listen to your body
You should listen to your body.
You’re supposed to go to the gym and squat heavier than you ever have before, but you only got one hour of sleep because the heavens gifted you with a nocturnal child. What should you do? Should you skip the gym? Or should you follow your strength program?
Listen to your body.
Ever since you started taking ALPHAFLEX24π, the most recent supplement Joe Rogan told you to take right after he said he was a dumb comedian that no one should listen to, you've felt dizzy. You've been discharging liquids from places liquids aren't supposed to live. What should you do? Keep taking the supplement? Or stop?
Listen to your body.
Your body has all of the answers…
or so the story goes.
Unfortunately, if listening to your body were a panacea, then pedophiles wouldn't be in prison.
Yeah.
I went there.
I had to go there.
Because listening to your body will turn you into an obese nerf herder with a criminal record. If you wanna know why, and you're inclined to take advice from a man that thinks cats are better than dogs, then keep reading…
You can’t really listen to your body.
The concept of “listening to your body” stems from the divide between your conscious brain’s “thoughts” and your nonconscious brain’s “feelings” and the fact that the two aren't 100% connected.
Example: Your eyes bubble with tears when you think about your ex-girlfriend, even though she cheated on you with twelve other dudes (and one farm animal). You know she's a terrible person, but you still care about her. Your thoughts oppose your feelings.
This makes it seem like your thoughts are completely disconnected from your feelings, but they aren't. Your feelings can influence your thoughts, just as your thoughts can influence your feelings.
If you take a sugar pill disguised as medicine, you'll probably feel better because you think you’re taking medicine.
This is the placebo effect. Evidence suggests the placebo effect can work even if you're consciously aware of the placebo effect. In other words, the sugar pill doesn’t even have to be disguised as medicine. The bottle can say: this placebo pill will make your stomach feel better. And it will.
Your thoughts influence your feelings.
The placebo effect is gnarly because the resultant feelings are real. When you feel better after taking a sugar pill, you actually feel better. The pill is fake, but the feelings aren't. You're telling yourself (overtly or subliminally) how to feel.
See the problem?
When you listen to your body, you might not be listening to your body. You might be listening to yourself tell your body how to feel.
Example: You skipped your training session because you felt tired, but you only felt tired because you wanted to skip your training session.
To avoid the placebo effect, you’d need to cut power to your conscious self.
But without your conscious self, you can’t really “listen” to your body. You can only follow your body's orders. This is a problem. Without conscience, you're a chimpanzee. Chimps rape. Chimps are genocidal. Chimps rip arms from sockets. You don't want to behave like a chimp.
There are many situations in which you SHOULDN'T follow your body's orders (especially if you're a pedophile or a psychopath):
CONSIDER ADDICTIONS
If smokers listened to their bodies, they’d always smoke. If alcoholics listened to their bodies, they’d always drink. If obese people always listened to their bodies, they'd always eat…
Your body doesn’t necessarily know what’s best. Oftentimes, it only knows what’s familiar. And so, if you listen to your body, you’re probably gonna lean towards short-term comfort and pleasure, as opposed to long-term pain and gain.
CONSIDER EVOLUTION
According to evolutionary biology, humans are compelled to consume and stockpile excess energy. This attribute was beneficial when food availability wasn’t guaranteed. In today’s world? When food is hyper-available?
We eat so much we kill ourselves with our consumption. Type 2 diabetes is essentially the disease of eating oneself to death, hence my petition to rename type 2 diabetes “Pizza the Hutt Syndrome.”
If you listen to your body, you're gonna behave as if Brontosaurus still existed.
Blindly following your body's orders and letting your nonconscious self run amok is not ideal…
unless you're a fanboy of The Purge. I'm not. I'd be the first casualty. “Can't we just talk about this over a beer?” I'd ask, right before a nunchaku shatters my esophagus.
This circles back to something I mentioned earlier. In order to pause and listen to your body, you need to activate your conscious self, which means the placebo effect is always invited to the party.
For fun, however, let's assume you were able to negate the placebo effect and truly listen to your body. This is a dream scenario, but it's still flakier than phyllo dough. Because the actions you take as a result of what you hear depend on your understanding of how the human body works.
Example: You pull your hamstring The injury is mild. You can't run, but you can walk. Either way, you're still sidelined. What do you do? Most people would rest. Their rationale: if you’re injured, then you’re damaged. Resting will give your body time to heal and recover.
Sounds sensible, right?
Wrong.
To me, bed rest is the WORST way to heal a mild injury. If I sustained a mild injury, I'd move. Often. More often than I otherwise would. I'd lean into discomfort (not pain) and encourage blood flow to the injured area because structures with ample blood supply heal quicker than structures with limited blood supply.
Regardless of right and wrong, you can see the problem. Listening to your body isn’t a yellow brick road to a singular destination. Where you end up depends on your subjective interpretation of what you hear.
Where does this leave us?
Your body is powerful in ways you can't consciously fathom (see: the chicken sexing phenomenon). You shouldn't necessarily ignore your body. Although, I dare say, when you most need to listen to your body, your body will be difficult to ignore. I'm reminded of this every time I eat pizza straight from the oven and burn the roof of my mouth.
Don't be dumb and always ignore your body, but, at the same time, remember two things:
First, how you feel is heavily influenced by how you expect to feel and how you want to feel. LISTENING TO YOUR BODY IS NOT AN OBJECTIVE PROCESS.
Second, your body tells you how it feels, not necessarily what to do as a result of how it feels. If you wanna take what you hear and put it to good use, you need a decent understanding of how the human body works. This is a bummer, as “listen to your body” is usually farted from faces and fingers as a form of advice without consideration of the recipient’s software as if you'll intuitively translate feelings into positive actions.
And so, here's how I suggest we deal with this problem:
The next time someone tells you to listen to your body, punch them in the face. Before they have a chance to retaliate, say this: “Sorry, I was just listening to my body.”