The Body Knew First
Why the body knows before your mind can explain
When Takeshi, my coaching client, walked into his new workplace on the first day, he thought he’d found everything he’d hoped for. Modern building, city center location. Colleagues who greeted him warmly. A well-designed office where everyone had space to focus. By every rational measure, it was a good start.
But his body told a different story.
“Something felt off,” he told me later in one of our sessions. But he couldn’t explain why at the time. It was just a faint stirring deep in his chest. A whisper he tried to ignore.
A month passed. But the feeling didn’t fade. It crystallized.
In meetings, everyone looked busy, he explained to me. But no one seemed to be working together. Conversations stayed within departmental boundaries. People shared the same space yet remained isolated, each one an island.
Then Takeshi—still new, still finding his footing—was asked to speak to a talented colleague who was thinking of resigning and convince him not to do so.
He sat down with the man, someone from another department he barely knew.
“We’re all too busy to look out for each other,” the colleague said.
“I’m just trying to keep up with my workload. I’ve lost sight of what I really want to do.”
“My boss only cares about results. It doesn’t feel like anyone is thinking about our individual futures in this organization.”
Takeshi listened. He tried to reassure him, to explain that the organization wasn’t truly like that. But even as he spoke, he heard the hollowness in his own words.
Because deep down, he felt the same way.
Before leaving, the colleague said quietly, “I wish I had met you sooner.”
When Takeshi finally shared his full story with me in one of our sessions, he concluded:
“You know that nagging feeling that came over me the minute I walked into that office?
It wasn’t just some fleeting impression. It was my body speaking to me.
It was my body that knew first.”
When the Body Speaks Before the Mind
How often do we brush off those subtle signals of discomfort—telling ourselves, “It’s probably nothing,” or “I’m overthinking it.”
The flutter in the chest, the tightness in the throat, the shallow breath, the knot in the stomach—our bodies speak to us in these ways.
Have you ever noticed your body sensing something before your mind could rationalize it? And in that moment, did you listen—or did you dismiss it as imagination?
As business professionals, we are constantly making decisions in uncertain environments.
While we rely on data and facts, we also draw on intuition refined through our own experiences to make effective choices.
Yet when stress and fatigue accumulate, that intuition begins to fade. In complex and high-pressure workplaces, it becomes harder to listen to what our bodies are telling us. But perhaps that very difficulty is what invites us to start “tuning in” to our bodies once again.
The Brain That Reacts Before Reason
Why do we hesitate to trust our intuition?
As business professionals, we make decisions in fast-moving, uncertain environments. We rely on data and facts—but also on instinct – it could be called a ‘gut feeling’, honed through experience.
Clark and Sugar note that combining intuition with analytical thinking allows people to make faster, better, and more accurate decisions. They also suggest that when individuals lose touch with their intuition, anxiety rises, self-consciousness increases, and decision-making—particularly pattern recognition—suffers. This tends to happen under stress or fatigue.
In Takeshi’s story, the strain of adapting to a new environment may have dulled his ability to listen to his intuitive voice.
Where That Gut Feeling Comes From
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis (SMH) offers insight.
SMH asserts that emotions, expressed as bodily feelings (somatic markers), are crucial for rational decision-making, guiding us by tagging potential outcomes as good or bad, even unconsciously. In this way, such somatically-linked emotions can help us choose wisely and avoid risks. This runs contrary to the idea that “pure logic” is best.
According to Damasio, these somatic “markers” are linked to past experiences and help filter complex choices. In this way, our emotions work in concert with reason, not against it.
Thus, when Takeshi sensed something was off—the atmosphere, the relationships, the dysfunction in the teamwork—what was happening was his body was recalling past experiences tied to similar feelings. When we encounter a new situation, the brain quickly searches its database of memories and, upon recognizing familiar patterns, triggers bodily reactions before conscious analysis begins.
A racing heart, a tight chest, a churning stomach—these “somatic markers” are signals from the body’s learned warning system.
Takeshi’s discomfort on his first day wasn’t “just a hunch.”
It was a message from his body: “This organizational pattern is a red flag.”
Even while his rational mind said, “Everything looks fine,” his body had already sensed the deeper structure—the unspoken communication patterns, the flow of energy, the invisible tension among people.
