Body to Brain Wellness, An Introduction (1 of 3)

Step 1: Get Your Brain to Listen to Your Body

I want you to frame your next diet or wellness program in a completely different light than past programs. My focus as a health coach is to flatline the emotional havoc that your body and brain endure with any type of lifestyle reset. Hormone resetting is the name of this game. Only when your brain is on board will your hormones play nice and help you sustain your goals.

Hormone resetting is the name of this game. And your brain has to be on board.

August 27, 2020
Body to Brain Resetting, An Introduction (2:11)
A few great steps to get your brain to listen to your body.

I’ve spent the past 2 years simplifying a “start where you are” program. Until this week I’ve focused primarily on 1-on-1 coaching, but I hope to bring a lot of these tips and tools to you all in my ongoing group Reset Challenges. For those of you who want to give this a try, let’s dig in. Join the Body to Brain Reset Challenge group on Facebook to take part with other like-minded people. I would love your feedback along the way to help me refine my paid coaching programs. So, let’s get started.

Body to Brain: An Introduction

Hey, changing food habits can be stressful. And when stress is involved, your brain does 2 things:

Your brain will revolt and resist creating new ruts (thought patterns)
Your brain will generate stress hormones which scramble hormonal signals, packing away consumed energy instead of using it for fuel and rebuilding organs and tissues

There’s real power in sustaining healthy habits when your brain is a willing participant. Seems like our brains should always want the best for us, right? It just comes down to perspective. I think you’ll like the brain-teasers I’ve included here that help you understand a little better how our brains are wired and how they think.

Training our brain to listen to our body Primal Utah

What does "Body to Brain" even mean?

Simply put, often either our brain is telling our body what to do, or our body is telling our brain. By nature, brains feel pretty superior in their role as the central processing hub of our mainframe anatomy. In many respects, our brains are on our side, such as constantly reminding us how not to die. Often times our brains get a little overzealous, encouraging us to do the exact same thing today as we did yesterday. Our brains do the math every day, calculating today's "likelihood of survival" at 99.9%, if we simply repeat the exact same thoughts, actions and emotions as yesterday. If you’re reading this then yesterday’s survival rate was 100%.

Willpower doesn’t work. It never has and never will. Example: If you walked by a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts right now, the dopamine in your brain would tell your body, “Body, we need to eat those doughnuts right now in order to survive.” (Click for my Dopamine and Doughnuts post) I know, you’re telling yourself that such a thought is completely irrational. Ah, and therein lies the paradox: Your brain can’t tell your brain that it’s thinking irrationally. There has to be an external stimulus that your brain recognizes and accepts. When you do something that benefits your body then your brain makes a mental note. We’re still a long way off from creating habits, because habits require those mental notes to be patterns that produce happy results. We’ll look at “buy-in and repetition” later.

The Things Our Brains Hate

"Convenience is the enemy of longevity" – your brain hates that quote. But in order to gain control of good habits, begin shifting away from your brain telling your body what to do and into a place where your body tells your brain what to do. Coincidentally, your body loves the idea of taking the long-cut. And during my 6-week coaching program, your body will learn to take the lead.

Things that brains hate but bodies love:

Lots of chances to move throughout the day
Getting to bed early, and waking with the rising of the sun
Shopping with hand baskets instead of a cart
Swatting flies
Misplacing your car keys
Getting into a hot car
Taking the long-cut
Potholes
Cold showers
Washing dishes by hand
See my chart here

Body to Brain wellness things tht make our brains grumpy

Grumpy Brains, Happy Bodies

Here are some familiar car scenarios that your brain and body likely relate to:

Misplacing your car keys:

Unhappy brain: What’s wrong with me? Am I losing my mind? I can never make up this lost time. I’m pushing more cortisol through my veins to see if heightened vigilance helps me find my keys faster.

Happy body: What’s this, more walking? More bending over, arm-stretching, cognitive backtracking? Whew, we thought we’d already be locked behind a steering wheel in sitting position.

Potholes:

Unhappy brain: Why can’t I see these holes and dodge them? Who in their right mind would let a public road get this way? This road will surely kill me..I’ll get a flat tire, or the engine will drop out, and I’ll be stranded here until…wait, if nobody ever finds me then I could die here.

Happy body: Hey, that bump stimulated some mechanotransduction in my rib cage. And there’s another one, some jostling in my hips activated some blood flow in millions of capillaries. Sure, we’ll take whatever movement we can get in this cramped car seating position.

Getting into a hot car:

Unhappy brain: I just know I’m gonna suffocate in here. Quick, crack a window! I’m gonna sweat like a pig. Why isn’t it cooling down already!?

Happy body: Good things happening here, with vasodilation in so many blood vessels. Let’s clear out some additional cancer cells with a little hormetic heat stress. If we’re lucky we’ll perspire a bit and pull some toxins out to get evaporated from our skin.

See more familiar scenarios