by Nora Reda
Committing to regular exercise is no children’s play. Or is it? Here is how we could shift our attitudes toward exercise and develop the muscle that moves us every time.
The Joy of Movement
Movement is one of the most innate nature of humans, and every living being. It begs the question then, why we need motivation to move as adults when we are so naturally and joyfully moving as children? What happens to the muscle that moves us in our young age later in life? It sounds so funny to ask this question in a world where we are constantly bombarded with messages about how to motivate ourselves to lead a more active life.
Within this statement lies a clue to the answer. So what logically follows is a movement that is done consciously for the betterment of our physical shape and thus the meaning has changed from movement being done for joy to performing it to reach a certain goal or expectation. There is innately nothing wrong with goals and expectations. However, what this mentality leads to is another thing to insert into our busy schedule. (Read more on training optimality here!)
Shifting our mentality about exercise has to do with changing the meaning associated with movement.
Awareness
Awareness is one of the key elements in neuroplasticity. One of the things to cultivate awareness is slowing down. Although this may not be as easily applicable in some forms of exercise where faster speed is the aim, still it can be very useful in your yoga practices or even gym style exercises where precision is key.
Awareness and the Body-Brain Connection
The brain is connected to the entire body and this connection is essential for maintaining homeostasis. Homeostasis is not only physical, it is also cognitive and emotional. Our habits are the fruit of our learning through our experiences and are very useful for us to be able to function efficiently. The nervous system creates habits as a shortcut to actions we would have to otherwise think about. Therefore, through habitual patterns we save energy and they are also needed for our survival in the form of reflexes.
However, some habits are dysfunctional. For us to shift habitual patterns, awareness is crucial.
This is where interoceptive awareness comes in. Low threshold mechano-receptors transmit messages through the spinal nerves and the vagus nerve and deliver to different parts of the brain where they are interpreted. Thus, interoception is a form of communication between the body and the brain. The primary purpose of this process is homeostasis.
Unconscious body states influence your emotions, your behaviour, and ultimately your decision making. (Ceunen, 625)
Interoception
Interoception means sensing what’s going on in the body that is below the radar of conscious awareness. These could be hormonal, immunological, metabolic, thermal, nociceptive, or visceromotor sensations. (Critchley, 2013)
Poor interoception is associated with many dysfunctions.
Poor Interoceptive Associations
- Pain
- Medically unexplained symptoms
- Negative emotions
- Anxiety
- Poor emotional regulation
- Poor decision making
- Eating disorders
- Addiction
- High blood pressure
- Cancer related fatigue (Ceunen, 2016)
Accurate Interoceptive Associations
- Increased vagal tone
- Improved heart rate variability
- Presence
- Agency
- Self-regulation
- Co-regulation
- Resilience (Ceunen, 2016)
Interoception can be gradually improved. Improved interoception, in return, will lead to better health.
So how does all of this relate to what motivates us to move?
Exercise and Innercise
As we said at the beginning, movement in its innate form is rooted in the feelings of joy. Pleasant feelings drive us towards things we pursue, while unpleasant ones drive us away.
For the purposes of practicality we can distinguish between exercise and innercise. While exercise is understood as training our physical bodies, in particular our muscles and connective tissues, innercise is a practice of noticing the body’s reactions to stimuli or, conversely, to stillness.
This implies that we condition ourselves to bring our unconscious to the level of consciousness. So by engaging in interoceptive awareness we can reconnect with our subconscious emotional processes (feelings, reactions) and impact our physiological processes (hormones, metabolism, senses, etc.) as well. Because these cues are processed in different parts of the brain, we essentially make better neural connections between them and begin to shift our overall attitude towards our own functioning and making appropriate shifts in our sense of self identity.
Since the fascia (connective tissue) has 6-10 times better innervation than muscle tissue does, our brain is keenly interested in what’s going on in our intercellular matrix. This complex web of tissue is present in our bodies in different constituencies, some more viscous than others, and respond to pressure and other stimulation in different ways (eg. Golgi tendon organ; muscle spindles).
Essentially, the more ways we can stimulate this fascial lattice, the better. This is exactly why natural movements such as jumping, tumbling, swinging, and rolling are really healthy for both the condition of our fascia and to our mental health. However, as we age, our connective tissues lose their viscosity and we will need to spend more time on “warming up” to vigorous exercise than when we were younger.
In Conclusion
A no pain no gain attitude is not always useful for moving through our exercises without being truly present and is not going to yield the same effect as focused, conscious movement. By developing our focused attitudes to any recreational movement we do, we are changing our nervous system and our brain and in return we get the impulses to move as a feedback from our body to get us into a state of pleasure over and over again.
Resources:
Kristine Kaoverii Weber, The Yoga and Neuroscience Connection, An Online Training for Yoga Professionals, Subtle Yoga, LLC 2021
Fascia in Yoga and Movement with Tom Myers and Dr. Robert Schleip, Online Training, 2021