Managing your body budget – your brain’s most important job

 

You have a body budget, and managing it your  brain’s most important job!

How many people do you know who:

  • are stressed, overwhelmed or on the edge of burnout?
  • have reached for a self help book, and
  • are disappointed with the results?

It happens because

Nobody has told them they have a body budget, and managing it is their brain’s most important job

(I only found this out through the work of Lisa Feldman Barret, who coined the term body budget)

Managing your body budget

Your body budget is just like any other budget: it deals with deposits and withdrawals  – of biological rather than financial resources

Battery or bank account?

I often ask people to draw a battery, like the one on a mobile phone, to represent their energy levels.  I invite them to take a view, how full is their battery 70%, 50% or 20% over the course of a day or a week.   What, I wonder does this tell them about their body budget?

Then I’ll make the point the image is only useful to get them thinking.  The body budget is more like a bank account than a battery.  A battery stops working, a bank account goes into overdraft.

When our body budget gets depleted it has an impact on the way we see the world.  We are easily drawn into survival mode, everything seems more threatening and we find it far harder to flex, adapt and respond appropriately to the challenges of daily life – let alone those of work.

The cost of being overdrawn

If your body budget is frequently overdrawn, don’t beat yourself up.  Lisa Feldman Barret explains in her book How Emotions are Made: the secret life of the brain – it’s a reflection of the society we live in.

If your body budget gets out of whack, then you’re going to feel crappy no matter what self-help tips you follow… modern culture is unfortunately engineered to screw it up

There are costs to living with a body budget that’s routinely overdrawn.  It has a detrimental impact on mental health (we see it in high levels of stress, anxiety and depression) and physical health, (it contributes to heart and gut problems and cancer).

Getting your body budget back into balance

The good news is we can get our body budget back into balance and increase personal resilience by consistently and intentionally making deposits.

This means getting the basics right: sleeping enough, eating well, ensuring you are well-hydrated, exercising sufficiently and connecting with others.

Connecting with others ?!

I’m guessing some of you will be surprised to see ‘connecting with others’ in this list.  Twenty years ago, I would have been surprised too.  After all, Western society and the corporate world including project management, put huge emphasis on developing cognitive skills.

We’ve lost sight of the fact, (or perhaps never appreciated), connecting with others is a biological imperative. In a second, and even more wonderful, book Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, Feldman Barret puts it this way

For the whole of your life, outside of your awareness you make deposits of sorts into other people’s body budgets, as well as withdrawals, and others do the same for you.

Think about this for a moment.

What difference would it make?

What difference would it make to life and work if going into the New Year:

  1. your body budget was in the black more often than the red?
  2. you were intentionally making deposits into other people’s body budgets and they were doing the same to yours?

 

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash