Meet Chief Operations Officer 24/7
Imagine it’s your first day on the job as the COO of a highly complex organization. As you walk into your new office, you notice it is a windowless, dark room. In the middle is a desk lit up by two giant computer monitors. One monitor, labeled “internal,” displays how your staff and internal resources are faring, while the “external” one shows how the organization is collaborating with its partners and staying ahead of its competitors. A memo from the CEO seems simple, yet intimidating: “Make sense of patterns from these monitors to predict what will happen so I know what to do. I fired the previous COO for being too reactive.”
Feeling stressed, you wonder to yourself: “Am I up for this challenge?”
Body Budgeting
This COO scenario vastly simplifies what our human brain must accomplish constantly, mostly below our conscious awareness: making sense of the signals (pleasant and unpleasant feelings) from our body – what scientists call “interoception” – and data from the body’s surroundings using our senses. To survive, our brain cannot afford to be reactive; this is why the former COO was fired. Instead, the brain constructs mental states to make predictions. Our brain models our body and environment to anticipate the use of energy needed to perform tasks to meet our goals (e.g., reading this blog post, getting ready to speak to our boss). This anticipatory energy regulation is called “allostasis” (Sterling, 2012), and neuroscientists (e.g., Lisa Feldman Barrett, Karl Friston) have described the brain’s role as predictive mind processing. Indeed, Barrett has argued that the primary job of our brain is actually not thinking, a popular view privileged by Western cultures. Instead, its key job is to control our bodies by anticipating and managing a body budget (Barrett 2020; Barrett 2017).
From Exhaustion to Illness
Barrett’s updated scientific explanation can help us appreciate why taking care of our mind, brain, and body is so important. It tells us that the issue of health and sickness can be a matter of budgeting our energy efficiently. For example, most of us are familiar with the harmful effects of chronic stress. We become stressed when we assess a situation and become unsure if we have the resources to meet the challenge. Physiologically, chronic stress is associated with elevated levels of cortisol hormone (Irwin & Cole, 2011). A vicious cycle can ensue when our immune system becomes less sensitive to cortisol, which normally suppresses inflammation. Persistent inflammation can flare up, leading us to feel tired with tissues swelling and fever. This exhaustion in turn can cause us to move less, affecting our appetite, sleep, and ability to exercise, leading to even higher energy deficit. We become more vulnerable to diseases, getting sick more easily with a host of problems such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity (Barrett, 2017). Insomnia, for example, has been found to be a significant predictor of mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, alcohol abuse, and psychosis (Hertenstein et al., 2019). It is also a common symptom found in 22 diagnostic criteria of mental disorders (Forbes et al., 2024).
Similarly, we can understand mental illness as our metabolic regulation going awry. For example, Barrett and her colleagues (Shaffer et al., 2022) have proposed that depression be explained in terms of metabolic disruptions. Running on an energy deficit can lead to persistent low mood, skewing our interoception and our brain’s ability to model our body accurately. Fatigue, in turn, can lead to avoidance of finding comfort in social relationships and learning from new, rewarding experiences. Together, they can keep us stuck in a downward spiral of body budget mismanagement (Barrett et al., 2016).
At the most basic level, a well-balanced body budget requires having a healthy diet, getting enough quality sleep, and exercising regularly. Moreover, cultivating what Barrett (2017) has called emotional granularity – strengthening our ability to distinguish emotional nuances – can help our brain make more accurate predictions flexibly across different contexts. Rather than lumping all negative feelings under a broad category of “I feel exhausted,” we can learn, for instance, to parse out “I feel dreadful” from “I feel annoyed” to better solve our life problems. Mastering the use of more emotional words can shape our brain to attune situationally to balance our body budget.
Attending to Our Vital Signs
Stories about healing our mind-body connections in Western cultures are as old as the time of Hippocrates (Kleisiaris, Sfakianakis, & Papathanasiou, 2014). Historians of medicine have observed that these accounts served to fill gaps in our modern health care systems. For example, Anne Harrington (2008) has described these stories, tracking back to some of their religious roots, as helping to manage “bodies behaving badly,” outside the confines of physicalist medicine. Examples include the power of suggestion (e.g., the placebo effect), the lament of modernity (e.g., the modern world overtaxing our energies), and the appeal of non-Western healing practices (e.g., the popularity of mindfulness). All of these stories have contributed to the rise of integrated mind-body medicine.
Today, the global health and wellness industry is estimated to be a $5.6 trillion market (Stea, 2024). Yet not all wellness solutions and explanations are the same. Adding to this uncertainty is that the line separating science and pseudo-science is often broader shades of gray (Lilienfeld et al., 2005). Worse, during the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-science movements leveraged the rhetoric of “natural immunity” to instill fears about vaccine efficacy (Hotez, 2023). In this sea of misinformation, clinical psychologist Jonathan Stea (2024) has noted our best defense is cultivating our science literacy – minding our science and developing a healthy skepticism against simple “cure-all” solutions.
Scientific explanations such as the body budget and predictive processing paint a more nuanced picture of our well-being and the multiple pathways for illness to emerge. At the same time, it offers support to many of the practical wisdoms about physical and emotional health. Our well-being is more than the absence of illness. Indeed, discerning clinicians such as Nancy McWilliams (2021) have helpfully described the “vital signs” of mental health to love, work, and play. Among these are abilities to find comfort in our important relationships, a realistic and reliable self-esteem, flexible emotional regulation, a healthy sense of community and individuality, and vitality. We can also now understand these vital signs as building a healthy foundation for our body budgeting.
So the next time we are feeling exhausted and miserable, remember to be kind to our 24/7 COO brain and take better care of our mind-body connections, in order to help them balance our body budget.
Self-Reflection
- How do you regularly take care of your body in the areas of eating healthy food, restful sleep, and exercise?
- What are your routines or coping habits when you feel overwhelmed? Are they helpful for the mind-body connections to balance your body budget?
- What steps can you take to change or improve to help balance your body budget? Some helpful examples: delegating tasks, keeping a regular sleep schedule, taking breaks to decompress, nourishing your body with a healthy diet
- What emotional words can you use to describe how you are feeling today? Often we experience different feelings together, practice noticing their subtleties and learn to use more than one word to describe them (e.g., movies, literature, and the arts are often helpful sources)
