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The teenage years are when the ability to feel your body grows the most: but they are also when you are most likely to misunderstand it

荻野健人

I want athletes in their teens, like me, to read this.

Your body changes significantly, sometimes moving just as you want, and other times suddenly refusing to move at all. Your emotions fluctuate, too. You become self-conscious about how others see you. A teenage body is like a daily experiment.

How you relate to your own body during this time might be the kind of thing you can't undo later.

The ability to sense what is happening inside your own body is called interoception. It is the sense of how accurately you can receive internal signals like your heartbeat, breathing, muscle tension, and fatigue.

What I found after looking into it is that adolescence seems to be a very important time for this ability to develop.

The circuits for feeling your body are being built right now

Research suggests that adolescence is a period when the brain circuits that process bodily signals grow significantly. It is often referred to as a potential "critical period." It is still more of a "very strong hypothesis" than a "proven fact." However, the view is that there is a special period somewhere between childhood and adulthood when interoception develops significantly.

Furthermore, the development of the ability to feel your body during this time is considered to be linked to the development of the ability to handle emotions well (self-regulation) and mental resilience. Conversely, there are reports that failure to process bodily signals effectively during this period is linked to problems such as anxiety and depression.

In other words, practicing how to feel your body also forms the foundation for mental strength. Whether or not you can build the habit of listening to your body's voice during this time will likely have a significant impact on who you are in 10 years.

However, there is an irony here

There is a somewhat ironic fact here.

At first, I thought, "Teenagers must be prone to looking away from their body's voice." But when I looked into it, it was the opposite. In one study (comparing teenagers and adults; however, please take this with a grain of salt as it is not yet peer-reviewed), teenagers were actually more strongly focused on their bodily sensations than adults, and they also had higher confidence that they were sensing them correctly.

The problem was that there was a gap between that "confidence" and "actual accuracy." Teenagers had lower ability than adults to gauge how accurately they were reading their bodies—in other words, the "ability to know whether you know."

I think this is quite a scary story. You feel it. You have confidence. But the accuracy of whether that is correct has not yet caught up. It means that it is easy for situations to occur where you think "I can do this" and push yourself, when in fact you are on the verge of breaking down.

The time when the ability to learn about your body grows the most is also the time when you are most likely to overconfidently misread yourself. Opportunity and risk are arriving at the same time.

I want to add this to the list of "things that should be nurtured"

IMG places great importance on how to nurture athletes during their maturation phase. Nutrition, sleep, and rest are all considered in accordance with the stage of growth. It is the idea that because this is a time when the body is being built, it should be treated with care.

I want to add one more thing to that list of "things to nurture during the growth phase." It is the ability to feel your body.

Just like muscles, bones, and physical strength, the ability to feel is something that grows the most during this time. And it is also during this time that you are most likely to be overconfident. That is precisely why it is worth consciously nurturing it, not just by saying "feel it," but by including the question, "Is my reading correct?"

This is my opinion, and research doesn't necessarily go that far. But I feel that the direction is not wrong.

It doesn't have to be difficult. After practice, ask yourself one question: "Where does my body feel tired today?" Then, the next day, check to see if your assessment was correct. Even just doing that will get the circuits working.

Because this is a period you can't put off, I want you to start today.

In this note, I will continue to write about the connection between the body and the mind. If you'd like, please follow me so we can think about this together.

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