Welcome back to Brainverse Me. This is Joshua Erickson. You know, for most of my life, I've tried to figure out how I feel by thinking harder. Sometimes something feels off. So I analyze it. I try to name the emotion, and then I respond. That approach makes sense, especially if you live in your head as much as I do. The problem is by the time I'm thinking about how I feel, my brain is usually already taken over. It's already interpreting, already building a narrative, already deciding what this means. So what I've learned slowly is that my thoughts are rarely the first signal. They're just the loudest. This is one of the moments where I caught that difference in real time. It wasn't a big moment. No argument. No bad news. Nothing that would have justified feeling an edge. I was just moving through a normal part of my day when I noticed that my heart rate felt, I don't know, off. Not pounding, not alarming, just higher than baseline. Then I noticed my breathing. Short inhales. Barely any pause. Almost no exhales. If you'd asked me how I was feeling right then, I probably would have said, I'm fine. That's the part that mattered. Because my body clearly wasn't. What I used to do in moments like that was ignore it and keep going. Eventually, my thoughts would catch up. I'd start feeling irritable or restless. Then my brain would jump in to explain it. What's wrong? Who messed something up? Why am I annoyed? What did I do wrong? And once that starts, it's a short path, either snapping at someone or retreating into my head. This time I didn't wait for that. I treated the physical signs as information, not a problem to solve. Elevated heart rate usually means I'm bracing. Shallow breathing usually means I'm trying to stay in control. Neither of those meant I was in danger. They just meant I was early. Early anxiety, early agitation, early overload. So instead of asking, why do I feel like this? I asked, what happens if I slow this down? I focused on my breathing. Nothing dramatic, no counting, no meditation app. I just made the exhales longer than the inhales, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Once, then again, my heart rate dropped slightly. That was it. I didn't suddenly feel calm. I didn't feel happy, but I also didn't tip over the mental spiral I knew too well. The one where everything needs to be interpreted justified or controlled. Later when I thought about it, that's what stood out. Not that I stopped anxiety entirely, but that I caught it before my brain built a story around it. I've noticed that when I wait for emotions to show up as thoughts, I'm already behind. When I noticed my heart rate and breathing first, I get a few seconds of warning. Those seconds matter. They're the difference between responding and reacting, between staying present and getting hijacked by my own head. For a long time I treated my body like background noise. Now I see it as an early warning system, one that speaks up before my brain starts rewriting reality. I wanted to stop here for a second, not to analyze what just happened, not to explain it away, just to notice something I used to ignore. Before my thoughts went anywhere, my body already knew. I knew it was tense, I knew it was bracing, I knew I was drifting towards something, even if I hadn't named it yet. For a long time I skipped or overlooked that part. I went straight to the thoughts, straight to interpretation. Straight to figuring out why I felt the way I did. But by the time I was doing that, my brain had already taken control of the narrative. What I missed was the warning signs didn't start in my head. They started in my chest tightening and my jaw clenching, my shoulders creeping up without me noticing, my breathing getting shallow while I was telling myself I was fine. That's the part I didn't listen to. I treated those signals like background noise. Something to push through, override, or ignore until I had a better explanation. And every time I did that, my brain got a head start. By the time I realized I was anxious, overwhelmed, or sliding toward anger or shutdown, I was already deep in the story my brain was about was telling me about. Here's the call out I need to own. I wasn't bad at identifying my emotions. I was late. I kept waiting for feelings to show up as thoughts. Instead of noticing that they had already arrived as sensations, and that delay mattered. Because once my brain is in charge, everything turns into justification, defense, or control. Listening earlier to the physical stuff is the only way I've found to interpret interrupt that process before it runs away from me. And here's the part that took me a long time to understand. My brain isn't slow, it's late. By the time I'm thinking something feels off, my nervous system has already made a decision. Heart rate up, breathing shallow, muscles ready. Sequence matters. We like to believe emotions start as thoughts we think something, interpret it, and then feel a certain way. That's not how it works, at least not for me. What happens first is physiological. My bro body reacts to something before I have language for it. Sometimes that something is obvious, sometimes it's subtle. Sometimes it's just cumulative. Too much stimulation, too many decisions, not enough recovery. But my body knows this before my brain does. If I miss that window, my brain fills in the blanks. Once my heart rate is elevated, my breathing is shallow, my brain starts scanning for a reason. It doesn't like ambiguity. It doesn't like unexplained activation. So it does what it's good at. It interprets, it tells a story, it looks for a thread, it signs meaning. It picks a narrative that justifies why my system feels the way it does. Anxiety, paranoia. Everything. And that's where things spiral. Because now I'm not just activated, I'm activated about something. Now I'm irritated for a reason, anxious for a reason, defensive for a reason. And once that happens, logic doesn't help. I can tell myself to calm down, I can analyze the situation, I can point out that nothing bad is actually happening. None of that changes the fact that my nervous system is already in motion. That's the hijack. What I've learned is that the only way to interrupt that process is to catch it before my brain gets involved. Not by thinking faster, not by explaining myself better. But by listening to the physical signs early, when they're just signals. Elevated heart rate doesn't mean panic. Shallow breathing doesn't mean danger. It means my system is waking up. And if I respond at that level by slowing my breathing, grounding myself physically, I don't need to convince my brain of