Every Friday, this column tries to crack open one assumption that usually goes unexamined.
This week’s is one we rarely question because it feels so obviously true: that thinking is how we figure things out.
The body registers before the mind narrates. A conversation that leaves you vaguely depleted despite going well on paper. A room you want to leave before you know why. A decision that feels settled in your chest long before your reasoning catches up. None of this is mysticism; it’s neuroscience. The vagus nerve alone carries more information upward to the brain than downward from it. The body isn’t waiting for instructions. It’s already filing reports that the conscious mind will spend considerable energy disputing, reframing, or simply ignoring.
What makes this more than a wellness observation is the social dimension. We are taught, systematically, to override somatic signals in professional and institutional contexts. Discomfort in a meeting becomes something to manage rather than something to read. Bessel van der Kolk documented how trauma lives in the body precisely because language-based processing keeps talking over it. But you don’t need a trauma history for the pattern to apply. Any environment that rewards articulacy over accuracy trains you to argue past what you already know.
So the interesting question isn’t whether your body was right. It’s how long you spent constructing the case against it and who benefited from that delay.
