Why learning to trust your body is the same work as learning to trust yourself
Carol came to coaching at 68 because she didn’t know what she wanted.
That was how she put it in our first conversation — not “I’m unhappy” or “something needs to change,” but the specific, quietly devastating phrase: “I don’t know what I want anymore.” She said it like a confession. Like not knowing was the failure, rather than the symptom.
We spent the first few sessions exploring the obvious territory — identity after retirement, purpose, the texture of her days. One afternoon, she casually mentioned a three-year-old tightness in her chest. This feeling arose whenever she thought about a family commitment. Every time. For three years. And she’d never once followed that signal anywhere. She’d just noticed it and kept going.
“What did you think that tightness was?” I asked.
She looked genuinely puzzled. “I don’t know. I guess I thought it was just… anxiety. Something to manage.”
It wasn’t anxiety. It was information. Her body had been sending the same message for three years, clearly and consistently, and she had learned so thoroughly to override it that she’d stopped hearing it as a signal at all. Carol didn’t have a clarity problem. She had a listening problem. And the listening problem ran through nearly every domain of her life.
She hadn’t stopped knowing what she wanted. She’d stopped trusting that what she knew mattered.
The Four Signals We Learned to Override
The body never actually goes quiet. It keeps sending signals with remarkable consistency. What changes, what decades of overriding will do, is change our ability to hear those signals as signals rather than noise to push through.
There are four channels where this pattern runs deepest.
Energy signals are the ones most women recognize first. Not the dramatic exhaustion of illness, but the subtler language, the difference between genuinely energized and running on obligation, between a day that leaves you tired-but-satisfied and one that leaves you depleted in a way sleep doesn’t fix. Years of productivity culture teach us to treat all tiredness as weakness, all depletion as something to push through. The result is women who can no longer distinguish between what fills them up and what quietly drains them. They’ve been overriding both for so long the distinction has blurred.
Hunger and fullness signals carry their own complicated history. Decades of diet culture, the counting, the restricting, the elaborate systems for managing what you eat, train you to distrust your body’s most basic communication. When you’ve spent thirty years following external rules about eating rather than internal signals, you lose confidence that the signals themselves are trustworthy. This is not a personal failure. It is the predictable outcome of a culture that told women their appetite was a problem to manage rather than a signal to honor.
Pain versus discomfort signals require the most discernment. There is growth discomfort, the mild resistance to doing something hard, and there is genuine stop-signal pain, the body’s clear communication that something is wrong. We, as women, have learned to push through both, unable to tell the difference. Learning to tell the difference is one of the most practical skills this work produces, and it requires exactly the body attentiveness most of us were never taught.
Intuition as a somatic signal is the channel Carol had most completely silenced. The gut feeling about a person, that immediate, pre-verbal knowing before the mind has assembled its reasons. The tightness around a commitment that isn’t right. The lightness, the almost physical expansion, that comes with a genuine yes. Neuroscience researcher Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has spent decades documenting what the body stores and communicates. The research is unambiguous that the body holds experiences, wisdom, and signals in ways the conscious mind doesn’t always access. This isn’t intuition as mysticism. It’s interoception, the neurological capacity to sense internal body states, and research increasingly links it to emotional intelligence and what we might simply call knowing yourself.
Carol’s tightness wasn’t anxiety to manage. It was her body’s three-year record of a decision that wasn’t aligned with who she actually was. She just needed someone to tell her the signal was worth following.
The Congruence Connection
In coaching work, we talk about congruence, the alignment between what you say, what you feel, and what you do. When those three things are in sync, you feel grounded and trustworthy to yourself. When they’re out of sync, you feel the specific discomfort of living slightly sideways from your own truth.
Body trust is congruence work. That’s what most conversations about “listening to your body” miss entirely.
When your body signals tiredness and you override it to be productive, you are practicing incongruence.
When your gut says no and your mouth says yes because yes is easier, you are practicing incongruence. Do this long enough and it stops feeling like a choice. The body speaks; the mind overrules; the signal gets filed under “not useful.”
