Watch the interview in full at the bottom of this page

How we react to our own bodily signals is something we’re taught by someone else, interoception can help us tune into what our bodies are really telling us

As babies, we have a limited survival repertoire: when we’re in discomfort, we cry. We rely almost entirely on caregivers to work out what we’re upset about, but without much to go on, their response isn’t always accurate.

Let’s say a baby is crying because it’s in pain, but the caregiver is convinced it’s hungry. The baby will get even more frustrated because it’s survival needs aren’t being satisfied and, if this becomes a long-term pattern, the baby may start to incorrectly associate a certain feeling with a certain need – in this case, pain equals food.

This association can become ingrained as we grow older and affect how good or bad we’re able to read our own bodily signals and the emotions of others. This is why interoception is so important because it allows us to tune into the signals coming from our bodies and correctly identify what they mean. It’s also why it’s important to continually hone this skill – our feelings and emotions are fluid. How we react to different situations changes throughout our lifetime, from being a baby, to adolescence and old age.

Humans aren’t rational, we’re relational

Contrary to the more mainstream belief that we’re rational beings, relationships with others are at the heart of what it means to be human. From the day we’re born to the moment we take our dying breath, we’re social animals – we need other people and live for them.

So while we all have our own unique experience of what it means to be us, we shouldn’t think of that experience as being isolated or distinct from the experience of other people. Understanding how other people make us feel, and how we make them feel, gives us insights into the choices we make, including our political decisions.

How our bodies and feelings can influence our politics (and how populist politics can take advantage)

Over the past 10 years, the world has felt increasingly unstable for many people. The financial crisis, the rise of gig economy (and job insecurity) and climate change. Then came the pandemic, which demonstrated the instability of the world even more starkly.

An unstable world creates feelings of vulnerability, in individuals and across societies, shaping our political decisions. We search for conditions that will diminish our anxieties and stressors. Populist politics takes advantage of this. Promising us a quick fix to how we feel by pointing the finger at the most immediate and sensational news items such as immigrants or the rise in ‘woke culture’. The irony is, migrants forced to seek out pastures new because of untenable living conditions in their home country is actually another symptom of global uncertainty rather than the cause of problem itself.

Democracy is good for your health

GDP (gross domestic product) is usually used as a measure of the success of a country. However, there may be a more accurate indicator. A major study published in 2019 ¹ that spanned 170 countries and more than 36 years found the presence of democratic governance was linked to lower mortality rates. This effect was seen across many causes of mortality including cardiovascular disease, transport accidents and cancers. Evidence like this suggests we should shift focus from financial development to political development when it comes to the health and wellbeing of a nation, because democracy is a more important factor than GPD.

Climate change could fuel hate speech

In a recent study ² looking at how extreme weather conditions affect us, researchers found that very high and low temperatures result in an increase in hate speech on Twitter. Just as extreme temperatures demonstrate an instability of the Earth’s climate, they also cause instability in our own bodies. We may feel less in control and experience more discomfort, either from being too hot or too cold.

If we’re not tuned into where these feelings are coming from, an internal feeling of discomfort may be experienced as frustration and expressed outwardly in unhelpful ways, like through hate speech. This is pertinent, as climate change creates more extreme temperatures.

Our unconscious social biases can hijack our perception

Black Americans are twice as likely to be shot while they’re unarmed, compared to white individuals. A disheartening reality that also plays out in the lab. Numerous studies have shown white participants find black people more threatening, and even misperceive a benign object as a weapon when in the hands of a black person.

We’ve spoken before about the brain being a prediction machine and this is another example. Through stereotypes, prejudice and even jokes, it becomes engrained in culture that different races are associated with different social behaviour. Our brain uses this information to shape our perception of reality. When this happens on a widescale, it can cause serious social problems. Therefore, it’s so important to bring together people of different backgrounds, skin colour and economic statuses so we can learn from each other and understand our differences and similarities.

