If you’re wondering How can it be that my emotions aren’t a product of the present moment?, you’re not alone. For decades, psychologists believed that our emotions were immediate responses to what we saw, heard, or experienced. In recent years, neuroscientists have overturned that idea, thanks in part to research by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychology professor at Northeastern University who introduced what’s known as the theory of constructed emotion. According to this ground-breaking theory, emotions begin in the body as physical sensations, which our subconscious then uses to predict how we should feel based on how we’ve felt in the past when we’ve experienced the same sensory state of being.
If our heart is racing, our breath is quick, and our blood is pulsing through our veins, our brain may interpret these sensations as fear or excitement, depending on what we’ve experienced in the past when we felt similarly. So, for instance, if we’re preparing for a big speech and have had unpleasant experiences with public speaking, our subconscious may interpret our sensory state as fear. But if our past experiences with public speaking have been positive, our subconscious may interpret the same sensations as excitement. Our emotions are really just mental concepts created by our body and driven by our past. Or, as Dr. Barrett put it, our emotions are “constructions of the world, not reactions to it.”20
The fact that our emotions are body-brain constructs, not hardwired reactions to our reality or relationships, means that we don’t have to be prisoners to what we feel. The theory of constructed emotion gives us the opportunity to perceive our emotions as self-creations, not reality, and empowers us to change how we feel by shifting certain physical sensations.
In psychology, our ability to sense our inner sensations is known as interoception. Interoception, sometimes called inner sensing, constantly occurs on an unconscious level as our subconscious scans our body’s sensory input to interpret the safety or threat of our environment. We can intentionally enhance our ability to practice interoception by practicing body consciousness to help identify our emotional state by consciously witnessing our body’s sensations.
Accessing this active state of body awareness allows us to intentionally change how we feel in the moment by actively shifting our body’s sensations, soothing ourselves if we’re stressed. Body consciousness is a life-changing practice we can use to help make conscious choices about how we want to feel and show up in our relationships.
MY JOURNEY TO BODY CONSCIOUSNESS
It took me years before I felt safe enough to spend consistent time in my physical body to begin to identify its needs and the emotions stored there. I preferred to live in the safety of the spaceship in my mind, obsessing over my thoughts without ever dropping into my physical experience. I was unaware of and unable to listen to the messages my body was sending me every day, which prevented me from being able to identify or meet my physical needs. As a result, I was often reactive and incapable of regulating my emotions, on many occasions finding myself trapped in cycles of inexplicable and inescapable agitation and discomfort.
For most of us, the process of disconnection begins in early childhood. For me, I believe it started in utero, when I was immersed in the stressed physiology of my mom’s dysregulated nervous system. If your mom didn’t feel safe inside her body, you probably didn’t feel safe inside her body when you were developing, either.
My mom discovered she was pregnant with me at age forty-two, fifteen years after giving birth to my sister. She was at a different stage of her life, not trying or expecting to have another child, and given her chronic anxiety about her health, when she began to experience morning sickness, she assumed that she had stomach cancer. When her doctor told her that she was pregnant, I imagine she was fearful of the diagnosis and could understand if she was feeling overwhelmed by the thought of having a third child whom she’d worry about.
While I was developing inside my mom, I absorbed her stress and apprehension—a normal state for her that was only amplified by her advanced maternal age. Because she was anxious and disconnected from herself, she remained unable to regulate her own emotions or her body’s cortisol levels, and as a result, when I was inside her, I couldn’t, either. My body was so stressed in utero that I was born with a sucking mark on my thumb. Looking back now, I have compassion for myself, who was, I believe, desperately trying to self-soothe before being born. Unable to calm my overwhelmed nervous system, I likely entered the world already dysregulated and feeling unsafe in my body. Research corroborates my experience, showing that elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol in a pregnant woman can cause larger amygdala volume in a developing child, leading to a dysregulated stress response and anxious behaviors.21
Growing up, I continued to absorb the unspoken messages from my family that there was little or no space for me to express my separate or different needs, and so I gradually stopped doing so. Like many who grew up with parents from an older generation, there was a Depression-era mentality in my home that as long as there was food on the table and a roof over my head, there was nothing else, including emotional support, that I could possibly need.
