Making Sense of the Mind-Body Connection

“Mind-body connection” is one of those phrases that gets said so often it stops meaning anything. So here’s the plain version. Your thoughts and feelings show up in your body, and it works the other way too.

Why it matters

You’ve probably felt this already. Stress and anxiety can turn into a headache, tight shoulders or an upset stomach. Stress can also wear on your immune system, so you may get sick more easily when you’re run down. That means when you work on your stress, your body tends to benefit as well.

Ways to work on it

1. Pay attention. Mindfulness just means being where you are and noticing what’s going on, around you and inside you. Once you start noticing your thoughts and feelings, you’ll often catch them showing up in your body, like the clenched jaw that appears every time you open your email.
2. Move. Any movement helps. Yoga and Pilates are especially good for this because they make you pay attention to how your body feels while you’re doing them.
3. Bring your stress down on purpose. Stress gets in the way of all of this. Try building something into your day that relaxes you, like meditation, a few minutes of deep breathing, or progressive muscle relaxation, where you tense and then release one group of muscles at a time.
4. Eat reasonably well. Lean toward whole, unprocessed food, and go easy on sugar, caffeine and alcohol. I’m not going to tell you to give up coffee.
5. Sleep. Your body and your mind both need it. Aim for seven to eight hours, and give yourself some kind of wind-down routine so you’re not going straight from your phone to your pillow.

You don’t have to do all five at once. Pick one, do it most days, and add another when the first one starts to feel normal.