sure, being less “in my body” allowed me to drink excessively and exercise until I couldn’t move; it made for fun times and lots of laughs too! But the sensitivity is worth it because you become more sensitive to what you want and who you enjoy spending time with. That, to me, is worth it. So, let’s take a deeper look.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is only the Beginning

In every industry there is always debate about which methods are best practice; who are the thought leaders and experts we should all follow; who are considered “woo-woo”, whacky or left of centre; what should be considered out of date; and what the next frontier to revolutionising the field is. Essentially, every industry has its politics . . .

For my industry, the “gold standard” of therapy is CBT. CBT or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a tried and true method (the science speaks for itself) that helps individuals learn about the ways thoughts and emotions affect behaviour. It’s the perfect triangle—a positive feedback loop—because once we begin to understand that our behaviours influence our emotions which influence our thoughts, we recognise that by simply practicing conscious habitual changes in any one of those three inputs, we can begin to effectively change who we are.

But here’s the rub: Human beings are so much more than thoughts, emotions and behaviour, and consistently and unwaveringly relying on CBT as a therapy just because it’s the tried and true method, in my opinion, denies each individual of their sovereignty. In effect, we’ve labelled them implicitly—when they walk into our clinics—as just another mammal that pays us for their time. Human beings are not just creatures with 210 million year old brains.

I completely understand and resonate with evolutionary psychology and the brilliant work B.F. Skinner did in the 20th century (although it led to the rise of addiction-based marketing like social media); but CBT might be better suited as a base approach before we begin to build a client up to help them find and love the aspects of themselves that make them so wonderfully unique—far beyond their essential biology.

Human beings create, love, mourn, inspire and connect. They are responsible for some of the most wonderful and awful ideas. Simply using CBT erodes them of this—with lack of a better word—spiritual nature (and I mean spiritual in terms of one’s ability to guide oneself through life). How do we help humans trust themselves enough to follow their own paths and find a life affirming meaning? This will help them look through the constructs that keep the rest of us locked in conforming habits and modes of thinking. We need individuality and authenticity and our responsibility as clinicians is to help our clients cultivate this.

CBT may very well help in the beginning; it’ll surely help individuals with their disorders. But what about beyond the disorders and the pain? What about learning to love the disorder because it wasn’t ever actually a disorder to begin with—simply a coping mechanism that worked when having to deal with a major environmental or circumstantial stressor?

What about creating a unique path and vision for your life and inspiring those around you? Will CBT work for all of that? Maybe? Maybe not? Just because something is the tried and true method, it doesn’t mean that all other methods are wrong or ineffective. What works for one client may not work for another; so being person-centred—as opposed to being a CBT dogmatist—must be the essential guiding ethic for every clinician. And although science promotes doubt and inquiry, it too can become dogmatic and absolutist just like any other system. This doesn’t mean it’s bad; it just means it’s a system, a set of things working together. Individuality is the opposite of a system. We are all individuals, despite our common biological underpinnings.

Rant over! So, as you begin to learn more about the way you feel and why, you’ll recognise common traits among mammals—say, for example, the fight or flight system—as well as tendencies only you possess. Here’s a way to think about it:

Emotions are the Gods of the Ancient World

Our feelings are always telling us something. That is their job. Emotions are the language of the body. They are in constant communication with the outside world, relaying and processing information, communicating effectively with how we feel on the inside based upon external stimuli presented to us. An emotion is a signal. It is not to be dismissed. Feeling an emotion means to listen to what it is saying. We might ask if what it wants. It won’t take long—if you give it the time it deserves—to decipher its messages, its code. Lecturer and researcher Dr Joe Dispenza writes:

“For example, you might begin by asking yourself: When I feel angry, what are my thought patterns? What do I say to others and myself? How do I act? What other emotions spring forth from my being angry? What does anger feel like in my body? How can I become conscious of what triggers my anger, and how can I change my reaction?”

There is a reason why the ancient Greeks personified emotions as ‘Gods’. Emotions happen to us. Although we can move our body and get ourselves into situations we know will evoke certain emotions; for the most part, emotional arousal is an unconscious operating system. Anger really does feel like Zeus, God of the sky, is throwing a lightning bolt at you. It enrages you and makes you want to take massive action. Although that isn’t what is happening, perceiving our emotions as entities that inhabit us, counterintuitively, helps us befriend them.

Once embraced not as foes but as friends, we can begin having a think about how we’d prefer to respond to situations when emotions arise. Dr Nicole LePara, the Holistic Psychologist offers some reflective journal prompts I find helpful both personally and professionally:

1. What can I learn about myself from what happened?

2. What patterns brought me here?

3. How can I embrace discomfort and grow from it?

4. How can I learn to accept criticism without feeling like a failure?

5. How can I forgive myself?

How would you like to speak with a friend, partner, or family member if they have caused you to feel anger? What would you say to them? How would you filter out your anger effectively? How could you use anger for good instead of condemning someone else through violence or antisocial behaviour?

Once we have a complete scope of how our emotions influence us, as well as how we’d like to think and act in the future, we can then begin the gradual process of practicing our new skill set, simultaneously and gradually dispensing with our old emotionally reactive habits that no longer serve us. This takes time. As Dr Jordan Peterson says: “Stumble up the mountain.”

What I have found when working with clients is that the combination of self-awareness alongside moving towards an ideal works best. As soon as you feel a negative emotion, take one conscious breath. Then act “as if” you already were the person you’re trying to become. Allow yourself to fail; take it slow, and you’ll be amazed by how far you’ve come when you look back on your life in a year’s time. Body and mind are one: they are working for you. More often than not, the best thing to do is to move with the inner experience, allowing it to guide you to a deeper truth.