Getting Out of Your Head: The Power of Body-based Therapy for Professionals
Working professionals face many challenges including but not limited to: overthinking, stress, and burnout. These challenges and the pressure to be productive can lead to a feeling of disconnection from the body. Things like ignoring hunger, thirst, and emotions, can lead to not knowing how you feel. Being overwhelmed and feeling numb from stress can lead to feeling unfulfilled and unhappy—both in your job and in other areas of life.
Somatic therapy is an effective way for overworked professionals to re-connect to themselves and find out what they need. Somatic therapy helps not only by allowing people to process their emotions verbally but also by providing a means to release feelings stuck in the body.
What Is Somatic Therapy San Francisco and Why Is It Different?
Somatic therapy is any type of psychotherapy that uses the mind-body connection to foster healing. Some examples include dance therapy and somatic experiencing. Somatic therapy differs from talk therapy in that it incorporates the body to help with psychological healing. Practitioners of somatic therapy enhance mind/body awareness, use targeted movement, and other techniques to release trauma and stress from the body.
Why Professionals Benefit from Somatic Therapy San Francisco
Stress, perfectionism, and high-performance pressure are rampant among professionals in San Francisco, especially in the tech field. Given the recent tech layoffs, many more people are worried about performing well on the job. For people that work in fields where they constantly value their intellect, the body and bodily needs can often be an afterthought. It’s easy to live in your head and somatic therapy can help to restore balance be bringing awareness to what is happening in the body.. Somatic therapy can help regulate emotions and stress, improve sleep, and reduce burnout. . .by recognizing the cues the body is giving and responding to them.
How Somatic Therapy San Francisco Helps You Get Out of Overthinking
When we come under stress, the body reacts by fighting, fleeing, freezing, or fawning. These are ways that we cope when the sympathetic nervous system gets activated. Signs that the sympathetic nervous system is activated can be some or many of the following: increased heart rate, blood pressure, sweating, dilated pupils, rapid breathing, and accompanying emotions such as fear and anxiety. The body responds as though it is under a physical attack, even if the threat is actually a work deadline. Until the parasympathetic nervous system, which calms the body down, engages, it is difficult to think and easy to ruminate. Anxiety and fear cause the brain to think in circles without finding any practical solutions. So how do we activate the parasympathetic nervous system to counter these bodily responses? Somatic therapy can help us build that connection that calms the body down by using techniques such as deep breathing, relaxation, and mindful movement. So what happens when the body comes out of fight or flight (aka the sympathetic nervous system goes offline)? We can start to think clearer and can make better decisions when able to handle our nervous system’s response to stress. Our focus improves and we can excel in our jobs.
The Mind-Body Connection: What Somatic Therapy San Francisco Teaches Professionals
Body awareness increases emotional intelligence and resilience.by helping address feelings and emotions before they get to crisis levels. If you are aware of your body, you have a head start on what emotions you are feeling and can make conscious decisions on how to cope. Somatic therapy can connect professionals to their body and help them identify emotions via the signals the body sends. Somatic can help you to have an embodied presence, where you can be more authentic and present in both your personal and professional relationships. You can feel confident in your.decision-making, your intuition, and what guides you in your personal and professional life.
If you feel that any of what I have written regarding the benefits of somatic therapy resonates with you, please feel free to reach out.to me at lisa@lisamanca.com. I am happy to answer any questions about somatic therapy or guide you in a search for a somatic therapist.