What Is Self Attunement
If you are going to have a good relationship with yourself, you need to be attuned to yourself. Self attunement is being consistently aware and responsive to your body and mind. Attunement is the ability to recognize basic needs such as hydration, fueling, and rest and then giving ourselves what we need to return to homoiostasis.
Homoiostasis comes from two Greek words that mean ‘equal’ and ‘holding still’.
Attunement is being able to identify an emotion and have the skills to care for it, if needed. (Not every emotion needs time and energy but that is for another post). Self attunement is referenced as ‘being present in your body’, consistently.
Knowing What You Need
There is SO MUCH health information out there but none of it is any good to you if you don’t know what you need. When trying a new health practice, you have to be attuned with yourself to know whether it is effective or not. We ask the doctor to tell us what to do. We ask the health and fitness influencers on social media to ‘just tell me what to eat, drink, or do’. But they don’t know you. Only you know you. Only you can determine what you need. So when someone on social says, ‘everyone should be doing this’, that can’t possibly be true.
In an interview on the Modern Wisdom podcast with Chris Williamson, Dr Rangan Chatterjee surmises that if people could tune into themselves, they would be able to communicate what they need from their medical provider instead of asking to be told what to do. Listen to that podcast here if you like, Behavior Change with Dr Chatterjee .
In turn, Dr Chatterjee interviews Dr. Gabor Mate’ on his podcast where the theme is to live for yourself, not others. Dr. Mate’ is a physician known for his compassionate approach to addiction and its root causes. He is also author to several powerful books on parenting, trauma, and living an authentic life. Find his books here on amazon. These are just a few examples of how the field of medicine is more aware than ever of relying on a patient’s ability to communicate that is happening for them internally.
The body and mind don’t run on auto pilot but many act as if we are a machine that will keep on running without any tuning. I did that for years without realizing that the damage builds slowly and by midlife, you start feeling the negative affects in low energy, lack of mobility, foggy cognition, and in some case, metabolic disease. I wonder if it isn’t aging that is the root cause. It is likely the years of cumulative neglect and mindless pushing of our bodies without regular, consistent, tuning in and care.
I regret all the time I spent ‘pushing’ and ‘running and gunning’ to get things done while completely neglecting my body’s signals and cues for rest, stretching, controlled thought, or nutrients. And all the times I ignored my gut when it was trying to tell me not to do something and I just treated the feeling like it was useless anxiety and pushed past it. All the mornings my stomach was aching and empty in my 20s when I didn’t feed it or poured bad coffee into it. This distorted mindset that I was somehow stronger because I could ‘push through’. That was an 80s and 90s athlete mentality I readily adopted and hard a rather fixed mindset about it. The fixed mindset is your greatest enemy.
Now I am all about striking energy balance. That process it cyclical from dawn to dusk and all through the night. *See the upcoming post on Restorative Sleep.
Techniques to Tune In
I ask my clients (and my children) to ‘check in with themselves’, asking ‘what do you need right now’? But sometimes we just don’t know. We feel unsure and disconnected. Here are some techniques to tune in using a technique called body-scan, which you can do any time, any where.
To effectively attune to ourselves, we first need to be well rested and restored. See you in the upcoming posts on sleep.
