The Mind Body Connection: How We Can Incorporate the Body in Therapy and Life
In this post, we’ll provide some background about the mind-body connection and demonstrate how everyone can benefit from improving this connection. We’ll also explore a couple of different therapeutic options for strengthening this connection, with an emphasis on how they can benefit anyone experiencing a disconnection from their body.
When we think about how the brain and the body are connected, it’s easy to first think of the nervous system- your brain sends a message to your hand when you want to eat, and you go to pick up a fork. Though we instinctively know that the brain controls the body, the body also controls the brain. For example, if you accidentally touch the proverbial hot stove, the nerves in your hand will send a message to your brain, leading you to remove your hand from danger. That distress signal from your hand will immediately override whatever you may have been thinking about before touching the stove. In this way, the brain and the body are like a two-way street, as they’re in constant back-and-forth communication with each other, and this communication has a powerful impact on both systems. Your thoughts cause physical sensations in your body! Likewise, the sensations you feel within your body can change the way you think. Our understanding of what’s happening internally, whether initiated by the brain or body, is called interoception. Within music therapy (and therapies of all kinds), you can work towards increasing understanding of what’s happening internally, as well as being able to influence both mind and body to achieve overall regulation.
D.I.Y. Example
Try it for yourself! One way you can experience your body’s effect on your brain (with caution) is by making yourself breathe rapidly at an uneven tempo. You may actually start to feel a sense of panic, stress or hyperawareness. When you change your breathing suddenly, your body sends signals to your brain that something may be wrong, and alerts your autonomic nervous system (ANS). You can adjust and train your autonomic nervous system (ANS) by intentionally causing specific sensations in your body.
The Autonomic Nervous System: Understanding The Biology Behind the Mind-Body Connection
If this is info you’re already familiar with, skip ahead for info on training the nervous system and a couple of interventions that can be particularly helpful in increasing interoception.
The autonomic nervous system controls many of the body’s involuntary processes. It can be separated into two main parts: sympathetic and parasympathetic. The sympathetic nervous system responds to stress, and is a part of your fight-or-flight response. Meanwhile, the parasympathetic nervous system calms, helping your body settle into rest periods and enabling digestion. When the sympathetic nervous system is activated, the parasympathetic nervous system is deactivated. The body is constantly switching between these two systems depending on your needs at any given moment. Deep breathing, movement, and chanting can train the ANS to move between the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems more quickly and fluidly.
For example, when we practice deep breathing, our heart rate will slow down on the exhale and speed up on the inhale.This small change marks a subtle shift from sympathetic activation (speeding up), to parasympathetic activation (slowing down). As the ANS improves, we can become more resilient to changes in our environment and in ourselves. A door slamming may cause us to become alarmed, but if we see it was an accident, a resilient ANS will allow us to shift back into feeling safe much faster (“What is Polyvagal Theory”).
Interoception and Self-Awareness
Training the ANS is just one way that we can help create a better connection between our body and brain. Another benefit of facilitating a connection between body and mind is having an increased sense of self-awareness. Remember that interoception is the conscious awareness of your body’s internal senses, such as feeling hungry and cold, or experiencing ‘butterflies’ in your stomach from nervousness. These sensations can be due to environmental factors like temperature, but they can also be related to your emotions. Your interoception may be impaired if you constantly forget/don’t register your body’s signals to eat, drink water, or take a break until the last possible second-the good news is that you can improve your interoception!
Your body will often sense potential threats or stressors before you consciously recognize them, and these can manifest as sensations in different parts of your body, like the gut or chest. Being able to notice bodily sensations can lead to better emotional awareness, letting you react to them appropriately. For example, if you’re experiencing chronic stress, it’s important to be able to feel where and when it is located in your body, in order to find ways to avoid stressors and utilize coping skills.
Who Can Benefit?
We all benefit from increased interoception and understanding more about what our brain and body are telling each other! Understanding the brain-body connection can be particularly critical for people who have impaired interoception. For instance, survivors of trauma often experience a level of disconnect between their body and brain, resulting in impaired interoception. For example, their body may register a feeling or a sight that triggers a stress response. Their breathing may quicken and their heart races, but consciously, they may not even notice. On the otherhand, the same person may talk about a traumatic event in great detail, but show no physiological changes (heart rate, blood pressure, breathing etc.). Both of these examples are signs that someone is experiencing a disconnect between their body and brain. This disconnect can cause dissociation or dissonance, which can ultimately lead to decreased well-being and lack of access to the full spectrum of emotions.
