You Know Your Body, But Are You Actually Listening to It?

Most people who've spent time in sports have been told, at some point, that they're in tune with their bodies. You know how to read fatigue, manage pain, push through discomfort. You've spent years developing a relationship with your body, training it, trusting it, getting results from it.

But I think there's a difference between knowing your body and actually listening to it. And it's a distinction worth slowing down on, because a lot of people I work with have one without the other.

Body Awareness In a Performance Context: Using the Body As An Instrument

In many high-pressure professional environments, body awareness is about using your body as an instrument. You pay attention to it in service of output. You track what it's doing so you can get more from it, manage it better, push it closer to its limit without breaking down.

It’s a real skill. It's a specific kind of attention, and it tends to move in one direction: you're gathering information from your body in order to override it, optimize it, or keep going past what it's asking for. The body speaks. You note it. And then you decide whether to listen or push through, and in a performance context, pushing through is almost always the right answer.

What gets complicated is that over time, the body doesn't just become an instrument you use. It becomes part of how you understand yourself. How hard you can push, how much you can take, what you're capable of. And it’s part of the story you carry about who you are.

What It Actually Looks Like to Stop Pushing Through

Listening is something different. It means slowing down enough to notice what the body is actually saying, and then honouring that, rather than pushing past it, filing it away as data to manage. It means your body's signals become something you follow, not something you override.

The difference sounds subtle, but it doesn't feel subtle when you're living it. Because listening, real listening, means sometimes the answer is stop, or I can't, or something is wrong here. And for people who've built an identity around pushing through, it can feel like a threat to something much deeper than fitness.

What Happens When the Performance Context Disappears

Here's what I notice with a lot of former athletes, or with people who've been running hard for a long time in other ways: when the context that organized all that body awareness disappears, there's a kind of confusion that sets in.

The awareness is still there. You're still tracking. But the framework that made sense of it, the training, the season, the goal, is gone. And so you end up relating to your body the same way you always did, in a context where that no longer fits. What used to be discipline starts to feel like damage. What used to be pushing through starts to cost you in ways that are harder to name.

Sometimes the body starts sending different signals entirely. Signals that don't fit the story you've been telling about yourself. Fatigue that doesn't respond to rest. Tension without an obvious source. A kind of flatness where feeling used to be. And because those signals don't map onto anything familiar, they're easy to dismiss, or to manage the way you've always managed things, by pushing past them.

I think what happens in those moments is that the loss is often not just physical. There’s a loss of a relationship. You don't just lose the sport, or the role, or the pace. You lose the context that told you how to interpret yourself.

Overriding Your Feelings Used to Be the Right Strategy

This isn't only an athlete thing. A lot of people, whether through sports, work, or just what they learned growing up, have gotten very good at overriding what they're feeling. At speaking through whatever is coming up rather than stopping to acknowledge it.

What that looks like in a room with me is: someone is talking about something that has weight to it, and their body is responding, there's tension, or a shift in breathing, or something that changes in their face, and moving straight past it. Not because they're hiding it. Because they genuinely haven't learned how to slow down long enough to notice it. The signal is there. They've just been trained, in one way or another, to keep moving.

It's usually a strategy that's worked for a long time. The question, the one I find myself returning to with a lot of people, is whether it's still working now. 

Using Body Attunement In a Different Direction

In the work I do,  I use an approach called Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), a lot of what happens is exactly this. Noticing what's coming up in the body in real time. Bringing attention to it rather than past it. Getting curious about what's there.

For people who've spent years in performance contexts, this is often less foreign than they expect. The body attunement is already there. What's new is using it in a different direction, toward what you're actually feeling, rather than toward what you're trying to produce. Toward listening, rather than managing.

If you've been moving past something for a while, it might be worth slowing down enough to look at it. That's something we could look at together.

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That shift is slow. It's not always comfortable. But something changes when you stop treating your body as something to get results from and start treating it as something that's been trying to tell you something for a while.

About the Author

Kimia Mohammadpour is a Pre-Registered Clinical Counsellor at OP Counselling Services in Vancouver, BC, offering virtual counselling across British Columbia and in-person sessions in East Vancouver. She works with high-performing individuals, former competitive athletes, and people navigating addiction and identity transitions, particularly those who have spent years managing their way through things and are beginning to wonder what's underneath it. Her approach is grounded in AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy), a relational approach that works experientially in the moment with what's happening in the room rather than just talking about things that happened, accessing the emotional patterns underneath, not just the thoughts.