Why Your Body Knows First

It’s 2:47 AM on a Wednesday and I’m standing in the bathroom of my apartment in Brooklyn, staring at my reflection, hands shaking for absolutely no reason.

Wait, that’s not true. There IS a reason. There’s always a reason. My body just decided to scream it at me before my brain caught up.

Three days before this bathroom moment, I was sitting in a coffee shop in Bushwick, telling my friend Jake about the new girl I’d been seeing. “She’s great,” I said. “Like, actually great.” Jake looked at me over his oat flat white and said, “Then why do you keep checking your phone when she texts?” I laughed it off. “I’m not, dude.” But I was. Every single time. My stomach would tighten. Not butterflies — that warm fizzy thing people write songs about. No, this was different. It was a clench. A literal physical clench that sat right under my ribs.

And I just kept ignoring it.

Why do we do that? Why do we treat our own bodies like they’re unreliable narrators? Like the chest tightness is just “stress” and the sudden headaches are “allergies” and the way your shoulders creep up to your ears is just “tension from work.” No. Stop. That’s not nothing. Your body knows first. It knew before you said yes to that second date. It knew before you signed that lease. It knew before you took that job. It knew before you sent that text you’ll regret at 3 AM.

I’m28 now. I didn’t start figuring this out until I was about 25.

Let me back up. The first time I really, truly couldn’t ignore what my body was telling me was when I was 24 and working at a startup in SoHo. The job was fine. The pay was fine. Everything was technically fine. But every Sunday night around 9 PM, I’d get this wave of dread. Not anxiety — I knew what anxiety felt like, this wasn’t that. This was more like my body already grieving something that hadn’t even ended yet. My chest would go heavy. I’d lose my appetite. I’d stare at my laptop screen and not see anything.

I told my therapist at the time, “I think I’m just tired.” She looked at me and said, “Or your body already quit before you did.”

That sentence wrecked me. I mean, WRECKED. I sat in her Midtown office on East 38th, clutching a tissue I didn’t end up using, and just stared at the carpet. She wasn’t telling me to quit. She wasn’t even saying the job was bad. She was saying my body had already made a decision my brain hadn’t caught up with. And I had been dragging my body around like a tired dog for eight months pretending everything was fine.

I quit six weeks later. Not because of her. Because of the Sunday night thing. Because of the way my shoulders lived three inches higher than they should. Because of the constant low-grade nausea I kept blaming on the bodega coffee.

But here’s what kills me — I knew. I KNEW. My body knew first. My brain just refused to listen. I kept looking for logical reasons, evidence, proof. “Maybe it’s just the commute.” “Maybe I just need a vacation.” “Maybe it’s the fluorescent lights.” Anything to avoid the obvious answer that my body was handing me on a silver platter.

You know what I think? I think we’re taught to override our bodies from like, age 6. Sit still even though your back hurts. Eat everything even though you’re full. Smile even though you’re miserable. Shake hands even though your instinct is to pull away. We get programmed to ignore the most honest feedback system we’ll ever have.

Think about it. When was the last time you actually listened to your body before your brain decided something?

Like last month. I was at a networking thing in Chelsea, some tech mixer with free wine and bad sliders. I was talking to this guy about a potential freelance gig. On paper, it was perfect. The money was good, the project sounded interesting, he seemed legit. But my body was doing the thing. The clench thing. The “something is off” thing. I took the red wine anyway because it would look weird not to. I handed him my email. I smiled. I went home. I woke up at 4 AM with that exact same dread in my stomach. And then I remembered — oh. My body tried to tell me. It tried to tell me at like8:47 PM over a lukewarm slider.

Did I listen? No. I emailed him back the next day. We scheduled a call. The call happened. I said yes. The project started. Three weeks in, I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I quit. He didn’t pay me for the last invoice. I lost about $1,400 and three weeks of my life I can’t get back.

My body knew first. My body always knows first.

I asked my friend Mara about this once. She’s a yoga teacher in Astoria, way more in tune with this stuff than me. She said, “Your body doesn’t lie. It can’t. It’s not smart enough to construct narratives or tell itself stories about why something is fine when it isn’t. It just feels.” That stuck with me. It just feels. No justification. No Pinterest quote. No “five signs you’re in the wrong job” listicle. Just feels.