For many survivors of trauma, reconnecting the brain and body can be a powerful part of their recovery process.Reconnecting with bodily feelings can be very difficult and potentially scary initially! After all, many survivors of trauma were forced to sever the connection to their bodies as a way of coping with and surviving their experiences. Thanks to research on this topic, many traditional talk therapies now include a somatic element to help clients foster a connection between their body and mind. Trauma-informed specialists are able to help victims of trauma to safely connect with their bodies, without drowning in the sensations that are being held within. There are many types of therapy that are uniquely suited to helping mend this connection, such as yoga, dance/movement, drama therapy, and music therapy.
Yoga
Yoga can be practiced for a variety of reasons. For some, it is a way to become more flexible, or to improve mental health, while others use yoga as a type of therapy. Yoga has proven to be an effective path to reconnecting with your body. Yoga exercises often include deep breathing and rhythmic movements, which can activate the ventral part of the vagus nerve. The ventral vagus nerve can help you adapt to stress and improve your ability to choose how you respond to emotions and experiences (Vagus Nerve Yoga for Trauma Recovery).
Yoga practices also include a wide variety of poses. The poses can certainly help you to reach greater physical flexibility, but that isn’t their only purpose. Different poses bring awareness to specific parts of the body that may be connected to past traumatic experiences. Yoga provides a safe structure to focus your attention on the feelings within parts of your body, and begin finding ways to let stored feelings or tension be released. A significant aspect of mindfulness in yoga is being aware of your body and its sensations. If you feel disconnected from your body, or you rarely feel internal sensations, yoga or other active movement can help you begin to reconnect with your body and bring alignment between body and mind.
Music Therapy
Music therapy is another effective venue for trauma recovery. Music therapy is the evidence-based use of music with a board-certified music therapist to reach non-musical goals- these goals could be cognitive, social-emotional, regulatory, physical/motor. Part of its effectiveness in the area of trauma recovery is due to music's ability to engage the entire body. Making music requires a strong awareness of different parts of your body working together and coordinating- forexample, singing involves breathing deep into your stomach while letting your chest cavity expand outward in all directions, then coordinating your mouth to create different vowel shapes and syllables as you sing out. The rhythm and length of the phrases in the music provide a predictable structure for your ANS to go through activation and relaxation cycles. Because of this, singing is an effective way to develop a more resilient ANS.
Another benefit of music therapy is an increased sense of interoception. When you sing, you learn to be aware of the sensations within your body, such as your diaphragm providing breath support, releasing tension in your neck, and finding space in your mouth to produce the sound you want. Developing interoception can help decrease feelings of dissociation by grounding yourself in your body. As you become more aware of feelings within your body, you are practicing being in the moment. A trained music therapist can guide you through building awareness as you engage in music. This self-awareness can then generalize into your daily life, and you can use the techniques developed in therapy to combat feelings of dissociation. The best part is- the therapist brings all the musical expertise! Music therapy clients don’t need any musical knowledge, and can engage in active music making according to their comfort level.
The content of the music used in therapy is also important, as it often evokes a range of emotions, especially if you already have associations with it. Incorporating your preferred music in sessions can open the door to processing emotions that you may not usually be able to access. Then, the music therapist can help you begin to process these emotions. For some, this may look like verbally discussing the emotions to gain a better understanding of them. For some, it may be challenging to put their feelings into words. Music therapy in these cases can allow people to express and communicate their emotions by playing them on an instrument, with the level of verbal processing of the playing based on their comfort level. Not only does this provide an alternative way to process emotions, it also causes your body and brain to actively engage with the music together.
When you combine emotions elicited from music with the act of playing along on an instrument, you create a two-way street between your brain and body. By taking an active role in the music, you can build a sense of autonomy and control over the music. You might change the dynamics to make the music louder or softer, adjust the pace of the music to be faster or slower, or determine when the music stops and starts. As you gain control over the music, you can begin to experience a sense of control over your reactions to felt emotions within the music. Even if you have no musical experience, the music therapist can help you find the right way for you to engage in the music- for example, your role in the music could be as simple as maintaining a beat on a hand drum to set the tempo of the song.
Choosing the Right Fit
Whether you’re working on reconnecting with your body or just wanting to be more aware of your body, there are manybenefits to incorporating somatic techniques into your life. Deciding which technique to use can be daunting as there are multiple options beyond the two discussed in this post. Fortunately, there isn’t one right answer. Different people will find different techniques to be more or less effective. A good way to help decide is to start by learning a little bit about a few options. Then ask yourself “Which one do I feel most drawn to?”. Believe it or not, you know best what you need, and the option that is most interesting to you is likely a good choice.
If you would like to learn more about music therapy, please reach out to us! Whether you are interested in scheduling a session or you just want more information, we are happy to connect and help in whichever way we can. Email us at staff@resonatemt.com or call/text us at 719-354-0893.