Critical feeling – an important skill you may not have heard of

Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and objectively about an issue and come up with a considered judgement. It’s an important skill that people should learn and develop, but just as vital is critical feeling. This is the ability to feel and become aware of your emotions (which itself takes time, practice and effort) then reflect on these feelings and understand their origin. Why am I feeling anxious, why am I scared?

It’s also important to apply this principle when interacting with other people. Why are they feeling what they’re feeling? And is there any political or historical context that might be causing this? Critical feeling can help us all to better understand our feelings and those of others and the cause behind them, ensuring we’re able to respond in a considered way rather than making kneejerk reactions.

Find out more

You can watch our full interview with Professor Tsakiris below:

For more information on Professor Tsakiris’ work, head over to his website www.politics-of-feelings.com. And for more insights and tips on how to improve your overall wellbeing, please check out the Inner Sense YouTube channel, you can also sign up for our newsletter.

References

The post How our emotions can influence our political decisions – and how interoception can improve the decisions we make appeared first on Restoring Balance.

There’s growing evidence to suggest the therapy is effective when it comes to treating certain anxiety disorders ^{3 4}. Ted Schubert, an expert at Anxiety & Behavioral Health Clinic in Florida, told us: “Research collected over many years consistently shows interoceptive exposure therapy is really effective at helping to reduce anxiety.” So, how does the therapy work and why do we get anxious in the first place? We take a look in this post.

(By the way, you can check out our full chat with Ted at the bottom of this page – he really knows his onions and it’s well worth a watch 👇)

Why do we get anxious?

Anxiety is how we describe unpleasant feelings that we experience when our bodies react to stress. There are lots of things that may lead us to experience anxiety, from exams to financial worries, and everybody’s triggers may be different.

When we’re anxious, changes take place in our nervous, hormonal and immune systems, which we sense as physical signals, like:

• Increased heart rate
• Fast, shallow breathing
• Dry mouth

This is part of what’s known as the stress response. Our bodies are deciding where best to direct our resources, priming us to deal with a stressful situation. So, while the feelings can be quite unpleasant sometimes, anxiety is perfectly natural and noticing bodily signals is very often helpful ⁵. But other times it can become an issue.

When does anxiety become a problem?

When anxiety starts to negatively affect our quality of life or damage our health, it can become a problem. People who experience long-term anxiety, may start to feel anxious about feeling anxious, and become fearful of the physical sensations associated with anxiety.

We may misinterpret an increased heartrate as a sign we’re about to have a heart attack. Shortness of breath may be misread as meaning a panic attack is imminent. Forgetting something, like where we put our keys, could be mistaken as a sign of cognitive decline. This can create an unhelpful cycle, reinforcing our anxiety and fear of certain bodily sensations ⁶.

How does interoception exposure therapy work?

Interoceptive exposure therapy, exposes us to the bodily sensations that trigger our anxiety. It can be tricky to turn these sensations on and off, so there are several techniques a therapist may use to help us induce them. Breathing through a straw can help us recreate shortness of breath, running up a flight of stairs can increase our heartrate and spinning on the spot can help us feel dizzy.

With the guidance and support of their therapist, the person will be encouraged to focus on the sensation and assess it objectively:

• Where’s it coming from?
• How does it make us feel?
• How long does it last?
• What level of threat does it pose to us?

The idea is that through the planned and predictable exposure to sensations we’re fearful of, we’re able to get used to them in a controlled setting. Gradually, our bodies and minds learn that these sensations aren’t permanent, nor are they dangerous. Ultimately, the therapy aims to help us dial down our fear response to the sensations and learn that our bodies and minds are safe.

Getting the most out of interoceptive exposure therapy

Interoceptive exposure therapy is a gradual process and changes won’t happen overnight. But we can help to prepare ourselves for the therapy by working on our interoceptive awareness in ways unrelated to feelings of anxiety. There are many practices and techniques based on sensing and interpreting what’s going on inside our bodies. Being more in tune with our bodies can help to ensure we’re able to hit the ground running with interoceptive exposure therapy and get the most out of the session.

If you’d like to find out more about interoception and how to improve your interoceptive awareness, we’ve got a page full of useful info here.

