Leading in a Non-Linear World

CHAPTER 3WHAT YOUR BODY IS TELLING YOU

The prediction–sensory loops of body and mind explain the fascinating evidence that our body often knows before our mind when good or bad things are about to happen to us. By tuning more intentionally into our physical signals, we strengthen the connection between the body and brain. To achieve this, we need to start by distinguishing between physical feeling and emotion, which we generally lump together in our thoughts. ‘I'm feeling tired’, or ‘I feel blurrghh’ are not emotions, but physical feelings. However, many of us are losing connection with these potent signals through overwork and a cocktail of poor diet, insufficient sleep, and exercise, with too much screen time, leaving us numb. At the same time, we feel in some unfathomable way detached from the world and the people and passions that matter most to us.

Affect is the continuous feeling sensation that encapsulates our brain's management of the body's systems – including tracking our heart rate, hormones, immune system, hydration, glucose, oxygen, and salt levels. This tracking coalesces as a general mood, or we might think of it as our body's climate. It can be characterised in two dimensions – pleasant/unpleasant and high/low energy. In our layer model, affect sits between consciousness and emotions. In 1980, James A. Russell created the affective circumplex¹ to help researchers track affect (see Figure 3.1).

The state of our affect profoundly influences the brain's predictions ...