My Body Is Not Against Me
My Body Is Not Against Me
Symptoms as Signals of Regulation, Tekoha, and Interoceptive Elasticity
We begin this block with care, because before we talk about social media, comparison, family, school, money, shame, or performance, we need to remember something simple together:
the body is not against us.
When tension, tiredness, irritation, poor sleep, tightness in the chest, a lump in the throat, or the desire to withdraw from the world appear, maybe the body is not failing. Maybe it is trying to say:
“I need more space, more belonging, and more elasticity.”
This is our entrance into Jiwasa — we together: not speaking from the outside, not pointing fingers, not diagnosing. Speaking with us, from the body, so that we can understand together what is being felt.
This first text follows the central direction of the block: a gentle, preventive, non-accusatory language that helps us read bodily symptoms as signs of regulation, not as proof that someone is broken.
The body is a messenger
In a biopsychosocial view, the body is not separated from emotion, sleep, family, food, school, territory, social pressure, movement, memory, and belonging.
A symptom is not always a “defect.” Sometimes it is a signal.
Tension can be a signal.
Poor sleep can be a signal.
A tight stomach can be a signal.
Irritation can be a signal.
Fatigue can be a signal.
Restlessness can be a signal.
The scientific idea of allostatic load helps us understand this. A 2023 systematic review on allostatic load in children and adolescents describes how repeated stress can accumulate in the body through biological regulation systems, especially when the environment keeps demanding adaptation without enough recovery. (PMC)
In BrainLatam2026 language, the question is not only:
“What is wrong with my body?”
The deeper question is:
“What is my body trying to regulate?”
Tekoha: when the world enters the body
In our language, Tekoha is the internal territory of the body.
The world enters us.
What we see enters us.
What we eat enters us.
What we hear enters us.
The language around us enters us.
The family atmosphere enters us.
The school enters us.
The screen enters us.
Fear enters us.
Belonging also enters us.
This is why a person can look “fine” from the outside and still feel overloaded inside. The body may be carrying comparison, family tension, fear of disappointing others, pressure to succeed, pressure to look okay, pressure to earn money early, pressure to be accepted, and pressure to stay connected all the time.
The body tries to organize all of this.
When it can organize the pressure and return, we call that elasticity.
When it cannot return, it begins to signal.
Interoception: feeling the body from within
Interoception is the perception of signals from inside the body: heartbeat, breathing, hunger, fullness, temperature, pain, nausea, fatigue, agitation, and calm. A 2023 review describes interoception as important for the nervous, cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, endocrine, autonomic, and inflammatory systems, and as increasingly relevant to psychiatry and mental health research. (PMC)
This matters because many feelings arrive in the body before they become words.
Shame can become tension.
Fear can become shallow breathing.
Comparison can become a tight chest.
Rejection can become fatigue.
Uncertainty can become alertness.
Loneliness can become heaviness.
The body is not inventing.
The body is translating.
Interoceptive elasticity
Interoceptive elasticity is the body’s ability to feel internal pressure and come back.
A body with elasticity can feel sadness and still breathe.
It can feel fear and still ask for help.
It can feel comparison and still remember its own value.
It can make a mistake and still restart.
It can enter Zone 1, the zone of action, and return to Zone 2, the zone of regulation, Fruition, Metacognition, and belonging.
When elasticity decreases, small situations may feel like big threats.
A message not answered may feel like rejection.
A school result may feel like total failure.
A family argument may feel like personal guilt.
A post on social media may open an endless loop of comparison.
This is Zone 3: not a moral failure, but a body in prolonged defense.
Screens also enter Tekoha
Technology is not the enemy. The problem begins when attention becomes captured territory.
The WHO Regional Office for Europe reported that problematic social media use among adolescents increased from 7% in 2018 to 11% in 2022, with signs such as difficulty controlling use and negative consequences for daily life and well-being. (World Health Organization)
A 2025 CDC study using data from U.S. teenagers aged 12 to 17 found that four or more hours per day of non-school screen time was associated with poorer indicators across sleep, physical activity, mental health, and perceived social support. The study is observational, so it does not prove causality, but it supports the need to look at screen time together with sleep, movement, emotional support, and health. (CDC)
In BrainLatam2026 language:
whoever captures our attention begins to organize our Tekoha.
If the screen delivers comparison, urgency, desire, fear, anger, consumption, and approval all day long, the body may begin to live as if it is always behind, always lacking something, always needing to prove itself.
The body does not need to be silenced
Many of us learn to silence the body:
“Stop feeling that.”
“Be strong.”
“Don’t complain.”
“Everyone goes through this.”
“Just keep going.”
But prevention begins differently.
Not by dramatizing every symptom.
Not by turning everything into a diagnosis.
