Are your emotions really in your mind?
and why the phrase "Mind-Body connection" is bullshit
If I hear the phrase “mind-body connection” one more time, I think I’ll lose my shit.
My problem with said phrase lies in its implications. I get that the phrase essentially says, “Wow, did you know our minds and bodies are linked and can impact each other?” But more insidiously, it suggests that our mind and our body are separate entities with convenient, neat, separate roles.
The concept that our mind, bodies, and emotions are all “connected” but separate not only misrepresents of how living organisms work, but also gives us a flawed map of our internal landscape, a map we try to follow when we’re feeling bad and want to feel better. Think of the phrase “mind-body connection” as printed MapQuest instructions from 1998, leaving people who are just trying travel somewhere new feeling frustrated, inept as navigators, and irritable with others. (Anyone else’s mom and dad get into shouting matches over those printouts?!)
The Myth of Brain as Commander in Chief
Let’s get even more imaginative than MapQuest: the tiny little alien from Men In Black (inside that gentle old guy’s head) encapsulates this flawed model.
This adorable little alien sits in a metallic cockpit with countless levers, switches and buttons. His seat back, embedded with speakers, transports sound from the old man’s ears. The tiny alien watches a staticky screen inside the old man’s face, conveying images that orient the alien to the old guy’s environment and spatial positions. Notice how the alien himself looks like an anthropomorphized homunculus (sans giant hands): his body scrawny and head bulbous with huge, sad, and weirdly cute, bloodshot eyes. I worry about his screen time averages.
The visual metaphor connotes the way most of us picture ourselves. The brain (tiny alien) acts as control tower, interpreting information and dictating the body’s (old guy’s) response with a coordinated sequence of button pushes and lever pulls. While this is some of the story - it lacks essential detail and nuance.
Worse, it tricks us into believing dangerous myths, like that we alone control our destinies. When we encounter stressors (deadlines, temptations, toxic relationships) that bring out our worst, we believe our thoughts alone can “fix” our responses/behavior, or “control” or emotions. If we coerce our own little guy to get tougher, harsher (see: negative self-talk, perfectionism) we’ll respond differently. In other words, just get your tiny alien (brain) to pull up their metallic bootstraps and get-it-fucking-together.
And if you can’t get-it-fucking-together, there must be something wrong with you! The rationale goes as follows:
Your mind is your brain, and that’s inside your head.
Your emotions are a part of your mind, so those are also inside your head.
The mind alone has the power to control your emotions and behavior, and if you’re a good person (good = disciplined, in control, strong, master of your own ship), your body and emotions obey.
If your body and emotions disobey your mind’s orders, you must be bad (bad = out of control, not on top of things, weak, lazy, a slob, dysfunctional). To become good, adjust how those orders sound. Make them harsher, louder, or punish yourself somehow to make your body and emotions finally listen and obey.
If the implicit isn’t already explicit - I’ll state it here: the mind as “control center” reeks of rugged individualism, the idea that we are the sole determinants of our own fate. And therefore, if shit goes left, it’s all your fault. Where are your little metallic bootstraps, and why aren’t you pulling them up HARDER?!
We do know, of course, that the brain sends information, directions, and signals to our bodies; I’m not advocating this doesn’t happen. But the reverse is ALSO happening all of the time: our bodies send information, directions, and signals to our brains. Processing (a word this therapist overuses) information happens bidirectionally: top down and bottom up.
How BOTH our brains and bodies process information
Top down processing refers to everything I’ve angrily written thus far. Your brain uses higher-level cognitive functioning (logic, concepts, planning, prior expectations and knowledge) to understand incoming stimuli (anything in your environment - a conversation, an Insta post, a sound you don’t recognize).
To simplify this concept, you might use the word perception. For example, if you’re sitting on the subway, watching a young man wearing a suit and an expensive-looking watch yell, “Just fucking sell already!” as he gets off at the Wall St. station, you’d probably assume he’s an investment banker. The assumption of his career choice based on what you observed is top down processing: you used existing knowledge and frameworks to fill in missing gaps of data. Another social work-y example of top down processing: what ethnicity or race did you picture when you pictured this guy’s description? No matter the skin color you saw in your mind’s eye, you used existing models and knowledge to fill in the gaps (also see: implicit bias).
