Exercise for Trauma Recovery & Success: Rebuilding Body Awareness
Have you noticed that among healthy, happy and successful people, exercise is usually normal to them? It is a part of their lifestyle.
The reasons for this likely have more to do with resilience and emotions, and they probably have no idea [and no its not “well exercise is good for mental clarity and physical health, so because they feel good, they can do good” ].
The answer is of interest to psychologists and of great use to anyone who is struggling with childhood trauma, anxiety, depression or any other mental complexities.
All of our emotions are primarily experienced on a physical level. We feel our emotions. Pit in our stomach, heavy in the chest, tingling behind our eyes.
At the core, emotions and exercise are both a sensation based, physical experience.
The human body is equipped with an eighth perceptive sense, called interoception. Interoception is your ability to feel and sense your internal world, and the sense is radically declined in people who are struggling with mental complexities, and the decline may just be the thing that keeps you stuck when we’re at your lowest.
Without a clear interoceptive sense, paired with its friend named the insula, a part of your brain that is heavily involved in integrating signals from your body and bringing them back to you in the form of conscious awareness.
The duo allows you to be aware of sensations like hot, uncomfortable, energetic, anxious and means you can respond to your own needs accordingly.
This system, either on the interpretive side or the awareness side, is usually compromised in people struggling with mental complexities.
If you’re not able to sense or feel yourself, you aren’t able to take care of yourself.
Exercise is a sensation filled experience. You learn to feel what your body feels like when it is weight-bearing, when it is under pressure, when it is tight, when it is stretched, when we are powerful, when we are weak, breathless, thirsty, tired etc etc etc.
Exercise rehearses being calm, safe and secure within yourself while under load. During exercise you experience the physiology of stress, you experience heavy breathing, increased heart rate, temperature fluctuation and fatigue.
You feel all of this and remain sturdy, purely because the cognitive or story side of the physical experience is not there to tell your brain and body that we are stressed. Without a threat-story attached, your body is experiencing intensity and yet you feel safe.
Exercise increases our ability to sit with discomfort while remaining secure and safe within ourselves.
That’s the real opportunity, expanded self-trust.
The profound benefits of exercise are less because it makes you feel good after, but because it teaches you to feel.
The body may be under load, but you remain steady. Sensation becomes information, not an emergency.
Your life and all of its decisions are guided by your bodily signals. If you can train yourself to experience sensations as what they are, sensations, not emergencies. You will be wiser, stronger and make greater, consistent decisions.
