Caroline Williams

And so there's definitely a middle ground where you can kind of tune in, well, that's probably nothing, tune out again.

Yeah, there's definitely a balance to be struck, I would say.

Yeah.

So the brain is a hugely important part of this.

So what I'm not saying is that like, oh, yeah, you know, the mind is all in the body.

Forget the brain.

It's very much a joint effort between the body and the brain.

And so this idea of the body's role in our emotions isn't entirely new.

You know, William James was saying in the 1880s that, you know, the body...

changes in our body affect our emotions but what why it didn't really take off is because everyone thought that well these changes in the body they're they're too slow to have anything to do with what the brain's doing and there's been a shift in neuroscience in recent years where to understand that the brain

predicts what it expects to have come in from all the senses including the internal senses including our interoceptive ones and so the brain is constantly predicting what it expects to come from the body and then updating that prediction based on what's actually coming in and then there's some sort of interaction between the two where these things are turned up or turned down depending on

what is most important at the time.

And it's this interaction that can go wrong in these various disorders.

But yeah, the brain is very much involved in this.

In fact, there's a huge area of the brain called the insula, we have one on each side of the head, which is known as the interoceptive cortex, where all the body signals come up from the body and are put together with the predictions coming down from the kind of more cognitive areas of the brain.

And what comes out of that

is the sensation of how I feel right now, right here.

making time, you know, initially to just kind of notice these things, maybe, you know, once a day even, you know, like I did it three times a day and I found it was really, really helpful to kind of just remember that there's more going on than what's going on round and round in my head as I sit at my desk.

So, yeah, just I think the more the more the better.

And just understanding that this is an aspect of life, that your body is sending messages, which they're sort of coloured with information, which is basically is what's happening good or bad or indifferent?