Bottom up processing works in an almost opposite way, as the name suggests. Bottom up processing begins with taking in real-time data from our bodies through our senses, as opposed to beginning with concepts/models/frameworks from our brains. To use the subway-guy example, bottom up processing allowed light rays reflecting from his suit and reaching your retinas to be encoded in your brain as one cohesive image; or sound waves from his shouting vibrated tiny hairs in your ears, which sent nerve impulses from the inner ear to the brain so that you registered that sound waves as his voice. Another word to simplify this concept: sensation.
To actually function, we absolutely need both top-down and bottom up processing. Without top down, we’d be eternal infants in adult bodies (i.e. Emma Stone in Poor Things - and we know what she does with produce at the kitchen table). Perception and assumption are both necessary for living; we need frameworks to organize the infinite amount of data (and variability of that data) to make sense of life.
The huge caveat is this: when we see the mind and body as separate, distinct entities, with the mind as the controller and body and responder, we rob ourselves of compassion, grace, understanding, and most importantly, the ability to heal on a deep and lasting level. The mind and body are not simply connected - they are both parts, coordinating together from cradle to grave, that make up one WHOLE you. The mind doesn’t just impact, but shapes the body, and simultaneously, the body shapes the mind at all times, 24/7. And if we give our bodies and our emotions the curiosity, attention, and care they deserve, we have the opportunity to become our authentic selves who can experience authentic, fulfilling lives.
Ok, but where do EMOTIONS fit in?
Most of us envision emotions as feelings that exist in our minds (or head/brain), that can impact but are, again, separate from our bodies. Neuroscience tells a wildly different story.
According to researchers and neuroscientists Damasio and Carvalho (2013), feelings, whether sensations or emotions, are “mental experiences of body states. They signify physiological need (for example, hunger), tissue injury (for example, pain), optimal function (for example, well-being), threats to the organism (for example, fear or anger) or specific social interactions (for example, compassion, gratitude or love).”
Feelings (both emotion and sensation) are how the brain represents changes in our bodies, in the same way sight is the brain’s representation of light rays or hearing is the brain’s representation of sound waves.
Here’s a veerrryy basic summary of how this works. Our central nervous system constantly surveys our external (outside of us) and internal (inside of us) environments for changes that signify how well or how badly we’re doing and how to use our energy effectively. Our brain and nervous system communicate and coordinate responses to those changes; these responses are conveyed and FELT as emotion. Are you relaxed and happy as you’re safely enjoying a picnic with friends, savoring the snacks and company? Or are you frightened as hell, dropping that hunk of jam-covered brie sprint away from the bee hovering dangerously close to your face? In each of these scenarios, our minds and bodies coordinate to create a felt emotion, which provokes a specific response to changes in our environment: pleasure, relaxation (time to chill) in the former, and fear, panic (move and get to safety) in the latter.
Emotions are the bridge between environmental changes and what we choose to do next; they are physiological feeling-states in the body that push us towards specific actions. Put in a more poetic way by Diana Fosha, PhD (founder of a somatic therapy modality called AEDP), “Emotion is the experiential arc between the problem and its solution: between the danger and the escape lies fear. Between novelty and its exploration lies joyful curiosity. Between the loss and its eventual acceptance lies the grief and its completion.”
In researcher Pannskepp’s (2010) equally poetic words, emotions are “ancestral tools for living - evolutionary memories of such importance that they were coded into the genome in rough form.” Pannskepp asserts that emotions have a sort “program” encoded into them, and that specific emotions provoke specific urges within us. Pannskepp’s research found seven primary building-block emotional systems in all mammals: seeking, rage, fear, lust, care, grief (formerly panic), and play. Each of these emotions have encoded drives or urges, summarized from Pannskepp’s (2010) study below:
Seeking - also curiosity, exploration, excited anticipation; pushes us towards seeking out resources we need to survive AND to feel good. Could also be categorized as eros or libido; life-energy.
