Listening to the body to avoid burnout (and how to use it for decision-making)

"What was that about?"

"I'll explain with a memory from that time. I was about to board a flight, as usual. I think I was travelling 90% of my days. I slip my trolley into the hand luggage gauges, and it doesn't fit. I was convinced it was the right size, but nothing. I couldn't take it with me."

"So what?"

"I started screaming like a madman, insulting everyone and I kicked the trolley to pieces in front of the astonished people."

I remember him pausing for a long time, as if reliving those crazy moments.

"You see, the body was warning me that I was no longer made for that job, that I had to change something, that I was verging on a nervous breakdown."

Well, I don't know if it has happened to you too, but recent research into the neuroscience of emotions confirms it: the body is the first to signal that something is wrong, and it does so with 'somatic markers', a concept devised by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.

And what do we usually answer?

Because of the dominant culture, we tend to silence them:

Gastric pains: 'it's the stomach, it happens'

Back pain: 'I need to improve my posture'

Continuing anxiety: 'It's normal when you have responsibilities'

The body anticipates collapse before the mind does. To ignore it is to ignore a built-in warning system. Learning to listen to it, helps us do one fundamental thing: make considered decisions when we have to choose whether to change, and how to do it.

So, how to make embodied choices?

As always, certain rules for each person and context do not exist, but three interesting thoughts I think I can leave here.

First of all, we recognise the signs before they scream.

Picking up on Damasio's somatic markers, if I experience visceral or muscular tension, it is easily a sign of inconsistency with your nature.

What 'contracts' us: constant malaise or tiredness, shortness of breath, insomnia... It is not weakness: it is information.

What are the environments, activities, people that contract us? If a project contracts you every day, even if logic repeats: 'it's a good opportunity', maybe you should trust the signal. The body does not lie about the hidden costs of choices.

Second point: move!

An avalanche of research shows how thinking becomes more lucid when we walk, run or trigger the body. These are not just 'pauses', but catalysts that re-tune thoughts.

Do you know who we find among the greatest thinkers-walkers in history?

The ancient Greek philosophers.

The very school of Aristotle was peripatetic, i.e. 'walking': he delivered his lectures while walking with his pupils, so that they could absorb the concepts as best they could.

When you feel stuck in a choice, move, you might help some true and hidden thoughts to come out of the hole.

Last point: make a decision.

Grooving is a principle of life design: it means simulating a choice by imagining that you have already made it as realistically as possible, and seeing how it feels.

Try a mini-groove now: imagine that you have made an important decision about something real at this time in your life. You are now in it.

Give yourself a few minutes to imagine yourself inside that choice: what do you do, who are you with?

How do you feel afterwards?

More contracted and tense, or lighter, energetic?

If you feel energy, curiosity, good tension, you are in a vital margin. Otherwise, as the neuroscientists would say, you are in regression.

It seems that the wisest attitudes in making a choice arise from the alliance between reason, emotions and the body. The body is an intelligence that speaks a subtle language: sensations, micro-tensions, caresses to the stomach. The body reacts before the mind. And the mind, if it is wise, listens.

* Partner & Head of Communication, Newton SpA