It’s all in your head. And also body.

It is hard to believe that we can’t think ourselves to wellness. With the emphasis of affirmations and the power of positive thinking and insistence that it’s ‘all in your head’ it’s hard to believe anything else can be effective. What has become increasingly clear to me is that despite how much we believe or don’t believe it, there are some things that are absolutely calming and signal safety to the body.

How can that be? My logical thinking wrestles with this reality over and over again.

I think we need to flip the narrative to help us understand that although our capacity for logic and reason is incredible, it does not erase the fact that we are ultimately also an animal. And this animal has a body with autonomic responses to stimulus in the environment that we have no cognitive awareness of. That is, until we tune in and learn how to listen for it.

The bottom line is to adopt a stance that allows us to understand our cognition is amazing but is not the entire story. We have a full operating system that does most of it’s work silently in the background. And so much of our work in terms of mental health is to learn to speak that language. Speaking to the body requires movement and temperature and breathing and nature and art. That’s not an exhaustive list, but it’s a good place to start.