Hey, welcome to Fit Soul, Chapter 16. Chapter 16. This is Ben Greenfield, and every week I release to you a

brand new chapter from my book Fit Soul, which you can also get for free at fitsolebook.com

That's fitsolebook.com

And today we are in Chapter 16

Chapter 16. How to listen to your body?

Your body is intelligent. It sends you subtle messages and cues about your state of stress and readiness that if you learn to listen

can save you from injury, illness, and even chronic disease. As author of SIRG writes in his book Regenerate and Jeffrey Rediger incurred,

your body can, when immersed in the correct enourishing and loving environment, repair and renew itself, very much unlike a car,

which would never spontaneously repair a dent, faulty wiring, or a worn brake pad.

By tuning in and listening to the messages your body sends you each day, whether regarding fitness, food, relationships, or business decisions,

you can enhance your ability to be an expert pilot of the finely tuned and intricately designed craft that is your human form.

On the contrary, if you rely purely upon self-quantifying wearable devices and take an all-too-popular modern biohacking and data-driven approach to listening to the body,

you can often miss those subtle cues from your body and ironically grow more distant from being able to care for yourself as intelligently as you could.

Anyone who relies upon a sleep device like a whoop or a dream or a bio-strap for self-quantification, those would mean you might wake well rested, refreshed, and energized from what you thought was an amazing night of sleep,

but upon glancing at your wearables metrics, you're suddenly confronted with a screen that warns you that your deep sleep was 10% lower than usual,

and that you hadn't abnormally high nighttime heart rate, thus your readiness for the day is supposedly quite low.

So, bubble burst, right? The placebo effect of being told by a computer that you're not rested can fill you with a sense of stress and unrest and influences you to make a decision to put the brakes on anything mildly stressful or meaningfully productive for the day,

causing you to instead choose to take a long nap, skip a meeting, or forego a workout.

Of course, the opposite is also true. You might wake with a sore, tired body, craving a cup of strong coffee and filling as though you barely slept a wink,

but when you glance at your sleep apps, feedback, it shows you a giant thumbs up with a congratulatory gold star for sleep and tells you to go crush the day.

So, you venture forth, push through tiredness, and experience a somewhat unproductive and unpleasant day as you fight your fatigue because, well, your computer told you were just fine.

What a conundrum. Well, is there any regular reader of some of my more edgy scientific fitness or recovery content knows?

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