Why Therapy Should Involve Your Body
You might wonder, why should therapy involve your body? Mental health issues seem to live in our minds, don’t they?
Well, while thoughts and emotions feel like they live independently in our minds, your body is inextricably linked to your mental state. Let’s dive into why body-based psychotherapy is a powerful tool for optimizing mental health in a natural and holistic way.
Your brain’s primary role isn’t thinking or feeling—it’s managing your body’s systems to keep you alive; systems like heart rate, hormones, and energy levels. This process, called allostasis, is like your brain running a budget for your body’s needs. It anticipates what your body requires and prepares to satisfy those demands before they arrive. The result? A process called interoception, which shapes your mood—the subtle, constant sense of how you feel. But mood isn’t the same as emotion; it’s a background hum that colors every thought, dream, or decision you make. It has two dimensions: valence (how pleasant or unpleasant you feel) and arousal (how energized or calm you are).
When your body is out of balance—dehydrated, sleep-deprived, or undernourished—your brain struggles to maintain this budget, leading to low mood or discomfort. For example, deficiencies in key nutrients can mimic mental health symptoms:
- Severe vitamin B3 deficiency (pellagra) can cause psychosis.
- Severe vitamin B1 deficiency (beriberi) can cause anxiety.
- Severe vitamin C deficiency (scurvy) can cause depression.
- Severe sleep deprivation can cause hallucinations.
These extreme cases highlight a key truth: your body’s state directly impacts your mental health. That’s why therapy should involve your body to address the root of your well-being.
The Power of Body Awareness in Therapy
Another reason to bring the body into therapy is that by having a practice of making the sensations in your body the primary focus of your attention while noticing your thoughts, you can stop the constant loop of thoughts that grab your attention and carry you away. Doing this regularly can train your system that those ruminations aren’t vital to your survival (the brain’s core task!). Thus, you can begin to deploy your attention in areas that take you towards your goals; instead of ruminations that don’t.
Many practices do this, such as meditation and yoga. But psychotherapy, particularly depth psychotherapy, is like doing your meditation with an expert guide. A skilled therapist basically becomes an extended mind of your own mind. They come to know you in such a way that they build an internal model of how you perceive yourself in the world. Thereby, having an educated guess of how to help you know yourself in ways that elude you. And the better you know yourself, the easier it becomes to reach your goals.
How Body-Based Psychotherapy Works
A psychotherapist can bring the body into therapy by engaging in relational exercises to build self-awareness. For example, gazing into someone’s eyes and noticing how you feel if the other person moves closer or further away. As with meditation, the idea is not to go down a verbal rabbit hole during this experience, but rather, to observe your physical sensations and fleeting thoughts. A relational exercise like this can bring up things about yourself to analyze with the therapist later. The experiential exercise (aka bioenergetic exercise) plus the analysis afterwards is what is known as integration. And that is the fruit of therapy.
Why Choose Body-Based Psychotherapy?
If you’re an adult seeking a natural, holistic approach to mental health, body-based psychotherapy offers a powerful way to use your body to improve your mind. By building awareness of your mood, you can discern how it’s driving your thoughts and emotions. Likewise, by paying attention to your health you can mitigate a lot of emotional turmoil. And this is why therapy should involve your body; your body is the foundation of your mental well-being.
