Feedback Loops
New clients are sometimes surprised to find that their Shiatsu treatment influenced their emotions as well as their energy levels. Some even experience flashbacks of memories from years ago—and they only came for help with a painful neck! It can be hard to imagine how being ‘handled’ can possibly have such impacts. Some conclude that there is spooky weird stuff going on!
To understand how hands-on bodywork can influence a person’s emotional, physiological and mental state, we need an appreciation of feedback loops.
The brain is a lump of electromagnetic gel inside a dark box so it cannot sense anything by itself. To ‘experience’ anything, the brain needs the body’s sensors. Importantly, it needs to be constantly updated about conditions in the body so that it can predict the direction of change and make necessary adjustments.
Muscle fibres contain sensors (muscle spindles) which send signals to the brain about how contracted they are. Millions of sensory signals are incoming during even simple movements. Even sitting still involves a collection of dynamic feedback loops.
The brain does not simply send out instructions to muscles, it also receives feedback from those muscles, and then adjusts accordingly—hundreds of them all over the body. If you mess with muscular feedback, you mess with movement. When my young cat was spayed, the vet put her in a tight stretchy bodysuit to prevent her from chewing and removing her stiches. Although the material was soft and easily stretched, she lay on the floor as if paralysed. When I sat her up, she stayed motionless unable to process movement. Because there was no feedback from her muscles she could not coordinate movement.
Facial feedback illustrates the link between muscular and emotional change.
When we are happy, we automatically smile by contracting a particular collection of facial muscles. Nothing odd there; but if we smile when we are not feeling happy, we begin to feel slightly happier. And even if our smiling muscles are stretched passively (e.g., by placing a pencil between our teeth), we feel slightly happier. This means that the muscular activity of smiling is not just a result of being happy but also contributes to us feeling happy. Processing of emotion in the brain and our facial expression is a feedback loop. The contraction patterns of facial muscles are one way that we feel an emotion [remember, the brain cannot feel anything].
Some fascinating details about facial feedback were discovered when Botox began to be used in the cosmetic industry. The most common use of Botox is to stop our frown muscles contracting so that we no longer have deep grooves in our forehead and consequently appear younger. If you paralyse people’s frown muscles, they become significantly less depressed. The explanation is that they are no longer feeling the facial expression of depression and so not constantly updating the brain with ‘feeling depressed’.
Emotions influence more than our facial muscles; they are whole body states. Feeling happy is not just a brain thing but an embodied experience of ‘happy’ neurotransmitters and hormones flowing in your bloodstream, skin buzzing with changes of electromagnetism, posture, voice, heart rate, breathing and muscular changes. It is the combined sensory information from your body that feeds back to the brain so that you can form an overall perception of ‘how you feel’.
Physical, emotional, physiological, mental ‘states’ are never separate. You cannot think clearly when fearful, depressed or in pain; you can be impulsive when excited or hungry, anxious when anaemic.
As a receiver of hands-on bodywork, feedback from your body to your brain is changed by the practitioner. Many of the techniques used also rely on feedback. To release a tense muscle, for example, practitioners can put more pressure on it using their thumbs, palms or elbows so that feedback to the brain says the muscle is now “too contracted” and the necessary adjustment of reduced contraction produces a less tense muscle.
When a bodywork practitioner spends enough time changing the patterns of muscular contraction in your body by stretching, rotating, pressing or pulling, you will feel different physically, emotionally and mentally because the patterns of feedback to your brain have now changed and the feedback loops have correspondingly adjusted your emotional and mental states.
