Train Your Mind

You’ve been busy the whole day; preparing breakfast, getting the children ready for school, going to work, endless meetings, conflicts and discussions with colleagues, new projects and deadlines, and then back home for dinner and other household chores.

At the end of the day you feel a throbbing headache. Your body is using physical symptoms to signal that you’re exhausted and you’ve been having too much stress. Your body is telling you via the headache that there’s a problem and that you should unwind and take it easy.

If your psyche is communicating through physical sensations, we call it psychosomatic, psyche meaning spirit/soul and soma meaning body. Body and psyche work together in producing our experience of all kinds of situations, how we perceive things, how we think about what we perceive, how we interpret things, and how we react towards our environment. Consciously, but also unconsciously. When the demands of a situation exceed our capacities to manage or cope with them, we experience stress, which involves physical reactions preparing our body to either respond actively (i.e. “fight”) or passively (i.e. “flight”) towards the stressful situation. Not only does our breathing, heart rate and blood pressure change, also our muscles change as our brains are producing hormones and signalling our bodies to react, which may even affect our immune system. Attention is heightened, concentration becomes focused on the physical aspect, and although we might feel exhausted we may be unable to sleep as our brains are trying to assess the internal situation even further. Our brain is telling every single cell in the body that something’s not ok.