Mind and Body: The Psychosomatic Process

Mind and Body: The Psychosomatic Process

Mind and body work together simultaneously. With pleasure, your blood and other body fluids expand to the surface, toward your skin. With anxiety, those fluids contract toward your heart area.

Your expansive feeling of pleasure and the fluid movement to the surface of your body are identical the way they function. They both let you respond to stimuli, such as things you notice. Your body and your feelings both expand. The pleasure function occurs in both simultaneously. One doesn’t cause the other. They are functionally identical. It’s your body responding.

When you feel anxiety, fear, or pain, your body fluids have moved to your center, near your heart. Your mind and body both contract at once. Your organism is contracting with fluids moving inward, and you feel anxious.

With anxiety, you might notice you feel hesitant, wary, cautious, scared, tentative, skeptical, uncertain, nervous, tense, immobilized, uneasy, stuck, apprehensive, worried, pain, suspicious, or even depressed. But your organism responds in two ways at once: fluids contract to your core and you feel contracted. You respond in both mind and body. One doesn’t cause the other.

We all function in mind and body simultaneously. Fluids move outward with (expansive) pleasure and inward with (contracted) anxiety.  It’s our biological response to what’s happening.

Anxiety/contraction and pleasure/expansion are opposite functions. Like a seesaw, if one side moves up, the other side moves down automatically. This is why you lose your sense of pleasure with chronic anxiety. Anxiety works against pleasure. Anxiety and depression both involve contraction. With therapy, people learn to tolerate expanding again. Their thinking improves too.