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Listening to our bodies

I was mindful of how much mindset is in our lives, with a busy schedule for most of us, deadlines to meet, full days, insufficient downtime and having those goals which we set ourselves often putting pressure on us to achieve even more next time.

Whilst having goals are all well and good, so is listening to our bodies. We often ignore what our bodies tell us due to the pressure of work, deadlines and pressure sometimes from our peers or employers.

It’s interesting when an animal feels sick, let’s say a dog or cat, it finds somewhere quiet and often dark to rest and recuperate.

What do we do? We ignore the signals are bodies tell us, because we see these outside pressures as more important than listening to what our bodies are telling us.

This led me to wonder why we might do this.

The reasons are ones I’m sure we are all familiar with, for example, we need to earn money, we can’t let customers or clients down, and so we struggle on and just make things worse.

What’s also interesting is that when others tell us they aren’t well, we are all full of great advice saying things like, ‘go home and rest’ and ‘take it easy’ and yet we never follow our own advice! Why is this?

We should be mindful of balancing the body and the mind so that we aren’t pushing ourselves in one direction to the detriment of the other.

An example of this is what I wrote about last week when I referred to me changing my mindset when running and pushing ahead. A colleague of mine has an injury and ran despite this saying, ‘I just push through the pain’ and ‘it’s usually okay when I do this’.

This led me to thinking that we do need to listen to our bodies too!

I was also reminded by a friend that we also need to listen to both voices in that “the body needs to be listened to and that sometimes we hate something because something doesn’t feel right in the body”. This may mean something in our body is hurt or damaged.

So, what’s the lesson here?

We need to listen to our bodies and be mindful of those goals we set and not to push ourselves too hard.

Remember the rule in the plane if it needs to land in an emergency! We need to put the oxygen mask on ourselves first before we can help others.

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