As part of an Italian American family, I was modeled highly ritualized eating habits in which my mom used food as a gesture of her love and care. Every night we ate together as a family at “dinnertime,” which in my family happened to be at 5:30 p.m., right after my dad came home from work. My attendance at those nightly mealtimes was a felt obligation or unspoken expectation, regardless of whatever else I had going on. That was especially true on Sundays, when my brother’s family and my two uncles usually came over for a big pot of Italian pasta and sauce (or gravy, as I grew up calling it). Because my mom was deeply insecure in her connections to us all, she used food as a primary way to show her love. She regularly looked to us for validation during those meals, hoping we’d proclaim that her food was delicious or clean our plates as an indication of our approval and reciprocated love. Seeking to please, I would often finish my whole plate and take seconds when my mom urged me to do so, usually after advising me to “eat more now” so I “don’t end up being hungry later.”
Food was one of the main means of consistent connection within my family. During our shared meals I consistently learned that it was important to tend to the expectations and feelings of others, even when my body told me otherwise. I would eat when or what was convenient for those around me even if I wasn’t hungry or disliked the taste to avoid offending anyone. I’d take an extra helping when my mom suggested I do to avoid disappointing or denying her request. I continued those habits as an adult by scheduling my mealtimes and making food choices based on the schedules, needs, or suggestions of those around me.
As a child, I learned to overlook other physical needs, too, like having a consistent sleep schedule and regular physical activity, because neither was prioritized or modeled in my home. I didn’t have a set bedtime and would regularly stay up late watching TV with my family, who also stayed up late. Outside of playing sports (which was motivated by my desire to be seen by my family as successful), I wasn’t encouraged to exercise, and although my dad was active, my mom frequently remained on the couch or in bed in pain.
Other than regular commentary on or criticism of the size and health of their bodies, no one in my family directly spoke about or showed their physical body. I never saw anyone in my household naked, so I assumed it was to be avoided—one reason why I never really felt comfortable showing much skin. My mom and I never discussed anything about puberty or a woman’s menstrual cycle, so I didn’t tell her when I got my period. By that age, I already felt so ashamed about most aspects of my developing body that I couldn’t imagine sharing those kinds of vulnerable experiences with anyone anyway. That deep-rooted shame resulted in a critical, noncompassionate relationship with my body, and I regularly overlooked my basic needs, often rushing through my self-care or treating my body roughly when I did tend to it at all.
My disconnection from my body created my disconnection from my emotions. I didn’t sleep enough or move in healthy ways and ate foods that inflamed and stressed my body. These habits only made it more difficult for me to regulate my overwhelming emotions, which continued to color my perceptions of the world.
Over time, I adopted a cool, apathetic exterior—my family began to call me “Nothing Bothers Me Nicole”—to hide the painful reality of my inner world, which was full of deep-rooted feelings of abandonment, loneliness, and shame. Without the safety and security to be myself, I used my outward attitude to protect against increasing feelings of unworthiness; if I never showed my vulnerabilities, I would never be at risk of having them or myself feel rejected.
To keep myself protected, I became hyperfocused and perfectionistic about my appearance, obsessively looking at and trying to hide the various scars I had been accumulating on my body over time. I ritualistically spot cleaned dirt and other stains off my clothes and shoes in the hope of removing any evidence of wear-and-tear or other imperfections. That obsessive behavior carried over to my physical environment, where I fanatically arranged items in my childhood bedroom in attempts to soothe the increasing feelings of stress and tension I was storing in my body. All of those behaviors seemed to my family just to be part of who I was or my “quirky personality,” as they put it, when, in reality, they were coping strategies to try to regulate my nervous system and manage my overwhelming emotions.
Eventually, I became aware of how disconnected I was from my body and the stress I carried in my physical self. Though I didn’t realize it for a few decades, my body was locked in a stressed state, with my muscles tightening and constricting more with time, especially in my back, neck, and jaw. With increasing physical tension, my body never felt like a truly safe place for me to rest or relax. As I shared in my first book, How to Do the Work, I fainted twice over the course of several months, once at the home of a childhood friend and again after spending a significant amount of time with my family over the holidays.
