We tend to underestimate the role of your body in mental health. It goes much deeper than “if you are healthy and fit, you feel good”. For example, you might think that when you feel an emotion, it starts in your brain and then goes to your body, because that is how it feels. But it works exactly the other way around: your brain is constantly monitoring signals from inside the body (heartbeat, breath, gut, muscle tension) and a huge part of what we call "an emotion" is the mind's interpretation of that internal signal. Your body reacts, your brain looks for cues in the environment, and then produces your experience. In psychology this is called appraisal: the appraisal of the environment that triggers a physical reaction which causes the emotion. If you can make a different interpretation, you can experience a different, hopefully more positive emotion. There is whole school of therapy based on this, we will get to that later.
Someone who is "out of touch with their feelings" is usually out of touch with their body. Spending years behind a desk, hardly using your body, makes it hard to feel what's happening inside – until a crisis hits. It goes beyond emotions: thinking isn't a separate mental process happening in some abstract brain space, but deeply connected to your body. Changing how you use your body is usually faster and less painful than trying to change the way your mind works.
An important point is that only using your body on a daily basis for useful, meaningful activities helps, not half an hour of pointless gym exercise, let alone using yet another mindfulness app. You need to do things with real stakes, not performance under fake ones -just like you need responsibility to be able to accept a new role. Most "confidence-building" activities fail this test because the stakes are fake and everyone knows it.
Breathing Control as Way to Become Quiet and Ready to Take in New Impressions.
Almost everything in your body's stress response is automatic: you are simply not in control of your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, which run that for you. You cannot just control your heart beat or your body temperature, or sweaty hands. But there is one important exception, and that is your breathing. We think that is because we need to control our breath to be able to talk, in fact, language beats the normal breathing pattern when needed. We can use that to our advantage: “take a deep breath” is usually very good advice.
There are practically no programs dealing with stress or growth that do not focus in one way or another on breath control, because it is very effective and very easy to learn. But it is not easy to do, because regulating your breathing takes constant control, constant attention. This is exactly why meditation focuses so much on breath control: you simply need to concentrate, and that is what meditation is all about: to concentrate our scattered attention and awareness. This method often breaks down in the real world, because you simply cannot afford to focus completely on your breathing while the world around you is asking for your attention. What you need is a way to practice breath control while doing other things, while getting direct feedback.
I will give a short explanation why it works like this. The best way to visualise a brain cell is an enormous tree: it has a trunk and hundreds of thousands of branches that connect with other cells. Unlike a real tree, these branches grow and die fast — while you are reading this sentence, thousands of new connections are being made in your brain, and thousands of old ones are dying off, all at once, in millions of cells. That has to be coordinated somehow. Here is the interesting part: there is no control room in your brain deciding where new connections should grow. There can't be, nothing sits in the middle with enough information to make that call for every cell. Instead, the brain does something simpler and smarter: whichever cells are actually being used right now start producing a substance called BDNF, and they release it to the cells around them. BDNF is what triggers new connections to grow. So the brain cells that are busy, make more room for themselves by using themselves. And this happens far more with meaningful exercise, exercise where mistakes have consequences and you have to keep paying attention, because that kind of exercise activates far more cells at once than routine exercise ever does. This is exactly why using your body for something new, with real stakes, changes your brain faster than any workout you could do on autopilot.
Flow and Feedback
We all know the feeling of flow, to be “in the zone” when you become fully absorbed, lose self-consciousness and track of time.. To get there you need to function just slightly above your normal level, but not so much you are out of your depth, and you need to get constant and immediate feedback and rewards. All games work like this, playing an instrument works like this, and learning a new skill, if you have a good method and a good teacher, will work like this. Functioning in the flow is extremely effective to build new pathways in the brain in a very rewarding and pleasant way.
Many people who experience some sort of life crisis report that they lost the feeling of flow in their work, and mostly in their lives as well. They just ran out of things that were testing their skills, and everything became routine, unrewarding and boring. In a way, they simply became too skilled at what they do. The only way to change this is, well, to do something new. Something that is challenging, but doable, with good immediate feedback. And of course, something that you can experience as useful, meaningful, and pleasurable.
There is another advantage to start doing new things that get you in the flow again: you have permission to be a total beginner again. That is an extremely important tool. In fact, one of the most influential books on the practice of Zen meditation called “Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind” says: “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.” Zen students are trying to bring this beginner’s mind back through attention and meditation, but of course, you could also just learn something new, and actually BE a beginner. This means a change of environment, and especially one where you have the opportunity to get back in a flow: something just hard enough, something meaningful and with good direct concrete feedback. You don’t have time to become a monk.
There is an interesting link with curiosity here. In a burn-out or a depression, one of the first things to go is curiosity. Curiosity makes you explore new things, makes you a beginner over and over again. When curiosity has gone, you cannot force it to come back in an old familiar environment. If you run out of things you want to learn, want to know more about, chances are you are in a bad place.