Making Connections

A crispy edge cuts the air. Red hues creep across the leaves. School begins today. The seasons are changing, and so is this blog.

Over the summer I have done interviews about my book What a Body Knows with radio personalities around the country—men and women, Christian and new age, conservative and liberal, credentialed and not. Many times I have been heartened by the words: People need to hear this. Some people. Some where. I am starting to listen.

Not a day goes by when I don’t hear some report or read some news piece and think about how my work could offer a different perspective and enrich the discussion.

Hence the new focus of this blog: I plan to make connections with articles and authors, books and blogs that are concerned with issues raised in What a Body Knows. It is time to map the range and reach of my emerging philosophy of bodily becoming, and provide a place for others to do the same. Chime in! Here goes.
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On August 18, Natalie Angier, one of my favorite science writers, published a fascinating column in the New York Times about how the “Brain is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop.” In its August 17th issue, Time magazine weighed in with a cover story by John Cloud on "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin."

Both stories miss what links them together and what What a Body Knows teaches: that bodily movement is the key to helping us find wisdom in our desires.

Take the stress loop. As Angier reports, researchers have discovered among deliberately-stressed (i.e., shocked, bullied, and nearly-drowned) rats, that the rodents were “cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over.” The centers of the brain governing habit formation bloomed. Provided with a bar they could press for a food pellet or a squirt of sugar water, the stressed rats “had difficulty deciding when to stop pressing the bar,” even when they no longer wanted to eat.

Angier links these findings back to the allostasis of our dynamic stress response system, which is designed to maintain control by causing marked changes in blood pressure, heart rate, muscle activity, and the like. As she says, we “dance to the beat.”

Meanwhile, Cloud reports that exercise does not lead to weight loss. The reasons are many, but one rises above the rest. Most exercise does not burn enough calories to make a difference. Even when we burn some calories, we tend to overcompensate for whatever we have burned, rewarding ourselves for our efforts and eating more than we otherwise would have done.

Angier characterizes the stress loop as “vicious” and “sinister,” though she admits it might be helpful in a crisis for shunting as many behaviors as possible to “automatic pilot.” Cloud laments that exercise is of little value in the fight against obesity, though reminding us that it is still good for our general health.

What is missing from these discussions, and what links them together, is what our bodies know.

In the case of Angier, for example, heightened habit formation is not the problem. Nor is stress itself. The problem is that we get stuck in stress because the habits we form are ones that reinforce the causes of the stress. In What a Body Knows, I call it cereal box logic. In responding to our sense of frustration or dissatisfaction, we resort to the same strategies that got us into trouble in the first place.

The fact, then, that our stress responses are making us more stressed is a sign of our bodily wisdom not stupidity. For this finding indicts the mind-over-body thinking, feeling, and acting that most people raised in American culture rely upon to cope. As I have described in earlier posts, this mind-over-body sense of ourselves is what we are taught, what we master, who we believe we are. It is one way of sensing ourselves, but not the only one.

If we were to adopt a stress response that shifted our experience of ourselves away from a mind-over-body sense, then the repetition of it would work to release us from the self-reinforcing stress cycle.

Doing so, however, is not a matter of willpower. Nor is it simply a matter of "relaxing." It involves cultivating a sensory awareness of our bodily selves regardless of what we are doing. It involves moving to breathe and breathing to move (see posts in Jan-Feb 2008), engaging in the kinds of bodily movement that draw our attention down and out and through our sensory selves.

Here is where exercise comes in, and its crucial role in our relationship to food. The value of exercise in this relationship has little or nothing to do with burning calories. More important is the bodily movement itself. Bodily movement has the potential for drawing our awareness out of our minds and into our bodies, and so that the loops of our mind-over-body stress responses loosen and fall. When they do, we stop pushing the bar for that extra squirt of sugar water. We don't have to--we don't want to--for we know a deeper pleasure, the pleasure of feeling and finding our own sense of enough.
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I spent last week at the Washington County Fair. My three older children were there for the week, showing their Jersey cows. The fair overloads the senses. Barn fans whirr with an incessant, fly-chasing drone. Milk-machine-powering generators hum. The screams of truck and tractor engines pulling harder than they should punctuate the afternoon. Voices crest and collide. Dust and dirt swirl and stick. It is a stressful situation for a new mother, namely me, with infant in tow. I empathize with Angier's rats.

After a few hours, a feeling of disease slides over me. I start retreating from my sensory self. I start thinking about the caramels in the candy tent. I can’t stop thinking about the caramels in the candy tent. And the butterscotches. The coffee treats. Then I know. It is time for a walk.

I leave the fair grounds, striding hard through the surrounding fields packed with parked cars. The attendants look at me strangely, wondering where I am going. No where. Just around—around the largest perimeter I can make. Striding. Breathing. Releasing. Being. Becoming. Feeling. Knowing. Dropping into my bodily self.

Suddenly my thoughts shift. I am the movement that is making me. Visions of caramels fade into pictures of what I really want. To write that article. To connect with this friend. To make plans for the school year. Back in myself, I head back to the fair, reconnected, ready to begin again.
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What connections can you make?