anything. The body settles. And the brain follows. That order matters. What I try to do the other way around, brain first, body later, I lose every single time. So this isn't about being hyper-aware or obsessive about sensations. It's about recognizing that my body gives me information before my thoughts turn into a problem. If I listen early, I get options. If I wait, I get reactions. That's the difference. So this is the part where I need to stop letting myself off the hook. Because once I know this pattern exists, pretending I don't notice it anymore is a choice. If my heart rate is up, if my breathing is shallow, and I keep pushing it away, that's not resilience. That's me choosing to ignore information. And then I act surprised when my brain hijacked the situation later. I used to blame my thoughts for that. Why did I snap? Why did I spiral? Why did this get so big so fast? But the truth is the warning signs were there long before the reaction. I just didn't want to deal with them. Because listening to my body means slowing down, it means interrupting momentum, it means admitting I'm closer to the edge than I'd like to be, and I don't love that. So instead, I'd override it. I'd tell myself I was fine, I'd push through, I'd stay productive. Then later when the thoughts took over and everything felt urgent or threatening, I'd treat that like a starting point. It wasn't. It was the result. Here's the uncomfortable part I had to accept. If I ignore my body when it whispers, I lose the right to complain when my body my brain starts yelling. Because the escalation didn't come out of nowhere. I helped it along. That's not self-blame, that's responsibility. Once I noticed that my heart rate and breathing were my earliest signals, I stopped pretending the hijack was inevitable. It isn't. It's predictable. And predictable means interruptible. But only if I'm willing to respond early, when the signals are subtle and inconvenient, instead of waiting until the thoughts are loud and overwhelming. If I wait until I'm already irritated, anxious, or defensive, I've waited too long. At that point I'm not choosing, I'm reacting. So yeah, that part's on me. Not the diagnoses, not my personality, not my past. Me. Ignoring data doesn't make it go away. It just guarantees I'll deal with it later at a higher cost. Once I stop arguing with my thoughts, this got simpler. Not easier. Simpler. I don't wait for my brain to agree with me anymore. I try I don't try to convince myself that I'm safe, calm, or overreacting. I start with the body. If my heart rate feels elevated, if my breathing is shallow or clipped, that's a signal. I don't ask why right away, I don't analyze it, I don't attach a story to it. I treat it like data. Something in my system is activating, so my response lives at that level. I slow my breathing down. Not dramatically, not perfectly, just enough that the exhales are longer than the inhales. That's it. I don't need a technique list. I don't need a script. I just give my nervous system one clear message. We're not in a rush. Sometimes I add movements, standing up, shifting position, letting my shoulders drop. Nothing that looks impressive. What matters is that I respond early. Because once my body settles even a little, my brain stops scrambling for meaning. The thoughts don't disappear, they just lose their urgency. And that's the window. That's where I get my choice back. From there, I can decide what actually needs attention and what doesn't. I can tell the difference between a real problem and leftover activation. If I skip this step and go straight to thinking, I lose that option. So now, when I notice the early signs, I don't treat them like an inconvenience. I treat them like an alert. Not a crisis, not a failure. Just information I can work with. If I'm willing to listen, that shift changed everything. Not because it made me calm all the time, but because it stopped my brain from running the show before I had a say. Now, I've said all of this, and you're probably wondering, but how do you do that? How do you listen to your body before your brain starts interpreting the situation? It's not easy at all. It takes a lot of practice, it takes a lot of determination, and you have to be deliberate about doing it. At least that's what I had to do. I don't know how long it took me in terms of weeks or months. Notice I didn't say days. But once I started to do it consistently, it got a little easier. Absolutely, it got a little easier. And every time that I did it, all those benefits I mentioned, I got to realize them. Now, even though I've been practicing this for a couple years, it doesn't mean I'm perfect. Sometimes the emotion that I feel is so strong that I can't interrupt it. Sometimes the thought is so loud, I hear it before my body. Doesn't happen all the time. It doesn't even happen often. But it does happen. And when it does occur, I used to say, Well, why did I do that? How did I miss that? Why was I ignoring myself? And then when I realized I wasn't ignoring anything, sometimes it's just too powerful or too fast. And I had to give myself a path. I had to forgive myself and realize sometimes I can't interrupt it. Sometimes it's too much to catch early. You have to give yourself a a break. You have to ease up on yourself a little bit. This is not easy. Here's what I'll leave you with. If you're trying to understand how you feel by thinking harder, you're probably already late. Your body speaks first, your brain just narrates it. So instead of waiting for your thoughts to spiral into something loud and convincing, pay attention earlier. When those signals are quiet. Heart rate, breathing, tension. You get to know how you are when you're not in any kind of emotional state. And you start comparing that to how you are when you do sense anxiety or being overwhelmed or angry. You notice your heart rate, you're breathing your tension. Don't judge them. Don't try to fix yourself. Just notice. Because the moment you catch those early signals, you get a choice. You can slow things down before your brain assigns meaning, you can respond before everything turns into a story. You can interrupt the hijack before it feels inevitable. That doesn't make you calm, it makes you present. And presence is often enough. You don't need perfect regulation. You don't need to feel great. You just need to stop letting your brain run off with a microphone while your body's been trying to warn you the whole time. That's the work. Not control. Not suppression. Listening. Thanks for being here today. Remember, your brain is fast. That doesn't mean it should always go first.