1. Better Self Control

   
   

Everyone on the planet has a vice- a habit you just can’t fully break. It always seems to resurface at a moment of weakness. For some people, this weakness is sugar or pizza. For others it is shopping, doom scrolling, or gossiping. In extreme cases, these behaviors can be a lot more destructive like substance use or toxic relationship patterns.

Addictions are not just substances. They are Behaviors, Events, Experiences, People, and substances. Any addictions are formed because it shifts our brain chemistry towards something it needs. Your brain remembers this vice was a way to regulate your nervous system. If the habit isn’t helping you anymore, then your brain needs an update around what options are available to help it achieve the same result.

This is where mind body connection practices come in. They help us zoom out from the roller coaster of pain, desire, pleasure, and shame enough to observe our patterns and afford us the opportunity to make different choices. Once we are free from the cycles, we can go on the journey of finding what replacement practices are more aligned with the life you want for yourself.

2. Increase Your Thinking and Productivity Power

Think of your brain as having an upstairs and downstairs. Our upstairs brain is in charge of focused attention, logic, decision making, relationships, and other “higher thinking” functions. The downstairs brain is in charge of survival functions like evaluating threat, breathing, and quick movement.

When we are under stress, our brain wants to prioritize its survival functions. So it will send blood flow away from the thinking brain in order to give those resources to survival brain. This is why people with social anxiety might show up stiff or uncomfortable in conversations. Its because the higher functions in your brain are operating with less resource due to the stress response.

Mind body connection practices send a signal to restore blood flow to the front brain to reactivate your higher thinking capabilities.

3.  Increase Integrity and Consistency in Character

Have you ever felt mixed around making a decision? You might say “one a part of me feels this way, but a different part of me feels another way. Every single person has different parts to their personality. And each of these parts represents different values or beliefs. Integrity literally means to integrate these parts.

When mind body connection health is weak, our values compete with each other, causing ambivalence and internal war. It causes us to address problems through the lens of choosing the “most important value” and the solutions we come up are win-lose in nature and selectively represent our character. But when our mind body connection is strong, we are united, whole, we are one. We become great at finding solutions that create win-win scenarios. This means we learn to make decisions that represent all of our values at the same time so we are able to create more consistency in our character.

4.  Better Intuition

A common misunderstanding in our culture is believing that “logic is king.” And the brain is the master of our experience. In reality, Only about 20% of our experience comes from the information stored in our head. The other 80% comes from information stored in the rest of the body. The newest research shows we have brain-like neurological centers in the heart and gut. These centers are even capable of making decisions independent of our head-brain. Neuro-scientists are now calling us 3-brained beings with a head-brain, heart-brain, and gut-brain.

When you “follow your heart” or have a “gut instinct” about something, you are engaging information stored in the heart or gut centers. People who are intuitive, naturally have a strong mind-body connection and make decisions that consider all three brains.

You can increase your “intuitive sense” by making mind-body connection a daily practice and engaging the wisdom your heart-brain and gut-brain have to offer.

5. More Joy

If you’ve ever spent time with young children, you know they are outrageously and unapologetically authentic. They have no problem asking for what they need, sharing their opinion, or expressing how they really feel. Neurologically speaking, joy is a relational pattern. It is the experience of being consistently delighted in, accepted, received, and loved. If the child has these needs met, expressions of love will become their inner-voice over time. They will develop a Joyful Identity.

This is not a reality for most adults because those needs have not been sufficiently met.

We learn to believe “I must become something else because love gets removed if I don’t show up the right way”. This happens to us all on a spectrum from mild to severe. Some of us have been deprived of these needs for so long that we don’t know what we really want, how to think, or how to feel without someone else’s approval. This enslaves us to the opinions of others and robs us of experiencing true joy.

Mind-body connection practice helps us to re-engage what is authentic. This creates an invitation let love into the rejected spaces and reclaim the joy that is our birthright.