Your Memories Are Physical, and Your Body Is Emotional

Although we tend to think of our memories as abstract and mental, they are physical and physiological. Your physical body is the evidence of your past — the embodied memory of everything that has come before. Or as Bessel van der Kolk, MD, put it in the very title of his book: The Body Keeps the Score. The experiences in our lives become our biology. Those experiences are memories stored in specific areas of our body. In the case of Jane, her waterskiing trauma created a memory that was stored in her leg. As Dr. Steven Cole, the director of the UCLA Social Genomics Core Laboratory, has said, “A cell is a machine for turning experience into biology.” Jane’s story highlights the fundamental connection between our emotions and our physical body. Although rarely connected by any medical professional, in reality, they are one in the same. The glue that holds our body, memories, and identity together is our emotions. Like memory, we tend to think of emotions as abstract, residing only in our minds. They are not. Emotions are physical. That bears repeating. Emotions and memories have physical markers in your body. According to the molecular biologist and neuroscientist Dr. Candice Pert, the surfaces of every cell throughout our body are lined with “receptors” that receive messages through neuropeptides, which are small protein molecules that relay information throughout our body and brain. Dr. Pert calls these peptides the “molecules of emotion,” explaining that the information relayed and stored throughout our brain and body is emotions. In other words, the information relayed throughout the brain and body are emotional in nature. That information — the emotional content — then becomes the body. The experiences we have transform not only our perspectives and identity but become our very biology. Why does this matter? Because we need to reframe how we see our body, and look at it as an emotional system. Emotions are chemical, and our body becomes accustomed or habituated to these chemicals. Take dopamine, for example. Your body becomes habituated to a certain dosage of dopamine, and when the chemical levels are low, the body literally needs more. As a result, and without conscious thought, your hand reaches for your smartphone, and you go through a subconscious loop you’ve played out repeatedly in the past. We catch ourselves doing this all the time. We do various things out of habit or addiction. The reason we subconsciously engage in repetitious behaviors is because our body has become addicted to the emotions that our behaviors create. The emotion is a chemical relayed and released throughout the body, recreating the homeostasis that is the physical body. This is why overcoming an addiction is so difficult. Addiction isn’t merely a mental disorder. It is physical. In order to change your addiction, you literally need to change your biology. You need a future self with a new identity, a new story, new environment, and new body. What chemicals are you addicted to? What emotions does your body thrive on and continuously reproduce? Many people are addicted to the chemical cortisol, which is stress. If they aren’t feeling stressed, they get uneasy and do things to create more stress in their lives. In his book The Big Leap, Dr. Gay Hendricks explains that when people begin a journey of personal transformation, they will subconsciously sabotage themselves in order to get back to their accustomed level: “Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.” Dr. Hendricks calls this the “Upper Limit Problem.” When you begin making improvements in your life, you’re going to subconsciously try to get back to where you feel comfortable. This is emotional. If you’re not used to feeling amazing all the time, then when you start allowing yourself to feel good, your subconscious will grow uneasy. It wants negative emotions because negative chemicals are what literally make up your body. I’ve seen this happen in my own life. In fact, it happened big-time while I was writing this book. Over the past few years, I’ve made huge leaps in terms of my education, finances, network, family, and overall happiness. However, over the past year, I almost threw everything away. I noticed myself trying to subconsciously sabotage everything amazing in my life. I got addicted to caffeine, travel, and confusion. I couldn’t get myself to write. I wasted huge amounts of time watching YouTube videos. I had a hard time getting motivated. As I watched myself beginning to struggle, I could see what was happening. Once I noticed that I was damaging myself, I realized that I needed to seek help. I started by expressing to my wife and others that I was on a downward spiral. We began therapy, set new goals, and made important adjustments to our family and routines. I re-created my future self. I got my vision going again. Without a clear vision pulling us forward, life becomes about how much willpower you are able to summon every day. What I needed was a goal to direct my identity and behavior. I needed a target. I used my future self as the filter for setting firmer boundaries in my life. This involved having hard conversations with people I deeply cared about, telling them I needed to readjust our relationship and put my priorities — like my faith, family, and health — back at the forefront. I was humbled as most of these people were respectful and supportive, even if slightly frustrated, such as when business plans were required to change or when I canceled scheduled speaking engagements. All of these conversations, adjustments in purpose, and behaviors were subconscious-enhancing — moving me at the fundamental level closer to my future self, not just conceptually. This was deep work, and deep work is emotional. If you don’t change your subconscious, then altering your personality will be difficult. If you change your subconscious, then altering your personality happens automatically. To make powerful change in our lives, we need to change at the subconscious level. Otherwise, the change will not be permanent. You could try to force yourself to be positive, for example, but if your subconscious, or physical body, is habituated to negative emotional states, it will default to behaviors that reproduce those emotions. Willpower doesn’t work for overcoming addictions, at least not in an effective or predictable way. Your body seeks homeostasis by leading you to behaviors and experiences that reproduce the emotional climate it is used to — not necessarily the behaviors that are best for you. You are an emotional being. Your physical body is your “subconscious mind,” and the only way to alter your subconscious is by shifting the emotional framework that makes you who you are. For a time, Jane had become accustomed to anger and rage. Those were the emotions she became addicted to. Her life became a pattern to re-create those emotions, even if consciously she was doing her best to be positive. As a result, those emotions became her biology, manifested through her leg pain. Dr. John E. Sarno, a former professor of rehabilitation medicine and attending physician at New York University, argues that physical pain, such as back pain, “exists only to distract [the person’s] attention away from the emotions. . . . There’s nothing like a little physical pain to keep your mind off your emotional problems.” Dr. Sarno explains that this is a survival mechanism of the body because it’s easier for us to live with physical pain than emotional pain. In many cases, the cause of physical pain is not “physical” at all but emotional. Once a person accepts the fact that they have suppressed emotions, and learns to express and reframe them, they will stop misdiagnosing their pain as a physical condition. Of this, Steven Ozanich wrote in The Great Pain Deception, “Pain and other chronic symptoms are physical manifestations of unresolved internal conflict. Symptoms surface as the instinctual mechanism for selfsurvival. They are messages from the inner self wanting to be heard, but ego takes center stage, and hides the truth within the shadows of the unconscious mind: which is the body.” When you change your subconscious, your personality will change as well. Your personality is merely a by-product or reflection of where you are emotionally. If you maintain suppressed emotions, you’ll develop a personality to either cope with or avoid them. The untransformed trauma (and the fixed mindset it creates) stunts your imagination. Your future self and purpose are then either nonexistent or extremely limited. As a result, you become a version of yourself that is far less than you could have been. You engage in behaviors and situations to produce emotions that numb the pain you’re suppressing. This isn’t what you want to do.