What your body says before you notice it

Before every emotional or psychological symptom I've ever worked with, in myself or in clients, the body was already speaking. Months, sometimes years, before the thing arrived at the level of consciousness where it could be named.

The shoulder that won't drop. The gut that twists in certain situations. The skin that flares when stress is high. The immune system that collapses every time you finally stop. The body knows. It's been knowing.

The reason it goes in that order is not mystical. The body is simply faster.

It registers a situation and responds before any of it has reached the part of you that makes sentences. By the time you have a thought about a person, your jaw has already had an opinion.

Which means the body is not a late warning system. It is the early one. It is the part that has already decided while you are still being reasonable about it.

Here is what the early signals actually look like, because people expect something louder than this.

A particular person's name on the screen and a small drop in your stomach before you have read the message.

Holding your breath while you open the post.

A shoulder that lifts on Sunday evening and comes down on Friday.

Being wide awake at 4 and absolutely fine about everything at 11.

Getting ill on the first day of every holiday.

Finding you are hungry all afternoon on the days with the meeting in them.

None of those are diagnoses and I am not offering them as any. They are information, and information is all they need to be.

What most of us do instead is override. This is the honest centre of it, so it is worth spelling out.

You take something for it. You push through the afternoon. You book the physio for the shoulder and never mention what the shoulder is next to in your week.

You decide you are being dramatic, which is often a sentence somebody else taught you.

And it works. That is the problem. Overriding works brilliantly, for years, which is why nobody stops.

The reason it does not hold is that overriding does not answer the signal, it only turns the volume down. So the body does the sensible thing, which is to turn the volume up.

The shoulder becomes the back. The occasional 4am becomes most nights. Eventually it says the thing in a way you cannot schedule around, and by then you are dealing with something much larger than the original message.

Health coaching, at the somatic level I work at, is about learning to listen before the body has to shout. Building the practice of checking in, genuinely and physically, and responding to what's actually there.

Checking in genuinely is a specific thing and it is not the same as asking yourself how you are, which gets you a report from the part of you that is managing the situation.

What works better is to go looking in 1 place at a time, and not for a feeling. For a fact.

Jaw. Is it together or apart. Shoulders. Where are they compared to where they could be. Breath. How far down does it go. Stomach. Is there anything there. Hands.

That takes about 30 seconds and the answers are boringly concrete, which is exactly why they are useful. You cannot talk yourself out of a clenched jaw.

Then the second half, which is the half people skip. Having noticed, do 1 thing in response.

Not a plan. A thing. Put the shoulders down. Let the breath go all the way out. Stand up. Get a glass of water and drink it sitting down. Say the word no to something small today.

Your body has been trying to tell you something. This is the work of hearing it.

Not overriding it. Not managing it. Not waiting for it to stop. Hearing it. Responding to it. Working with it rather than against it.

The most useful version of this is to do it on the days when nothing is wrong. Checking in only in a crisis teaches you nothing, because you have no idea what your ordinary looks like.

Do it on a Wednesday when the week is fine, and after a fortnight you will know your own baseline. Once you know that, a shift off it is obvious, and you get to respond while the thing is still small.

What people tend to notice is not that the signals stop. It is that they arrive earlier, and that they stop being frightening, because a signal you can read is just a signal.

One more pattern worth naming, because it catches people who are otherwise good at this.

Some of us are excellent at reading everybody else's body and hopeless at reading our own. You can tell from across a room that somebody is not all right, and have no idea you have not unclenched your jaw since Monday.

That is not a contradiction. Reading other people was the skill that was needed, so it is the one that developed.

If that is you, the way in is usually not introspection, which you will turn into a project within a day. It is something physical and external. A hand on your own shoulder. Walking without anything in your ears. Cold water on the wrists.

Something that gives the body a say before the mind files its report.

And one more thing, which I would say to anybody. Listening to the body is not instead of seeing a doctor about something physical. It sits alongside it. If something in you is persistent or new, get it looked at properly, and do this as well.

The body always speaks first, are you listening?

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