My body was overwhelmed by nervous system dysregulation, overwhelming emotions, and childhood trauma, and it was starting to shut down. Though I thought I was taking care of my health when I decided to become a vegan in my midtwenties after I learned about industrial animal farming, I still wasn’t listening to my body and its host of unmet physical needs. Like most of us, I operated on autopilot, eating whatever was around me or whatever and whenever others ate, barely exercising, while not prioritizing my sleep or ever really allowing my body to truly rest—all habits I had learned in childhood.
Getting things done without paying active attention can, of course, help us deal with many of the complex experiences we have to navigate daily, like acquiring what we’ll eat, coordinating our daily commute, and remaining aware of the changing social etiquette. But the habitual tendency to mindlessly engage with daily life can also lead us to eat without tasting our food, overexert our muscles when they need rest, and interact with others without actually connecting with them.
Because my body was overwhelmed by decades of unmet physical needs and accumulated emotions, I didn’t feel comfortable spending much time in it to feel or understand to my physical sensations. I had no idea how fast my heart beat, how deeply or calmly I could take in the air around me, whether my energy was constricted or light, or how my muscles felt. Those sensations created my emotional landscape every minute of every day, but I wasn’t paying attention to them. And I didn’t know why I should or how I could.
During my dark night of the soul, I learned a lot about our physical body, which was when I discovered that our emotions live inside us—in the physical cells of our muscles, fascia, and organs. Your issues are literally in your tissues, or so the saying goes. Our emotions get activated when our body has a biological response (hormonal, neural, and cellular) to trauma. Shocked and inspired, I began spending more time consciously aware of my body every day, using my Future Self Journal (FSJ) to help me keep that daily intention. (You can download your own free copy with a how-to guide on my website, www.theholisticpsychologist.com.)
At first, it was difficult to feel what was happening inside my body since I’d been disconnected from it for so long. Most of my sensations felt uncomfortable. My heart rate was often erratic, my breathing was shallow and constricted, and my jaw always seemed to be clenched. At the same time, I knew those sensations were telling me something, that I was existing in a state of fear and stress. My nervous system dysregulation was causing me to shut down, which explained my fainting episodes (a progression of the freeze response) and why I couldn’t remember so many moments in my past that others could easily recall. I was basically living in a state of numbed overwhelm.
Learning about the evolutionary function of our emotions and our nervous system responses helped me understand why I never felt able to truly relax or find peace in my body. It explained why a “perfect” appearance or environment calmed me only temporarily. It explained why the alcohol and other substances I had relied on from such an early age had never really taken away the deep-rooted pain inside.
Though that realization was alarming, it was also incredibly empowering, setting me on a path to create body consciousness. Using my FSJ, I recorded my daily intention to check in with my body every day, several times throughout the day. Then, every few hours, I would set an alarm on my phone to remind me to do a body consciousness check-in (see here).
That practice helped me recognize how often I looked to others to meet my physical needs and how I still relied on my mom for health advice, even when I knew how to take care of myself. It helped me more clearly see how sharing my health-related stress or worry was my attempt to connect with my mom and others emotionally. I saw how regularly I continued to prioritize my “obligations” or “achievements,” diving right into my to-do list instead of taking a moment in the morning to connect with and care for my body. I noticed how consistently I felt as though I had to “earn” moments of rest or relaxation by first completing a task, like sending a work email, always pushing myself to be “done” with my never-ending list of projects.
I was starting to see all of the ways I was carrying the dysregulation that had lived inside me since I was a child wherever I went as an adult. It was like the famously titled Jon Kabat-Zinn book Wherever You Go, There You Are.
I also saw that the more I turned inward and spent time with my body rather than cycling through the loop of my conscious thoughts, the more capable I became at sensing my physical sensations and recognizing when my nervous system was activated. And during the times when I knew something deeper was happening inside me, I started to become curious about what was prompting my reactions.
Over time, I became better able to discern when I was actually hungry or needed to move or rest my body, which helped me feel more grounded and less irritable in general. I started to stretch the tense muscles in my body that had been frozen or constricted from years of stress-related tension and began to eat more nourishing foods. I maintained a regular sleep schedule for the first time in my life, going to bed and waking up earlier to sync my natural circadian rhythm with the sun. I started moving my body and stretching my muscles almost daily while taking rest when my body needed it.
