Get Out of Your Head
Ever have the feeling that you just can’t get out of your head? Me too!
Well, first of all, just so we all know, this in-your-head habit is entirely healthy and natural: it literally enables you to get through the day. Nonetheless, just because it’s helpful doesn’t mean that being in your head feels like the best place to live all the time—when you’re overly-managed by thinking, it makes you a bit anxiety-ridden, and it gets super old super fast.
The good news is that you can regain the capacity to live in more embodied ways given a little consistent effort. It’s time for a mini neuroscience lesson! Don’t worry, we’ll simplify it as much as we can while still staying accurate enough, too!
Neurobiologically speaking, the left hemisphere of the brain is where this “in your head” thing primarily happens: the left hemisphere is where functions around language, planning, and rational thought take place. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, is where the processing of emotion and other more embodied experiences resides.
The thing about the left hemisphere, though, is that when we give it too much uninterrupted air time, that well-intentioned little Thinky Thinkerson tends to dominate our experiences—and we end up feeling “all in our heads.”
This is because “the left hemisphere has evolved to inhibit information and sensations processed in the right hemisphere and the body… The downside is that if this inhibition is too strong—too consistent—it can lead us to miss valuable right-to-left and bottom-up information that is essential to knowing ourselves and others.”* (Wanna keep going down this science-y route and come back to the rest of this later? Maybe this quick read will interest you. Or here’s something a bit deeper.)
Boiled down a bit, this means that when we hang out in analytical thinking a whole lot, we also inadvertently turn down the volume on important messages from our physical and emotional bodies.
And this is part of the reason why we use mindfulness and slowing down in our Hakomi-informed counseling work: it gives us just that little extra bit of space to turn down left-hemisphere inhibition, sense our bodies, feel our emotions, and hear from those small, quiet voices inside that guide us toward deeper truths about ourselves and how we want to be in the world.
Don’t want to dive into counseling or can’t afford it right now? Wanna try something on your own first? Check out these free resources for incorporating some right hemi- time into your left hemisphere-heavy tasks: the pomodoro method can be well used to interrupt that in-your-head tendency while working, and this at-your-desk stretch routine from our heroes over at GMB can help to get you in your body even if you’re working at the computer.
And this is part of the reason why we use mindfulness and slowing down in our Hakomi-informed counseling work: it gives us just that little extra bit of space to turn down left-hemisphere inhibition, sense our bodies, feel our emotions, and hear from those small, quiet voices inside that guide us toward deeper truths about ourselves and how we want to be in the world.
Don’t want to dive into counseling or can’t afford it right now? Wanna try something on your own first? Check out these free resources for incorporating some right hemi- time into your left hemisphere-heavy tasks: the pomodoro method can be well used to interrupt that in-your-head tendency while working, and this at-your-desk stretch routine from our heroes over at GMB can help to get you in your body even if you’re working at the computer.
with Blessings for Embodiedness,
*Reference: Cozolino, L. (2021). The Development of a Therapist. W. W. Norton & Company. (p. 16)