Not by saying the body is weak.
Prevention begins by listening.
Instead of asking:
“What is wrong with me?”
we can ask:
“What is my body trying to tell us?”
That question opens Metacognition: the ability to notice what is happening without being completely swallowed by it.
Small ways to recover elasticity
Elasticity does not return through pressure. It returns through rhythm, safety, movement, and belonging.
We can begin with small gestures:
walking a little and feeling the ground,
drinking water slowly,
sleeping better when possible,
talking to someone safe,
writing one sentence about what the body is feeling,
staying away from the screen for a short while,
listening to music without scrolling,
eating with someone,
moving the body without performance,
looking through a window and breathing,
getting sunlight,
asking for help without shame.
The evidence also supports this simple direction. A 2023 umbrella review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that physical activity interventions are beneficial for symptoms of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress across adult populations; for adolescents, the translation must be careful, safe, and connected to pleasure and belonging, not performance pressure. (PubMed)
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in JAMA Network Open examined 33 observational studies with 96,173 adults and found that higher daily step counts were associated with fewer depressive symptoms. This does not mean walking is a cure, but it supports movement as a simple body-territory practice. (JAMA Network)
In our language:
walking can reopen APUS.
The body sees distance again.
The feet feel the ground again.
Breathing finds rhythm again.
The world becomes larger than the screen again.
EEG/NIRS/fNIRS window: how could we study this?
A behavioral neuroscience study on “my body is not against me” could investigate how young people perceive body signals, regulate emotions, and recover from mild social or attentional pressure.
EEG and ERP could help observe attention and emotional processing. For example, a 2023 study with adolescents with major depression used combined EEG and eye-tracking during an emotion-regulation paradigm, showing how neural, visual, and behavioral measures can be integrated to study emotional regulation. (PubMed)
NIRS/fNIRS could help observe prefrontal hemodynamic activity during tasks involving body awareness, emotional regulation, breathing, safe conversation, or social comparison. A 2023 fNIRS study explored differences between emotional regulation strategies such as venting and distraction, showing how fNIRS can be used to study prefrontal regulation in more naturalistic emotional contexts. (PMC)
With HRV/RMSSD, respiration, GSR, EMG, and eye-tracking, BrainLatam could build a multimodal protocol to observe when the body stays in Zone 3 and when it begins to recover elasticity.
The scientific question would be:
Which practices help the body move from defense to regulation?
Walking?
Music?
Breathing?
Safe conversation?
Less screen pressure?
A collective activity?
A moment of Jiwasa?
This is where neuroscience, behavior, body, and territory meet.
Closing
The body is not against us.
The body feels before the sentence.
The body signals before collapse.
The body asks for space before illness becomes heavier.
In BrainLatam2026 language:
Tekoha is APUS internalized.
When the external territory pressures too much, interoception loses elasticity. When elasticity decreases, the body begins to signal. And when we listen with care, we can open a path back to Fruition, Metacognition, and Zone 2.
My body is not against me.
My body is trying to bring me back to myself — and to us, in Jiwasa.
Post-2021 References
Lucente, M., & Guidi, J. (2023). Allostatic Load in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 92(5), 295–303. (PMC)
Nayok, S. B., Sreeraj, V. S., Shivakumar, V., & Venkatasubramanian, G. (2023). A Primer on Interoception and its Importance in Psychiatry. Clinical Psychopharmacology and Neuroscience, 21(2), 252–261. (PMC)
World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe. (2024). Teens, screens and mental health. (World Health Organization)
Zablotsky, B., Ng, A. E., Black, L. I., Haile, G., Bose, J., Jones, J. R., et al. (2025). Associations Between Screen Time Use and Health Outcomes Among US Teenagers. Preventing Chronic Disease, 22, 240537. (CDC)
Singh, B., Olds, T., Curtis, R., Dumuid, D., Virgara, R., Watson, A., et al. (2023). Effectiveness of physical activity interventions for improving depression, anxiety and distress: an overview of systematic reviews. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 57, 1203–1209. (PubMed)
Bizzozero-Peroni, B., Díaz-Goñi, V., Díaz, J. J., et al. (2024). Daily Step Count and Depression in Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. JAMA Network Open. (JAMA Network)
Feldmann, L., Zsigo, C., Mörtl, I., Bartling, J., Wachinger, C., Oort, F., Schulte-Körne, G., & Greimel, E. (2023). Emotion regulation in adolescents with major depression — Evidence from a combined EEG and eye-tracking study. Journal of Affective Disorders, 340, 899–906. (PubMed)
Zhang, X., et al. (2023). Functional near-infrared spectroscopy approach to the emotional regulation effect of drawing: Venting versus distraction. Brain and Behavior. (PMC)
