What do I mean when I say body perception? Body perception is the ability to sense one’s body from within. For example, when you close your eyes, can you sense your hand resting on your lap? Are you able to outline the hand and fingers with your eyes closed? Another example is when you bend down to touch your toes, can you sense how your spine moves, which muscles are activating and where?
Body perception is the ability to connect your mind to your body. Some clients I work with will say to me, I have great body awareness, meaning they know how their body moves and when I ask them to do particular movements using visualization they have no problem connecting the visualization to the movement pattern in their body.
I have other clients that struggle with just coordinating a single movement and they will often say, I’m not sure how to do that or I don’t know which muscle to use to do that movement. I usually take this as a yellow flag that there may be body perception problems and could be contributing to their pain. To be more certain that body perception is problem; I need to do more testing and investigating.
If you think about it, when we are in “pain” it’s an unpleasant sensation. Our society sort of has this idea that unpleasant sensations are “bad,” therefore we need to get ourselves “away” from it as fast as possible. This is when the potential for disconnecting from our bodies can happen. The potential of disconnection increases the longer we have pain.
So what are some consequences of disconnecting? When we lose that mind/body connection we lose coordination, muscle imbalances start, we begin to stress the body in places that are not used to it and the sensations coming to the brain from that body part can become distorted.
So let’s look at some brain anatomy to understand this connection between the body/brain/mind.
Firstly we have the sensory cortex which is the outer part of the brain that receives signals from the body regarding sounds, sights, smells, touch, vibration and where our body is located in space (1). It is also involved in planning movement.
Next we have the motor cortex which is also located on the outer part of the brain, right beside the sensory cortex and is involved in planning, controlling and executing movement (2).
Then we have the cortical homunculus, which is a distorted representation of the body and its parts based on use and need for accurate sensation and movement.
So looking at the picture you will see the representation of the hands is very large. This is because we use them all the time and we have to do fine movements, which requires a lot of attention. If we injured our hand and continued to have pain 3, 6, 9, 12 months later and stopped using our hands. The representation in the brain would begin to shrink or smudge we call it. Smudging is like looking at a blurry Google map. Can you imagine how hard it would be to drive home if your map was blurry?
So if this happens to the map of our hand in the brain, we won’t be able to use it as good and normal sensations such as movement and touch can become extremely painful. Thus creating a vicious cycle of more pain, equals less movement, this leads to more pain.
So how can we break this cycle and heal from our pain? Research is coming out in support of body/mind exercise; we call it “body mapping exercise.” Basically this type of exercise combines mindfulness, being present with the body, and sensing what we are feeling. It has imagery to give our brain a new thing to focus on, which allows for learning. Lastly the movement part, we need to be able to move the painful body part in a non-threatening motion to help “refresh” the Google map in our brains.
If your pain is persisting despite regular therapy, perhaps body perception is contributing.