Your Body Is Talking: Are You Listening? How Somatic Awareness Supports Mental Health

Many of us learned to treat our bodies like transportation.

Something that carries our brain from meeting to meeting. Task to task. Responsibility to responsibility.

As long as the body keeps moving, we assume everything is fine.

Until it isn’t.

As part of my upcoming book, You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to See a Therapist, I’m sharing stories from my clinical work to help people understand what actually happens in therapy. Therapy is not just talking about problems. It is learning to understand yourself differently—your thoughts, emotions, patterns, and yes, even your body.

The stories in this series are drawn from my work as a psychologist. Identifying details have been changed, and some stories are composites of clients with similar experiences or themes.

“I Don’t Know Why I’m So Tired”

Angela came to therapy frustrated with herself.

From the outside, she looked like she was doing great.

Successful career. Family responsibilities handled. The person everyone could count on.

But inside?

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she told me. “I should be happy. I have everything I wanted.”

That word caught my attention.

Should.

As we talked, Angela explained that she was exhausted all the time. Her shoulders hurt. Her jaw was tight. She was having trouble sleeping.

But she dismissed all of it.

“I think I just need to push through,” she said.

Her body disagreed.

The Body Keeps Score Too

During one session, Angela was explaining a situation at work.

Her words said one thing.

Her body said another.

“It wasn’t a big deal,” she told me.

But as she spoke, her shoulders moved closer to her ears. Her breathing became shallow. Her hands tightened.

So I gently interrupted.

“Pause for a second. Before we keep talking about what happened, can we notice what your body is doing right now?”

She looked surprised.

“My body?”

“Yes. Your body is part of this conversation too.”

At first, she laughed.

“I have no idea. I don’t really pay attention to my body unless it hurts.”

Exactly.

And that was where we started.

Your Body Is Information, Not an Inconvenience

Many people have been taught to override their bodies.

Push through exhaustion. Ignore tension. Dismiss discomfort. Keep functioning.

And sometimes that skill was necessary.

But a survival skill can become a problem when we never learn when to turn it off.

Research shows that emotions involve both brain and body processes. Our nervous system constantly receives and responds to internal signals—a process called interoception, or the ability to notice sensations inside the body (Craig, 2002). Differences in interoceptive awareness have been connected to anxiety, emotional regulation, and overall mental health (Khalsa et al., 2018).

The body is constantly communicating.

Many of us just learned not to listen.

Learning a New Language

Angela and I began practicing curiosity.

Not judgment.

Not “Why am I like this?”

Instead:

“What is my body trying to tell me?”

A tight chest before certain meetings.

A stomachache before saying yes to something she didn’t want to do.

Exhaustion that showed up every time she ignored her own needs.

Slowly, patterns appeared.

“I thought my body was betraying me,” she said one day. “But I think it’s actually been trying to protect me.”

That was the shift.

Her symptoms weren’t enemies.

They were messages.

Therapy Helps You Come Home to Yourself

Somatic awareness is not about obsessing over every sensation.

It is about rebuilding trust with yourself.

It is learning:

My shoulders are tense. Maybe I need a pause.

My stomach feels unsettled. Maybe something about this situation needs attention.

I am exhausted. Maybe my body is asking for care, not criticism.

Angela was still ambitious. Still successful. Still driven.

The difference was that she stopped dragging her body behind her goals.

She learned to bring herself with her.

And that changed everything.

Try This

If you’ve been ignoring your body, start here.

1. Take a 30-second body scan

What it is: A brief pause to notice physical sensations without judgment.

Why it works: Awareness helps reconnect the brain and body so stress signals can be recognized earlier.

How to do it: Ask yourself: “Where am I holding tension right now?”

2. Name the sensation before the story

What it is: Separating what you feel physically from the explanation your mind creates.

Why it works: The pause creates space between reaction and response.

How to do it:

Try: “My chest feels tight” before jumping to “Something is wrong.”

3. Listen before pushing through

What it is: Treating body signals as information.

Why it works: Ignoring stress signals often leads the body to communicate louder.

How to do it: Ask: “If my body could talk, what would it be asking for?”

If this resonated, I encourage you to share it with someone who is tired of pushing through.

These stories are part of my upcoming book, You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to See a Therapist, which explores what therapy actually looks like and how it helps people better understand themselves.

If you’d like support finding the right therapist, download my free guide, How to Interview a Therapist (So You Actually Find the Right One)—a practical guide to choosing a therapist who fits you, not the other way around.

⟶ Download the FREE guide here

References

Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3, 655–666.

Khalsa, S. S., et al. (2018). Interoception and mental health: A roadmap. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 3(6), 501–513.