Find out more

For more information on interoception exposure therapy, check out our full interview with Ted Schubert below, and you can follow the research of Ted and his colleagues at the Anxiety and Behavioral Health Clinic here: https://abhcfsu.wixsite.com/website-1

For more insights and tips on how to improve your overall wellbeing, please check out the Inner Sense YouTube channel and sign up to our newsletter.

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While all this was happening in his personal life, Dr Ashar was carrying out academic research into the factors that influence chronic pain. One day, the penny dropped, and he realised he was experiencing exactly the things he was learning about through his studies.

Standing still was the trigger to Dr Ashar’s pain, but incredibly he committed to completing the entire meditation retreat on his feet and stationery. Despite often feeling very painful, it was a breakthrough experience for Dr Ashar.

Observing his pain, he noticed how fearful he’d become of standing still. It would cause him to clench his chest and neck, creating tension throughout his body. He was able to deconstruct his pain and gradually learn to break free from it.

The experience also gave him an invaluable perspective on chronic pain, helping him truly understand the condition from the perspective of someone going through it. It’s knowledge that helps guide him in his current position as a neuroscientist at University of Colorado Anschutz, where he’s a leading authority on an emerging treatment aiming to help people resolve their chronic pain: pain reprocessing therapy (PRT).

We caught up with Dr Ashar to find out more about PRT, as well as discussing the causes and mechanisms of chronic pain. Below are some of the key points we’ve picked out from our fascinating interview, which you can watch in full at the bottom of this post.

Why does chronic pain happen?

Pain protects us. Although not always pleasant, it helps guide our behaviour away from real and perceived threats.

At any given time, our body is sending our brain hundreds of signals, and for the most part the brain is pretty good at filtering out noise so it can focus on what’s most important. When a strong signal comes through (imagine hitting your thumb with a hammer) the brain sits up and takes note. The resultant pain lets us know to exercise more care in future when swinging hammers around.

But sometimes, the brain is less good at filtering out noise and its sensitivity to the signals coming from the body is too high. The signals are amplified, and we experience them as pain. If this happens regularly, the reaction pattern can become a habit and chronic pain can occur.

What type of pain is chronic pain?

Pain related to damage to our cells (think again of the hammer and thumb) can be thoughts of as structural pain. However, when the brain generates pain in the absence of damage, for example when its sensitivity to other signals coming from the body is too high, it’s call neuroplastic pain. This is the category that most chronic pain fits into.

Is chronic pain real pain?

When someone experiences chronic pain, what they’re feeling is real pain; but crucially, the threat perceived by the brain may not be useful. It’s a bit like an oversensitive car alarm that goes off at the slightest touch, for instance a softly falling leaf. The leaf is really there, and the alarm really went off, but the threat posed to the car by the leaf isn’t significant.

Just like we can turn down the sensitivity of a car alarm, we can also train our brain to return to a normal level of sensitivity through treatments like pain reprocessing therapy.

What’s pain reprocessing therapy (PRT)?

PRT is a treatment that aims to help people resolve their chronic pain and feel safe in their body. The process starts with an assessment with a physician to help identify if the pain is structural (caused by damage to our cells) or neuroplastic (caused by the brain).

If the cause of the pain is the brain, a therapist then helps a person retrain how they relate to bodily sensations and think about their pain. This helps them reduce fear and avoidance they may have built up around the causes of their discomfort.

The technique involves interoceptive awareness and gathering evidence to support feelings of being safe in one’s body. So, if someone fears bending over, PRT aims to help them get more comfortable with bending over. If they’re avoiding running, PRT aims to help get them running again without debilitating pain.

Can pain reprocessing therapy help treat chronic pain?

Dr Ashar carried out a study in 2021 ⁷ to test the effectiveness of PRT when it comes to treating chronic pain. The results were extremely encouraging.

He and his research team enrolled 151 people with chronic backpain, for which no physical cause could be found. Participants were given either PRT, a placebo injection or a continuation of their usual care.