Becoming more connected to my body, I started creating safety for myself whenever I felt my nervous system becoming activated. When this occurred and I sensed I was shutting down or going into a freeze response, I practiced the Wim Hof Method, a breathing method that helps activate our sympathetic nervous system and pull us out of a shut-down parasympathetic state. When I noticed that I was overstimulated or going into fight-or-flight mode, I took some slow, deep belly breaths to help calm myself down. We’ll explore these different breathing techniques here.
Today, I still use intentional breathing and other mind-body practices to regulate my nervous system and help me navigate my emotions. Since I’m often activated within relationships, like most of us are, I try to practice body consciousness when I’m around others or before I react impulsively to help me make sense of and manage my emotions. If I don’t hear from my partner as quickly as I’d like and begin to worry about the security of our connection, I can drop into my body to practice the body consciousness pause. If I feel that my heart rate is elevated, my face is flushed, and my energy is agitated, I know that my nervous system is in a stress response. Although these feelings are real, I can now acknowledge the possibility that I’m reacting to old wounds rather than new slights. With this understanding, I may be able to reinterpret my situation. It’s likely that my partner still loves me and just needs space or is going through something stressful and needs time alone. In such moments, I can calm my body so that I don’t send a snarky text or do something else I might regret. I can go for a walk, practice deep belly breathing, or stand outside with my feet firmly planted in the grass, all of which can help bring my body back to safety. When my heart rate slows and my energy lightens, I can reassess the situation more calmly and objectively.
To tell the truth, I still struggle to consistently maintain body consciousness. Instead of living with and feeling my physical sensations, I sometimes ignore my body, running away from it by looping through my distracting thoughts, keeping myself busy with my endless to-do list, or numbing myself by watching mindless TV for hours on end. In such moments, I extend myself grace and compassion, understanding that these actions were my best (and only) way to regulate my big and overwhelming emotions as a child. I sometimes do still allow myself to check out for a few hours with my favorite TV programs, knowing that those moments can give my nervous system the rest it needs to rebalance and replenish itself especially when I’m feeling particularly stressed or overwhelmed.
Thankfully, I’ve paid attention to my body long enough to know that whenever I’m connected and listening to my body, I’m better able to meet my needs and calm my nervous system, no matter what’s happening around me or within my relationships. When I’m calm, grounded, and connected within myself, I’m better able to feel calm, grounded, and connected when I’m with others. And it’s only in those moments that I feel safe enough to be me, that will give me the opportunity to truly connect to you.
PRACTICING BODY CONSCIOUSNESS
The first step in our journey to connect authentically with another person is learning how to be present in our own body by practicing body consciousness. When we consistently begin to pay more attention to being in our body, we can begin to make intentional choices to help regulate its different emotional states. This is how we cultivate emotional resilience, giving us the opportunity to have a feeling without reacting or behaving in ways that don’t serve ourselves or our relationships. When we are emotionally resilient, we are able to deal with stress and other upsetting emotions and are flexible in our responses to our changing circumstances rather than staying stuck in our habitual or conditioned reactions.
Since many of us have been disconnected from our body for so long, spending time with our full range of physical sensations can be both difficult and uncomfortable at first. We may not be able to tell if our heart is beating quickly or slowly or if our energy is open and light or constricted and heavy. Practicing the daily body consciousness pauses you learned about in chapter 2 will help you reconnect with your body’s sensations.
Using Body Consciousness to Witness Your Emotions
As we explored in chapter 3, we can all learn to identify when we’re in a stress response, as well as which particular response we’re experiencing. If we’re able to notice and identify when we’re in a freeze or shutdown response, feeling detached from what’s happening around us, we can move or shake vigorously to reawaken our body to help us reconnect to the present moment. And if we notice we’re overstimulated in a fight-or-flight response, we can move and breathe more slowly to calm ourselves down. Once our body returns to safety, we can then open ourselves back up to connecting with others.
We can even learn to witness how different emotional states feel in our body so that we can use our actual physical sensations to shift our emotional experiences. Remember, we all experience emotions a little differently, so the physical sensations that signal fear in one person may indicate excitement in another. At the same time, all humans experience the six core emotions—anger, sadness, fear, joy/happiness, disgust, and surprise—in similar ways. The chart below can help you identify your emotions based on your physical sensations, along with the messages that these sensations may be sending you.
