If you’ve ever been frustrated by the advice, ‘just listen to your body,’ start here. Your body is constantly communicating with you, whether or not your cognition and inner dialogue recognize it.
Your body wants water, you feel thirsty. You’re tired, you yawn. When you’re hungry, you might crave easy-to-digest calories, or possibly your habitual stimulant such as nicotine or caffeine.
We can all respond to the loud signals with default actions.
Sore muscles > rest day. Hungry > reach for quick calories. Are you choosing what’s most convenient? Are you choosing what to eat because of a diet or protocol? Or can you tune into what your body actually needs to feel its best?
What listening to your body can provide is a deeper understanding of what type of rest or how much movement feels best for your sore muscles, or which foods leave you feeling grounded, powerful, and mentally clear for hours rather than satiated for one.
What does “listen to your body” actually mean?
Listening to your body means you can look deeper than the surface-level impulse or, often, conditioning about what will help you feel balanced and content in your being.
When you’re in tune with your body’s signals, the silent language of symptoms and sensations, and attuned to your changing rhythms, you develop an intimacy with the science-based physical needs of your organic being.
Your body is a wonder of science.
You need to regularly feed it, just like crops need the right nutrients in the soil and weather conditions to thrive. Your body needs the right combination of nourishment and stress to become resilient.
Stress can be beneficial. For example, exercise or going for a walk on a windy day might be exactly what your body needs to clear your mind, invigorate your muscles, and refresh your lungs.
The strongest corn stalks in the field are the ones that held up in the windstorm. Healthy stress. They stand strong because they are also braced from the wind by their neighbouring stalks.
Community is something that can create ease in your body. Sometimes your body might need to laugh more than it needs nine hours in bed.
Your body holds a lot of tension, and a lot of that can come from your mind. Listening to your body might mean booking a therapy appointment and taking the afternoon off work. If you’re getting more and more high-strung by the day, your body may be telling you the holistic picture of balance is off.
Of course, listen to your body is often associated with what you eat, but your lifestyle also influences how your body digests and absorbs nutrients into your tissues.
To be able to hear your inner signal for ‘what to eat,’ can you be quiet and still long enough to listen?
Listening to your body, after learning a bit about nutrition and your unique version of wellness, can yield insights like:
- Slow-cooked steak and barley soup is exactly what my body wants today.
- I must eat an orange before bacon and eggs this morning.
- Those cookies look so good but honestly a bowl of porridge will feel so much more grounding (maybe one cookie, after).
- I’ll replace that exercise in today’s class…
- Yes actually, I’d love to come for a walk after lunch…
- A snack is not what I truly need right now.
Why it can be hard to know what your body is telling you
A big part of this is the onslaught of advice we’re constantly inundated with… TV commercials, social media tips (even the helpful ones!), special diets, anecdotes about how miraculous a specific program or diet has been for someone else, what worked for a past version of you. Advice is everywhere.
We are conditioned to look outside of ourselves for validation, reassurance, processes and steps to feeling amazing.
And while the guidelines for daily recommended intakes are helpful, your body changes every day. Your nourishment needs shift depending on what you’re going through.
Emotional stress, environmental exposures, physical activity and mental load can all affect how you feel on a given day.
Rather than try to juggle all the individual considerations affecting your body’s needs, the simple route is to cut through the noise and develop an intuitive connection to your wellness.
Start with observation, not judgment
Becoming intuitive about your body’s needs doesn’t mean you have a psychic voice telling you what you need to do.
Intuitive can be informed by gut instinct, but it also refers to having a natural understanding or something that’s easy to learn.
Sometimes you unbox an IKEA side table and it’s clear which screws and posts connect to which holes. The intuitive design is informed by your experience with tables, how the shapes look next to each other, and the most plausible steps to take.
Unfortunately, our bodies are a little more complicated than a side table.
Listening to your body may have become difficult because you’re reading the manual for a king-sized bed frame but the box came with twin bunks.