Dr Ashar found 66% of the PRT group were free or nearly free of pain, compared to just 20% for the other groups. Dr Ashar and his team checked back in with participants after a year and the reductions in pain were largely maintained. Dr Ashar continues to trial PRT, but the signs so far are really positive that it’s an effective treatment when it comes to resolving chronic pain.

Find out more

You can watch our full interview with Dr Ashar below, and for more information on Dr Ashar and his work, head over on his website: yonestar.github.io

For more insights and tips on how to improve your overall wellbeing, please check out the Inner Sense YouTube channel and sign up to our newsletter.

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1. Understanding interoception might sound difficult, but it’s really easy

Interoception can sound like a technical term, so getting your head around it isn’t always easy. So, Kelly starts simple, linking it to everyday life to help make it more straightforward.

She says: “I always ask people: “How do you know when you’re hungry? How do you know when you’re sleepy? How do you know when you’re excited? And do you know how you feel that feeling in your body?”. The answer that they arrive at for that final question, that’s interoception!” Of course, how we experience interoception is completely personal, but this is a useful way of helping to explain what it is.

2. Breaking down how we feel can help us improve our interoceptive awareness

Understanding how our bodies feel is really important and can help us feel safe inside our own skin. But for some people describing how our bodies feel requires a lot of concentration and attention. This can make it really inaccessible, especially children. By focusing on one body part at a time, the hands, heart and stomach, suddenly it’s much more manageable and we can slowly build up a picture of how our entire body feels.

Find out more about interoception in our full interview with Kelly Mahler below:

3. Emotion words can be abstract, interoception helps to give them meaning

In the world of therapy, there’s sometimes a knowledge gap between what a practitioner is suggesting during a treatment and what the person is experiencing. A practitioner might tell us to breathe deeply when we’re stressed or angry. But emotion words like these can be really abstract, so first we need to understand what stress or anger feels like to us in our body.

Through interoception, we’re able to feel what happens in our body for a particular emotion, which helps to apply meaning to these words. It makes it much easier to engage with a troublesome emotion and figure out how to work our way through it better.

4. We often try to ignore discomfort, but we should listen to the discomfort in our bodies

From the day we’re born, we’re designed to notice discomfort. And our bodies are actually built to be uncomfortable. When a baby feels interoceptively uncomfortable, it cries to let us know that something isn’t right and we need to take action.

But generally as a culture, we’re not very good at confronting discomfort, and often even try to ignore it. However, listening to our discomfort is really important because it can provide us really valuable information about our bodies and what we need.

Find out more

You can find out more about Kelly and her brilliant work on her website: www.kelly-mahler.com

For more fascinating interviews with experts on interoception and inner body awareness, head over to our Inner Sense YouTube channel. And if you’d like more insights and tips on how to live improve your overall wellbeing, please sign up to the Restoring Balance newsletter.

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Ever wondered what it means to be alive? What is the key factor that separates us and other living organisms from inanimate objects? You’re not alone, it’s a topic that’s troubled scientific communities for many years. But in 2006, English professor Karl Friston introduced his free energy principle (FEP) to the world.⁸ In this post, we pick over the bones of his fascinating, controversial (and some would say inaccessible) theory to provide a jargon-free explanation of what the free energy principle is, why it’s so important and how it links in with other concepts like interoception.

The free energy principle explained

The FEP is a set of conditions that, according to the principle, all living things conform to. It helps us better understand how our bodies and brains work together to maintain their structures and resist the tendency of lifeless matter to gradually dissolve into its environment.

To understand the FEP, think about the difference between something that’s alive, like an apple ripening on a tree, and something that’s not, like the apple after it’s fallen and started rotting away on the ground.

What’s the fundamental difference? The apple hanging on the branch is highly organised and has a recognisable structure, which it’s able to maintain. The rotting apple, conversely, is slowly decaying, losing its structure, and merging into its environment.

The FEP states the way apples, and indeed all living organisms, resist dispersion is because they’re impelled to minimise surprise and resolve uncertainty. The gap between what you expect and the reality of the world around you is what Professor Friston calls free energy.

Why is the free energy principle radical?