The Cost of Ignoring Discomfort
Let’s revisit the story of Ayako from my previous article, Unfinished Business and the Bandage.
Ayako, just like Takeshi, was unable to recognize her “somatic markers”—her body’s sensations.
She continued to see what she wanted to see. In her mind’s “inner theater,” she replayed her “favorite” stories over and over. She continued running similar narratives on loop, reinforcing what she believed—even when it was nothing more than an “assumption” or “misunderstanding”—layering it again and again until it solidified.
In Ayako’s case, she kept searching for evidence to remain the protagonist in a grand drama of her misunderstanding: “I am not enough” and “I will not be accepted as I am”—beliefs rooted in the false perspectives of others.
The amygdala—our anxiety-detection system that resists change—continued to convince Ayako that maintaining the status quo was good for her. Even as she sensed that “something was wrong,” she lived on without confronting that bodily sensation.
As a result, Ayako becomes trapped in a cycle of self-negation, unable to express her true potential. Moreover, the “discomfort” within her remained an unresolved issue—like “a browser tab left open to check later”—constantly consuming her laptop’s background memory and draining her energy. She desperately wanted to change, to break free, yet she continued to cling to the illusory belief that change is “dangerous,” exhausting herself and further reinforcing that very belief in an ongoing cycle of depletion.
Dialoguing with the Body—Becoming a Better Professional
By tuning into our intuition and bodily sensations, we can complement our rational analysis and avoid blind spots.
Daniel Goleman in The Focused Leader describes three kinds of attention in effective leaders: Self Focus, Other Focus, and Outer Focus.
Here, I’d like to focus on the first of these—attention toward oneself, which relies heavily on self-awareness.
This involves recognizing the signals from our somatic markers—the emotions and intuitions emerging from the amygdala—and integrating them with logic and reason to make balanced decisions.
At the same time, bodily reactions can be distorted by stress, fatigue, or environmental noise. Sometimes they’re false alarms.
So how can we refine our ability to observe and interpret these signals without overreacting?
One approach is journaling, from the following perspectives:
• Structuring experience
According to James Pennebaker, putting experiences into words deepens understanding, helping us make sense of events and organize them into a coherent system. In doing so, intuition and bodily sensations become more accessible and interpretable.
• Emotional balance
Research by Lieberman, Eisenberger and others shows that labeling one’s emotions with words reduces amygdala activation, promoting emotional regulation and decreasing the fight-or-flight response. Repeated journaling can train us to read somatic signals more accurately without overreacting.
• Method
Handwriting may be particularly effective. Studies by Mangen and Vely suggest that writing by hand activates multiple brain regions, including those related to emotion and self-expression.
Takeaway
Our bodies and brains are constantly working to protect and guide our true selves. By listening—neither ignoring nor overreacting—we can live and lead more fully.
Ultimately, attuning to our inner voice allows us to live in alignment with our values and use ourselves as the most powerful instrument of our own work. In so doing, the self can become a force for good, benefiting not only ourselves, but others.
Final Reflection
Let me leave you with a question to reflect on:
Have you ever paused to listen to your body and have a dialogue with it before making a big decision?
The body has its own wiring and its own wisdom. And, as in the case of Takeshi, sometimes it senses the most important things first.
References:
Clark, D, Sugar, A. (2023). What to Do If You Feel Like You’ve Lost Your Intuition. Harvard Business Review.com. https://hbr.org/2023/10/what-to-do-if-you-feel-like-youve-lost-your-intuition
Damasio, A. (2005). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Penguin Books.
Goleman, D. (2013). The Focused Leader. Harvard Business Review.com. https://hbr.org/2013/12/the-focused-leader
Lieberman, M.D., Eisenberger, N.I., Crockett, M.J., Tom, S.M., Pfeifer, J.H., & Way, B.M. (2007). “Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli.” Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428
Mangen, A., & Velay, J. (2010). Digitizing Literacy: Reflections on the haptics of writing. In InTech eBooks. https://doi.org/10.5772/8710
Memarian, N., Torre, J.B., Haltom, K., Stanton, A.L., & Lieberman, M.D. (2017). Neural activity during affect labeling predicts expressive writing effects on well-being: GLM and SVM approaches https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/12/9/1437/3979177
Pennebaker, J.W. (1997). “Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process. Psychological Science.” 8(3), 162-166.
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