Rather than try to follow the steps laid out for a different frame, looking online for videos and tutorials, asking your handy cousin what he would do…
Just step back and look at the pieces.
Unplug from all the shoulds and external noise. The body isn’t something easy to learn, but your body is something you can tune into with practice, and it can become simple to listen.
What body signals should you pay attention to?
Whatever frustrated you into reading this article is what to pay attention to.
There are some qualities that you might be able to name easily.
Low energy? Appetite issues? Feeling sluggish or bloated? Headaches? Acne? Brain fog? Poor sleep?
Others are just always there and might take some time to sit with and be brave enough to acknowledge.
Melancholy? Anxious? Frustrated? Feeling like you’re not living up to your potential? Plateaued in some effort or another? Mentally drained? Lacking motivation? Empty? Unfocused?
Confused about nutrition? Get specific. Which parts are confusing right now? When to eat? How much?
Pay attention to the repetitive thoughts that come into your mind every day. Pay attention to what you have dismissed as ‘your normal’ that’s also holding you back from thriving.
All of the many confusing and annoying parts about what you experience in your body are even more of a mess when you rip out all the pages of the manual, mix them around on the ground like a game of 52-pick-up, and try to make sense of the mess at first glance.
How to notice patterns in your body
Take the information you’re receiving one step at a time.
What you’re feeling during your 2 pm slump is information. Rather than react to it with frustration and a coffee, you can develop a wellness intuition that has you taking a short walk, downing a water, or having a piece of fruit.
It could come from variable sources, and if you want to remove the slump rather than address it every day, the cause might not be what’s happening in that moment.
The reason you’re tired at 2 pm could come from lunch, breakfast, this morning’s commitments, last night’s sleep, last night’s bedtime routine, or the weekend.
Before we try and race to the end, start with receiving each piece of information from an observer’s perspective.
Try a 10-day body awareness practice
I encourage everyone on the journey to understand their body to start with a 10-day self-observation practice.
You might also call this a food journal, but not everyone has to write down their food and drinks.
Tracking your wellness for 10 days organizes that mess of pages into a step-by-step process that can be reviewed and analyzed logically.
Once you can see the rhythm of your average days, you can identify patterns.
Average days are so important to this exercise in self-knowledge. This is a private and personal record. You don’t need to impress anyone, and the temptation is often to eat more vegetables or go to bed earlier when you start recording your normal life.
Don’t change anything.
Write it down.
Write down every occurrence of the frustration that brought you here. You might have one particular concern you’d like to understand better, or several things you’ve been noticing about yourself. Record your energy levels, sleep quality, mood, digestive upset, and if it’s not triggering, also record your fluid intake and amounts, and food intake and volumes.
Not calories or macros, just how much you’re eating.
After 10 days, look back at what you’ve recorded. What keeps coming up? Are there particular times of day when you feel better or worse? What was happening in the hours or days leading up to those experiences?
Let’s say you’ve recorded your afternoon energy slump for 10 days. Looking back, you notice that on the days you slept poorly, the slump was more pronounced. You might look at your bedtime routine or what (and when) you ate for dinner the night before to see if there’s another pattern worth exploring.
Or perhaps you notice it happens on days when you skip breakfast, regardless of how much you slept. Do you feel more of a slump on days you have an extra coffee?
And if every day looks the same, but you’re drinking three coffees throughout the morning, what does your instinct tell you about that habit?
You’re not trying to draw conclusions from one afternoon. You’re looking for repeated experiences that might point you toward something worth exploring.
Now you have somewhere to begin. You might experiment with an earlier bedtime, a different breakfast, or swapping one coffee for tea, and continue observing how you feel.
These observations aren’t a diagnosis, and persistent or concerning symptoms deserve medical attention, but they can help you ask better questions about your own wellness.
And that’s where listening to your body begins.
Start your own 10-day practice
If you’re ready to begin, I’ve created a free wellness tracker called the Vitality Snapshot to guide you through observing your everyday routines and recognizing your own patterns.
It’s a starting point for developing the self-knowledge that makes wellness intuition possible.
