How We Make Ourselves Dumb

“If I’m not breathing, the next thing I do is going to be dumb.”

^^ He’s not wrong.

I can often count on my clients to communicate what we’re up to better than I possibly could.

You know well enough that entrepreneurship is stressful. And yet how much extra strain are you putting on yourself by treating your body as an afterthought?

I find it helpful to think of performance as a three-tiered triangle.

The base is sensory-motor activity.

The middle is emotional.

And at the very top is cognitive activity.

This maps onto both our evolutionary and our developmental history. At the start of life we have movement, organized through feedback between sensory and motor systems in the body.

Emotions develop somewhat later as ways to organize behavior. They reveal what matters, in what way, and to what degree. Accurate perception of emotional states depends, however, on awareness of what’s going on in terms of sensation and movement.

Anger, for instance, feels very different than sadness. Both, in turn, are distinctly different from anxiety. Knowing what you feel makes *just a bit* of difference in terms of determining the appropriate response to the situations around you.

Cognition develops even later as a means of projecting our capacity to act across space and time. “Our thoughts die so we don’t have to,” as Peterson once described it.

Cognition allows us to harness the energy and information provided by emotions, deploying ourselves more skillfully in order to accomplish long term goals.

It’s not that you’re necessarily dumb if you aren’t breathing.

It’s that you're not as smart as you could otherwise be, considering that there’s practically no way you’re orienting effectively to the situation at hand.

Without access to your body, you’re somewhere else, relying on stereotyped thinking and force of habit. You may get lucky with this, but it’s far from guaranteed. More often, when I see people making decisions separated from their bodies, they end up creating more problems for themselves down the road.

All this to say: body awareness is a nice square one for hedging your bets against doing stuff you may regret later.

If your previous experiences in coaching or therapeutic modalities haven’t brought this into play, this may be partially responsible for plateaus in your experience with them.