Harper PhD LPC-S ACS ACN Faith G. - Unfuck Your Body: Using Science to Reconnect Your Body and Mind to Eat, Sleep, Breathe, Move, and Feel Better

Introduction

Where do we even start with talking about how bodies get fucked up?

We get sick or injured. Trauma takes root, directly affecting our physical body as much as our brain. Stress seizes us up. Our toxic environments and food systems poison us. We experience pain. Our immune systems freak out and we dont know why. We have kids, or dont. We get busy and stop exercising. Years of insomnia catch up with us. We have surgery or take medication that changes our bodies. Or, most common of all, our personal meat puppet gets older and less tolerant of our bullshit.

We cant talk about bodies without talking about our brains, and vice versabecause our bodies and minds influence each other in every area of our physical and emotional lives.

This book is about how the body and mind communicate with each other using the vagus nerve, and the enormous role trauma, inflammation, toxicity, and stress plays in that communication and our overall health. And most of all, its about how we can feel better, by improving our body-brain awareness, developing habits that support the brain and body, and accessing treatments that serve our physical and mental health.

When my first book, Unfuck Your Brain , came out, there was so much about the mind body connection that I wanted to include that there just wasnt physically the room to include. I swore that this book would follow up where that one left off.

Unfuck Your Brain is about trauma. So is this book. Trauma is a physical event, an injury to the nervous system. In that book, I did talk a little about the impact of trauma on the body (like with the physical symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, depression, and anger) and in some cases recommended physical treatments. I focused mainly on mental and emotional sources of trauma, as well as ways of working with those issues to promote healing.

But so much of trauma is a bodily experience that it merits a deeper dive and its own book. Stuff that we have known is incredibly helpful to mental health (like yoga, breathwork, somatics, and dietary changes without the BMI body shaming bullshit) as practice-based evidence is now collecting more and more data to back it up as evidence-based practice. And we are gaining ground at light speed at answering the but why questions of the body-mind connection. So much so, that I have to dial it down a bit and not write the 12 volume Encyclopedia of Body Unfuckening that will then be sold in late night commercials by Time Life Books (and if you are old enough to get that joke, you are as middle aged as I am).

There was some concern that if I wrote this book it would get shelved as another change your body, change your life diet-and-exercise regime book with tips like gargle with lavender essential oil, sleep upside down like a bat, and live on a diet of bee pollen and kale. Or whatever idea is fresh at this moment. But one thing that has happened in the five years since Unfuck Your Brain came out, is a bigger cultural awareness of the mind-body connection and how we support whole health by recognizing both. This means it isnt weird and woo-woo for us to recognize our gut as being our second brain. Or that polyvagal theory explains so much about how our bodily reactions fuel our thoughts and feelings. Stuff that nutritionists and other complementary practitioners have been yammering on about for a century or more are now entering the mainstream with enough energy that I can tell this story with hella research and without the presumption that I am trying to sell you on a fad regime that includes wasp stings, protein powder, and astral projection.