The FEP is so ground-breaking because it’s the first theory that unifies observations made by different fields of research such as biology and physics, creating a lens through which the views converge.⁹ A bit like when Albert Einstein unified relativity and quantum mechanics with his famous E=mc² equation.

The free energy principle and interoception

Some pioneering researchers have taken a big leap from the mathematical foundations of the FEP and have progressed from explaining simple self-organising structures like apples to explaining the behaviour of social creatures like foraging ants, flocking birds and even Facebook-using humans. This has led to the development of the idea of interoceptive active inference ¹⁰.

As we covered in our article on body budgeting, humans and animals have a very nifty and energy-efficient way of staying alive. We’ve evolved to become prediction-making machines, with our brains anticipating our bodies’ needs in our ever-changing surroundings and deciding in advance where best to spend resources.

When the brain senses an adjustment is needed, it uses our memories and experiences to automatically predict how it can fix the gap between where our energy levels are and where they should be. In the case of interoceptive active inference, our brain anticipates our needs and takes action to regulate the body’s internal functions accordingly, like increasing or reducing heartrate, blood pressure and oxygen levels.

The free energy principle and mental health

The FEP along with associated concepts such as active inference may offer new insights for practitioners working in the field of mental health or emotion regulation.^{11 12}

Sometimes the predictions our brains make about the world around us are off the mark. Imagine a person with a phobia of common, non-venomous household spiders. When seeing a small spider in the corner of the room, they react as though it were a giant man-eating tarantula. Cue increased heartrate, some screaming and a hasty retreat away from the tiny arachnid!

This is an example the brain failing to minimise free energy, the gap between what’s expected and the reality is too wide and can be costly. Over time, this can have a profoundly negative affect on mental and physical health. According to the FEP, this is what’s happening in situations of chronic stress or trauma.

It’s my belief that Professor Friston’s principle, together with concepts like interoceptive active inference, will help unify existing approaches used by practitioners from many disciplines including:

• Trauma-informed therapy based around Polvagal theory – helping people move from perceptions of threat to safety
• Desensitisation therapy for allergy or hypersensitiveness
• Therapy for phobias – such as interoceptive exposure therapy with CBT

FEP isn’t without its critics. Friston himself acknowledges the principle can’t be fully proven or disproven. ¹³ And the dizzying mathematical framework behind the FEP (which even trying to begin to explain is beyond the scope of this article) has also been criticised for being very difficult to understand, even for the experts. However, the gist of what Professor Friston’s maths aims to convey is at least more straightforward and has the potential to revolutionise how we understand life as we know it. ¹⁴

Find out more

For more information on how we can apply new scientific insights to our everyday health and wellbeing, please sign up to the Restoring Balance newsletter.

Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior, by Thomas Parr, Giovanni Pezzulo and Karl J. Friston was released on 29th March 2022

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Everything is not quite as it seems.

This is according to Professor Anil Seth, a leading expert in cognition and consciousness, in his international bestseller, Being You.¹⁹ Published in 2021, Seth’s book brings together cutting-edge research on consciousness and how we make sense of the world around us and within us.

Seth posits that humans, and indeed all conscious creatures, have evolved to perceive things not as they are but rather in a way that’s helpful for their survival. So, everything we see, hear and feel is in fact a controlled hallucination.

 

Brains don’t see or hear anything, so must make an educated guess on what’s really out there

Imagine a brain. Trapped inside a dark skull, what does it really see or hear? Nothing. Instead, it relies merely on electrical impulses sent from sensory organs, like our eyes and ears. Our brains compare and combine these signals with prior expectations or beliefs to form a picture of the world around us and to predict how to react. Essentially, how we perceive the world is our brain’s best guess of what’s out there: a controlled hallucination.

And it’s not just external information that’s perceived this way, our brains also use guesswork to make sense of what’s going on inside our bodies too.²⁰

Using sensory information from our organs, combined with past experience, our brains are able to create sensations of feeling thirsty, tired or hungry; a skill called interoception.

We’ve evolved like this because it’s a better use of our resources to be proactive in how we interact with our environment rather than reacting to it. We explain more on this in our post on body budgeting.