I’m not saying every gut feeling is right. I’m not saying you should quit your job every time your stomach does a weird thing. Some of it IS just the bodega coffee. But when it keeps coming back? When it’s the same feeling, same place, same tightness, over and over? That’s not random. That’s data.

Okay but how do you even tell the difference? Honestly? I still struggle with this. Last Tuesday I woke up with this heaviness in my chest and I spent an hour trying to figure out if I was actually anxious or if I just needed to poop. (I needed to poop. It was that. The heaviness went away.) But the other times — the persistent ones, the ones that show up at the same hour, the same day of the week, the same place in my body — those are the ones I should probably listen to.

I had a friend in college, let’s call him Theo, who used to say his body was his “first draft.” Like, his body would write the truth first, and then his brain would go back and edit it, soften it, rationalize it, sometimes completely rewrite it. “By the time I’m reacting,” he said once at a party on his fire escape in the East Village, “I’ve already blown past what my body was trying to tell me.” He said that in like 2019. I think about it constantly.

So what do I do now? Honestly, not much. I’m not great at this. I still override. I still rationalize. I still smile when I want to leave. But I’ve gotten slightly better. I started keeping a tiny notes app file on my phone called “body said no” and every time I notice the clench, the heaviness, the dread, the sudden exhaustion that has no source, I just jot it down. No analysis. No fixing. Just “Tuesday3 PM, chest tight, didn’t want to take call with mom.” “Sunday 9 PM, shoulders up, dread, dread, dread.” “Friday11 PM, nauseous, said yes to second drink when I meant no.”

Sometimes I look back at the list a month later and the pattern is so obvious I want to scream at past-me. “YOU KNEW,” I want to yell. “ON MARCH 14 AT4:12 PM YOUR BODY LITERALLY TOLD YOU AND YOU IGNORED IT.”

But I also think there’s something to be said for the fact that I needed the lessons I didn’t listen for. Maybe I had to ignore the body signals three or four times before I really believed them. Maybe that’s how it works. You don’t trust the whisper, so the body has to keep whispering until it becomes a shout. And by then you’re standing in a bathroom at 2:47 AM, hands shaking, wondering how you got here.

I think we’re taught to distrust our bodies because our bodies are inconvenient. Bodies want to be held, fed, rested, touched gently. They want to sleep when they’re tired and stop when they’re full and leave when they’re uncomfortable. None of that is compatible with capitalism, or dating, or family dinners, or pretty much anything modern life requires of us. So we override. We override. We override. Until the override becomes the baseline and we don’t even remember what it felt like to feel something real.

Stop. Just stop for a second. Right now. Wherever you are. What’s your body doing? Are your shoulders up? Is your jaw clenched? Are you holding your breath without realizing it? Are your hands fisted? Are you sitting in a way that feels normal but is actually hurting?

That thing. Whatever that thing is. That’s not nothing. That’s data. That’s your body talking.

I’ve been writing this for like an hour and my lower back is killing me and I’m pretty sure my right shoulder is three inches higher than my left because I’ve been hunched over my laptop in a coffee shop in Greenpoint for too long. So I’m gonna stop. Not because I don’t have more to say. Because my body is telling me to stop and I’m going to listen to it this time.

The girl I was seeing when this whole thing started? I broke up with her. It was the right call. My body knew it before I did — about three weeks before I did, if I’m being honest. Three weeks of Sunday night dread. Three weeks of stomach clench. Three weeks of ignoring the clearest feedback I’ve ever gotten. I lost three weeks of pretending. But at least I lost them. At least I noticed eventually.

That’s the thing about your body knowing first. It doesn’t punish you for not listening right away. It just keeps trying. Patient, honest, ignored, still trying. And honestly? I think there’s something kind of beautiful about that. Not in a cheesy way. In a real way. Your body doesn’t give up on you even when you give up on it.

Okay I’m going for a walk now. My back hurts. The coffee shop is too loud. I want sunlight.

You should probably check your shoulders.