Your mind will tell you that you are fine. Your mind is an excellent liar.
Your body does not lie. Pay attention to it.
The Signals
The jaw that clenches in meetings. The shoulder that climbs toward your ear when you open your email. The sleep that comes in fragments, full of the tasks you did not finish. The appetite that vanished, or the appetite that became the only comfort left.
These are not quirks. They are signals. Your body is telling you something your mind has been trained to ignore: you are not fine, and the strategy of pretending otherwise is failing.
I learned to listen to my body in a context that left no room for denial. When you have been shot with arrows, the body’s communication becomes impossible to misinterpret. But the principle applies at every scale.
The body registers stress, fear, and unsustainability before the mind is willing to acknowledge them. If you wait for your mind to admit the problem, you will wait too long.
The Override Culture
We live in a culture that treats the body as a machine to be overridden. Tired? Coffee. In pain? Painkillers. Anxious? Push through. The body says stop; the culture says keep going.
This is not strength. It is a systematic dismantling of the most reliable information system you have.
A soldier who ignores their body on the battlefield dies. Not from the enemy but from the failure to recognize dehydration, exhaustion, or injury in time to act on it. The corporate version of this is slower but the principle is identical: ignore the body long enough, and it will make the decision for you, and it will not be gentle about it.
Three Practices
Morning scan. Before you check your phone. Before you open your laptop. Lie still for sixty seconds and notice. What hurts? What is tight? What feels different from yesterday? This is not meditation. It is reconnaissance.
The midday check. At the middle of your day, wherever you are, stop. Unclench your jaw. Drop your shoulders. Take three breaths that go all the way down to your stomach. Notice what changes. That change is the distance between where your body was and where it should be.
The honest evening. Before sleep, ask your body one question: what did today cost? Not what it produced. What it cost. Notice where the debt is accumulating. Decide whether tomorrow will be a deposit or another withdrawal.
The Point
I am not a therapist. I am not a doctor. I am a person who survived being used as target practice and who learned, in the recovery, that the body is the first and last line of defense.
Listen to yours. It is smarter than your ambition, more honest than your ego, and more invested in your survival than any institution you serve.
The body does not keep score to punish you. It keeps score because the account must eventually be settled.
Settle it on your terms, not on the floor of your office.