 

Optical illusions help illustrate how controlled hallucinations work

We can experience a controlled hallucination in action when we look at an optical illusion. A famous example is the checker shadow illusion. Conceived in 1995 by professor of Vision Science Edward Adelson, this visual trick uses our expectations of what we think we should see to fool us.

Looking at the image 1. below, does square A or B appear lighter? Most people see B as the lighter square, when in reality both are the same colour (see image 2.). This happens because the brain is using prior knowledge of the pattern of a checkerboard, combined with our understanding that a shadow dims the appearance of a surface, to make B seem lighter than it is.

Image 1

Image 2

Images by Adrian Pingstone, based on an original image by Edward H. Adelson²¹

 

Our brains do a good job of providing us an accurate picture of reality, but not always

In general, our brains are very good at providing us with a useful and relatively accurate picture of reality. But not all the time.

As we saw in the example above, sometimes the brain can be tricked. Similarly, in some mental illnesses what the brain is predicting can become unhelpful to a person’s overall wellbeing. Recent research suggests that people with depression tend to make too many unhelpful predictions or disregard helpful information that contradicts negative expectations.²² The result is a prolonged unhelpful perception of the world and their place within it.

In his book, The Way Out, psychotherapist Alan Gordon theorises that chronic pain is another example of the brain’s prediction process going awry.²³ The nervous system of people who experience persistent pain unintentionally constructs their pain because of mistaken guesses that they’re in some way under threat. A vicious cycle of feedback forms, where pain is the reaction to benign stimuli.

 

We can use the new understanding of controlled hallucinations to our advantage

This new understanding of how perception works can provide us with vital clues of how to deal with life’s challenges. Recognising that our moods, feelings and emotions are in part best guesses, but not necessarily accurate reactions, opens the door to changing the way we feel and react to situations.

This can apply not only to clinically-diagnosed conditions, such as depression or forms of chronic pain, but can help us overcome unhelpful everyday patterns of behaviours or habits, such as eating too much or exercising too little.

 

Perception as controlled hallucination: find out more

If you’d like to find out more about perception as controlled hallucination, as well as other theories on consciousness, the following websites are a great place to start:

• https://www.anilseth.com/
• https://www.newscientist.com/question/four-main-theories-consciousness/

 

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Sources and references

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels.

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Viewing the brain in its vital role of helping your body to manage its overall budget is very useful for day-to-day wellbeing. It helps us better appreciate the two-way link between our mind and body so we can take a holistic approach to understanding and improving our physical and mental wellbeing.

What is body budgeting?

So exactly what is body bugeting? To stay alive, our bodies need to expend and receive energy and resources. Body budgeting is an analogy that likens this to a financial forecast. Just like companies have an accounting department that plans for expected expenditure and income, our brains manage our bodies to keep the books balanced.

At every moment, our brains are anticipating our bodies’ needs, deciding where to spend resources. Through a mixture of lifestyle choices and our ability to understand what our bodies are telling us we can help the brain balance our body budgets.

How does body budgeting work?

When the brain senses an adjustment is needed, it uses our memories and experiences to automatically predict how it can fix the gap between where our energy levels are and where they should be. To fill that gap, the brain decides to invest resources where it thinks they’ll be needed, for instance:

• Cortisol is proactively released into our bloodstream when we wake up, giving us a quick shot of energy to get ourselves out of bed
• Our heartrate increases if we’re about to do exercise, in expectation that we’ll soon need more oxygen flowing around the body
• Our digestive functions engage before we’re likely to be eating, ready to start processing food as soon as it arrives in the stomach

For every action that uses a resource, we need to pay the body back with an action that tops up our supply. Movement and learning are our most expensive actions, while eating and sleeping provide us with the most income.

