Dec 1, 2025
Your Body is Speaking - Are You Listening?
Everyday, our bodies send us signals for what they need. They send signals to rest, play, eat, and spend time with others. Everyday, we also make choices that either honor those needs or push them aside.
It’s easy to get swept up in the busyness of life and lose touch with what your body is asking for. That’s why it’s important to reflect on what happens when you ignore these messages for too long, and how to begin listening again for the sake of your greater health and wellbeing.
key takeaways
Ignoring the Body Leads to Dysregulation: Suppressing the body’s natural impulses, like rest or emotional expression, can make it harder to manage stress and maintain a healthy perspective.
Unhealthy Impulses Emerge from Suppression: When healthy impulses are ignored, unhealthy behaviors such as anger, numbness, or substance use may emerge as coping strategies.
Listen to Your Body’s Needs for Wellbeing: Start tuning into your body’s signals and taking steps to fulfill those needs, despite the discomfort of shifting away from unhealthy habitual patterns.
TUNING INTO PHYSICAL SIGNALS
What is Your Body Saying?
Ignoring the body’s needs often leads to a dysregulated nervous system. And when the nervous system is out of balance, it becomes much harder to maintain a healthy perspective, especially in the face of stress.
Culturally, we’ve become so conditioned to move quickly, to multitask, and to override the body’s intuition about what it needs — all for the sake of greater productivity. And for those who grew up in environments where healthy impulses weren’t honored or allowed, there can also be additional lasting tension within the body.
Healthy impulses are your body’s way of communicating what it needs.
Healthy impulses don’t lead to unhealthy behavior — they simply signal that something essential has been missing.
Healthy impulses are to do things like:
Rest or sleep
Take time to be with yourself or with other people
Show authentic emotion or energy
Speak up and be heard
Reach out into the world to explore
Eat or stop eating
Use the bathroom when you need to
Anxiety and depression can easily emerge when the body’s needs are chronically suppressed.
When ignoring bodily cues, we often lose ourselves in a constant focus on external demands and following social rules that were given to us early on about what is and isn't appropriate.
Is being silly something immature to be embarrassed about?
Is dancing when you’re excited uncouth?
Is crying a sign of weakness?
How easy it is to suppress natural expressions with the judgments we pick up through life, and how constrained we then become.
✷ Closer Look: For more on how to return to a life aligned with your own needs and values, read Breaking Free From the Script: How to Live with Intention and Purpose.
DISCONNECTION FROM PHYSICAL SIGNALS
The Cost of Ignoring Your Body
Suppressing natural impulses for rest, play, or expression comes at a cost. That energy doesn’t vanish; it settles in the body, quietly accumulating. Often, it’s not even noticeable until it erupts in unexpected ways:
► You don’t allow yourself to rest, and suddenly you’re burned out, dropping all responsibilities and obligations without warning.
► You hold back your voice too long, and suddenly it bursts out as anger around family and friends.
► You don’t express genuine emotion, and now find yourself numbing them with drugs, alcohol, sex, or food.
It can be hard to reconnect with the body after so much time away from it. But it’s still there, still trying to communicate.
Often, what we first notice is physical tension: tight muscles send anxious signals to the brain; slouched shoulders send signals of sadness or defeat.
Your posture reinforces the very emotions you’re trying to manage.
You can test this for yourself.
► Scrunch your face into a scowl. Furrow your brows, sneer, and clench your jaw. Now, in that state, try to feel calm, peaceful, and open.
► Then relax your face. Let your muscles soften. Now try again to feel calm and open.
Notice the difference?
✶ Additional Insight: To see how facing your internal experiences can promote healing, see Building Courage Through Anxiety: How Challenges Strengthen Character.
REBUILDING AWARENESS OF SOMATIC SIGNALS
How to Start Listening to Your Body
Facial expressions, posture, muscle tension — and all the body’s impulses — are trying to tell you something. Start by gently turning your attention inward. Notice the sensations without trying to change them.
Close your eyes and ask:
“What am I really needing right now?”
Pay attention to how your body responds. Let it speak, without rushing to fix or judge what arises.
Then ask:
“What can I do to begin giving that to myself?”
This might lead you to a neglected area of life that’s been quietly asking for attention.
Follow with:
“What’s keeping me from offering this to myself?”
Am I prioritizing productivity over health? Do I feel unworthy of rest or care? Am I afraid of what might happen if I slow down?
Finally, ask:
“What would need to change for me to start freely giving my body what it needs?”
Let these answers emerge without forcing them. Listening with curiosity and openness is the first step toward greater care for yourself.
OPENNING UP FOR RESTORATION AND GROWTH
Making Space for New Experiences
If you’ve become accustomed to ignoring your body and are just now tuning in, be prepared for it to feel like an inconvenience. Listening requires giving up, at least momentarily, the distractions or patterns that once kept the discomfort out of focus.
But this is a healthy kind of discomfort. It’s the kind that invites restoration and growth.
Practice opening up to these messages. Over time, it becomes less of an inconvenience and more about reclaiming what your body has been asking for all along: care, connection, and space to heal.
Jason Peruchini, LMFT
Jason Peruchini is a licensed psychotherapist and anxiety treatment professional who helps people address issues in mental health to live better lives.