Rage - comes up when our seeking is thwarted or if we/loved ones are in danger. Pushes us to fight, to protect, to frighten others.
Fear - a protective emotion that wants us to avert “pain or destruction.” Pushes us to flee, to freeze, or even fawn (to soothe the aggressor).
Lust - related to the seeking system, pushes us to find a mate, have sex, make babies and project the species into the future (evolutionarily speaking, not 2024-speaking).
Care - pushes us to nurture and take care of our loved ones, primarily parent to off-spring, but also to knit our communities together. Creates social cohesion that makes a group stronger than one individual.
Grief - elicited when we’re separated by loved ones in fundamental ways. Pushes us to panic, to mourn, to seek the one we’ve lost.
Play - also joy, pleasure in a social context. Pushes us to connect with others, learn social rules and refine social interactions.
Each of the above are seven basic, evolutionary emotions/feeling-states with a corresponding drive within them. As humans, we’ve felt and labeled many, many more. Just take a look at the emotions wheel I have in my office (I’ve always hated that they leave the sexuality part out).
We deeply understand that emotions are felt. Often words can’t convey the experience, but our bodies can (great art can too! but that’s another piece for another time). Well known metaphors attempt to capture the felt sense of emotions: “butterflies in your stomach” when you experience the anxious excitement before a first date; needing to vent or “let off steam” when you’re frustrated and can’t hold it in anymore, or feeling “empty” after a devastating loss. Visualizing each of these phrases carries both an emotional and a physical valence; the beauty of emotions is that they exist in the mind and the body simultaneously, holding both an experience and a drive to sustain us within them.
Despite what our ruggedly-individualistic tiny aliens might say, emotions aren’t superfluous extras that our minds can control. Emotions are the language our body speaks to communicate to our whole being. They carry deep insight about what’s going on with us, often before our cognitive systems piece together narratives about our experiences. Worse, our thoughts often thwart our emotion’s insight, bewitching us with false narratives about who we are, how the world works, and what we’re allowed to do and feel. When we understand that our emotions, bodies, minds, brains (and souls, if this language speaks to you) are all valuable inroads to understanding and healing ourselves, we inherently see ourselves as we are: holistic, infinitely multi-dimensional, messy, human.
In a society that prioritizes control, obedience, perfection, and hyper-productivity, responding to our felt, non-verbal experience is radical. So what, you should skip the zoom meeting and nap anytime you’re tired?? Well, ideally yes, but obviously we don’t live in utopia (yet).
Realistically, listening to yourself holistically begins with shifting your attention to your felt sensations, learning recognize their signals and interpret them with clarity, and finally responding to what they’re asking of you. Anything less flattens the maddeningly complex and nuanced experience of being human; “mind-body connection” be damned.
References (i.e. you can take the woman out of grad school, but can’t take grad school out of the woman)
Damasio, A., Carvalho, G. The nature of feelings: evolutionary and neurobiological origins. Nat Rev Neurosci 14, 143–152 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3403
Doucleff, M. (2013, December 30). Mapping emotions on the body: love makes us warm all over. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/12/30/258313116/mapping-emotions-on-the-body-love-makes-us-warm-all-over
Drew, C. (July 6, 2023). 25 Top-Down Processing Examples. Helpful Professor. https://helpfulprofessor.com/top-down-processing-examples/
Fosha, D. (2000). The transforming power of affect. Perseus Book Groups.
Panksepp J. (2010). Affective neuroscience of the emotional BrainMind: evolutionary perspectives and implications for understanding depression. Dialogues in clinical neuroscience, 12(4), 533–545. https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2010.12.4/jpanksepp
Rousay, V. (2023, September 7). Bottom-up processing: definition and examples. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/bottom-up-processing.html
Thank you for this well written article. I have printed it out to give to clients.