Here is the connection that changes everything: when you learn to hear and honor your body’s signals, you are practicing the same skill as trusting your own judgment in relationships, following your instincts about opportunities, and saying no when something doesn’t feel right. The research on interoception shows these are functionally the same neural pathway: the capacity to sense what’s true in your body and the capacity to act from your own knowing are the same capacity, expressed in different domains.
Carol didn’t have a clarity problem because she was confused. She had a clarity problem because she had practiced for decades not trusting what she already knew.
Think of a decision you’ve made in your life that you knew in your body before your mind caught up. That sensation of knowing before knowing occurs when something settles or resists before a single reason has been assembled. That signal is still available to you. It never left. The work is learning to listen again.
The Permission That Changes Everything
You are allowed to rest when you’re tired. Not when you’ve earned it. Not after you’ve finished everything on the list. When your body says so.
You are allowed to stop eating when you’re full, and to eat when you’re hungry, without a system mediating between you and your own appetite. You are allowed to say “something feels wrong here” and take that seriously before you have a logical reason. You are allowed to decline an invitation because your body contracted at the prospect and to treat that contraction as data rather than weakness.
These aren’t indulgences. They are the beginning of the trust that makes everything else possible. You cannot build a life that genuinely fits you if you have no practice listening to what fits and what doesn’t. Body trust isn’t the soft work you do after the real work. It is the real work. It is how you learn, again, to be a reliable witness to your own experience.
What Carol Discovered
Once Carol started treating the tightness as a signal rather a symptom, something unexpected happened. The signal grew louder. Not more anxious just clearer. As if her body, finally being listened to, was willing to be more specific.
She began taking Highbanks walks not to log steps but to practice this exactly. She let her body set the pace, noticing what arose without immediately managing it. Over months, the full landscape came into view: the lightness that came with certain conversations, the contraction that preceded certain obligations, the quiet hum of genuine interest she’d been mistaking for distraction.
“I keep thinking I should be further along by now,” she told me one afternoon. “And then I notice the ‘should,’ and I know that’s the old pattern.”
She was right. The should was the old pattern. Noticing it, that small, clean moment of recognizing the signal for what it was, that was the new one.
Carol knew what she wanted. She’d known for years. She just needed to rebuild enough trust to believe that what she knew was worth acting on.
Three Ways to Start Listening
The listening practice is simple and yet, not easy.
Daily — The Three-Times-a-Day Check-In. Set a gentle alarm for mid-morning, midday, and mid-afternoon. When it goes off, pause for sixty seconds and ask your body three questions: “How’s my energy right now?” “What do I need in this moment?” “What am I noticing in my chest, gut, or shoulders?” Don’t analyze the answers. Fix nothing, just notice. Repetition, not effort, builds languages, and you are rebuilding one.
This week — One Override Undone. Identify one moment where you routinely override a body signal: pushing through tiredness at 3pm, eating past fullness at dinner, tensing through a conversation that contracts you. This week, when that moment arrives, honor the signal instead. Notice what happens when the signal is acknowledged rather than managed.
Each evening — The Congruence Question. Before sleep, ask: “Was there a moment today when my body knew something my mind was arguing with? What did the body know?” Write for five minutes without editing. You are not solving anything — you are calibrating. Learning to read the language your body has been speaking all along.
The Trust That Was Always There
Body trust and self-trust are not two different things you build separately and then somehow integrate. They are the same trust, practiced in the same moment, through the same simple act of turning toward what your body knows and deciding it matters.
You can have a complicated history with your body AND begin a new chapter of partnership today. You can acknowledge years of overriding AND trust that the signals are still there, still clear, still waiting. The body is extraordinarily patient. It has been sending the same messages for years without giving up.
Start with the check-in. Three times a day. Three questions. Sixty seconds. You will be surprised, within a week, how much your body has to say when you give it a moment to be heard.