Our bodies can exist in a deficit, but it’s not sustainable

Our modern lives can make it difficult to balance our body budgets:

• Artificial lights, like those from the screens of our very addictive mobile devices, can cause sleep loss
• Highly processed foods, while convenient and often tasty, don’t provide us with the best balance of nutrients in the long run and can disrupt our core metabolic functions
• Unrealistic expectations of how to look and behave promoted through social media and product advertising can create a form of chronic stress that places a high demand on our body budget and may gradually erode wellbeing
• We’re also just very good at ignoring what the brain is telling us, disregarding signals so we can make the most of every last second of the day

Before we know it, we’ve spent too many resources without paying them back, landing us in debt. The body, like real life finances, can run on a deficit; but it’s not sustainable. Being overdrawn too long leaves us vulnerable to disease, mental illness and ultimately untimely death.

To balance the books, we need to invest more resources in our body budgets

To restore the balance of the body budget, it’s imperative that we invest as much as we spend. We should focus on paying the body back with things like:

• Eating a well-rounded diet, high in nutrient-rich whole foods and drinking plenty of hydrating fluids
• Developing supportive relationships with family, friends and colleagues that help soothe our nervous system
• Creating the right routine and environment for us to get enough restful sleep

We can also improve our ability to read the signals our brains send us, a sense called interoception. By tuning in to our inner bodily sensations, such as hunger, thirst and tiredness, we can take appropriate action sooner and ensure we’re keeping our body budgets in the black.

Find out more

For more articles on how to live in easy harmony with your body, please sign up to the Restoring Balance newsletter. And click on the following link to download a free chapter from my book.

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Yes, if done in the right way, exercise whilst fasting is completely safe. And we may be specially adapted to do it – ancestors who could perform well in a fasted state were able to gather food more successfully, giving them an evolutionary edge²⁷. Clearly, we’re going back a few years, although exercising whilst fasting continues to offer us benefits today. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of these benefits and discuss how to get the most out of your fasted workouts.

Benefits of Exercising whilst Fasting

So what benefits can we expect?

Well, studies suggest that exercising on an empty stomach improves brain function and mood and, although you probably wouldn’t want to attempt a PB during a fast, you may end up feeling more energised in certain types of activites.

It can also help us improve our body composition. During a fast, the body switches to fat burning, where fat molecules are broken down into smaller pieces and used to generate energy. It’s a state known as ketosis and is a great weight-loss tool.

Getting the Most Out of Your Fasted Workouts

There are a few strategies you can employ to ensure that you maximise the benefits of your fasted workouts.

Let’s start with what you shouldn’t do.

Avoid intense or long exercise sessions during multi-day fasts. It’s unlikely that you will get the most out of your workout, and it could even be detrimental to your health.

And the dos?

• Timing – exercising towards the start of your fast, for example early in the morning 12 hours or so after your evening meal, may help enhance the beneficial effects of the fast.²⁸
• Hydrate – during a fast, you can still drink liquids like black tea, coffee and of course water. So, drink plenty to ensure you stay well hydrated.
• Mindset – it’s natural to have reservations about working out on an empty stomach because we know that food fuels us, but your body is able to release fuel stored as fat. And, if you at any point you do feel uncomfortable, remember you’re in control – you decide how hard you push yourself and can stop at any time.

Playing It Safe

As with everything, intermittent fasting isn’t for everyone, and if any of the following apply to you, it’s best to avoid it:

• You’re aged below 20 or above 70
• You’re pregnant or breastfeeding
• You have an existing eating disorder
• You’re underweight (a Body Mass Index of less than 18)

And, although fasting can help alleviate certain chronic illnesses, you should always seek supervision from a clinician if using it therapeutically.

It’s also important to listen to your body, you know it better than anyone. If you feel lightheaded, weak or just really hungry, take a break. You can always try again another time and slowly build your tolerance.

But if you’re relatively fit, healthy and want to give fasted exercising a go, we hope this article gives you the confidence to experiment within safe boundaries.

Get More on Fasting, Health and Wellness

For more information on intermittent fasting, as well as health and wellness, please sign up to the Restoring Balance newsletter. And click on the following link to download a free chapter from my book.

Sources and References

Photo by Munbaik Cycling Clothing on Unsplash (add image credit if needed when yo and Suraj have worked on it)

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