Caroline Williams

Is your heart bursting out of your chest because, you know, you're scared?

Is there something you need to do?

Are you in pain?

Do you feel fatigued and need to take a rest?

So these senses are becoming clear that they are very much the basis of pretty much everything we ever think, feel, our motivations, our mood, our energy levels.

And so they're very, very important in the basis of our mind, which hasn't really been considered before.

It's all been sort of neck up until fairly recently.

Yeah, I think the so what is that we haven't really been factoring this in when we think about the mind and things that go wrong with our physical health and our mental health that are usually quite difficult to treat.

So a lot of mental health issues that have normally been thought of as brain issues, for example, anxiety, panic disorder, eating disorders, addictions, all of these have very strong physical components.

And what is now becoming clear is that what's happening in a lot of those disorders is that the interpretation and the detection of these internal signals can get out of balance.

And we all vary a lot anyway just naturally in our ability and our tendency to use these sensations.

And so by understanding these sort of body brain connections, finding ways to tweak them, scientists are finding new treatments for lots of difficult things.

You know, things like IBS where, yeah, it's a physical problem, but it's also exacerbated by stress.

And so a lot of things where they are not necessarily all in the brain or all in the body, they're in the interaction between both.

And that's kind of quite a new way of looking at health.

Yeah, well, the way I think of it really is kind of like a background track to our lives.

So, you know, like when you're watching a movie and suddenly the mood will shift and you feel a little bit on edge, but you're not quite sure why that is.

And it's because the backing track to the movie has suddenly shifted.

Interceptive feelings aren't necessarily always in your face and always obvious but they can just shift and if you don't necessarily have the ability to tune in and see what they mean and interpret those correctly that can sort of sometimes lead you astray and one of the reasons why now is an important time to understand this is not just because it's an area of science that's really booming but also because our lifestyles work against

our ability to make sense of what's going on with our bodies so we spend a lot of time um sedentary and so when we're sitting still all the time and just all up in our heads we're not getting very much change in those messages from our bodies and so we can just sort of tune them out and then we don't really know what's going on are we hungry are we tired are we bored you know what's going on