"Listen to Your Body" Is Useless Advice. Here's What It Actually Means.
The science has a name for the thing wellness never taught you. And it takes 60 seconds.
Something shifts in April and I fall for it every single year.
Longer days, lighter clothes, race sign-ups everywhere (Hyrox season is back, I can feel it), your feed filling up with 'day 1' selfies and new training plans.
That collective post-winter hibernation 'I'm starting NOW' energy hits, and before you've properly registered it, your brain has already committed to something your body hasn't been consulted about.
My body often finds out about these plans later, and last week was a textbook case.
We were heading to Panama City and I knew days before we arrived that the hotel had a PROPER gym.
Not a “2 dumbbells and a yoga mat in a converted storage room” gym (I’ve had those too…). No, a real proper one.
I’d checked the photos. My workouts were ready. I was going to do 4 days of serious strength training instead of the bodyweight and cardio workouts I’ve been doing while on the road.
But I arrived totally flat. Bad sleep, too much travel, work piling up. My body was sending every signal short of a formal letter, and my brain was going ok honey, but get over it because there’s a squat rack!
I coach people through this for a living. I know what I’m supposed to do.
And I still walked into that gym and tried to train like I hadn’t spent days travelling and sleeping 6 hours a night.
I'm also, as I write this, eyeing a half marathon in Mexico City in June. We've got the Inca Trail a few weeks later, so this is either excellent preparation or a spectacularly bad idea and I genuinely cannot tell.
The most useless phrase in wellness
It's in every fitness programme, right?
Every physio appointment, every pilates instructor, every PT's Instagram bio, every app's loading screen. The same 4 words: listen to your body.
As if that’s a thing you can just do?
As if years of calorie trackers and macro targets and sleep scores and readiness percentages and pushing through pain because a podcast bro said “discipline equals freedom” haven’t systematically trained you to do the exact opposite.
Nobody teaches you what listening actually involves.
It’s just assumed, like breathing or knowing how to parallel park (I can do one of those. Guess which?)
What 'listening' actually means
The skill of detecting and interpreting signals from inside your own body has a proper name. It’s called interoception.
It's how your body talks to you. Not in words, obviously. In sensations. Hunger, fatigue, the tightness in your chest before you cry, that flush of heat right before you say something you'll regret at dinner. All of that is interoception, and most of us have never been taught to read it.
I always thought I was good at this. I can feel when something’s off.
Especially nowadays. Giving up drinking 3 years ago turned the volume up on signals I'd been numbing for years (turns out your body has a lot to say when you stop drowning it out).
And yet there I was in a hotel gym in Panama City, ignoring every signal my body was sending because there were dumbbells and a plan.
A paper in Biological Psychology actually measured this and found that the skill breaks down into 3 things: how well you actually detect your body’s signals, how good you think you are at it, and the gap between those two.
That gap is the whole story.
Because most of us, especially the type A ones, have very high confidence and surprisingly low accuracy.
We’re sure we know what our body is saying.
We are, measurably, not great at it.
You think you’re pushing through productive discomfort, but you’re actually pushing through a warning.
You think you’re “not that hungry,” but you’re actually overriding a signal that got buried under 5 years of MyFitnessPal.
“Listen to your body” assumes you have the accuracy. It never checks.
How we got so bad at hearing ourselves
Every plan, app, and tracker you’ve ever used has slowly replaced your internal signals with external rules.
You stopped asking am I hungry? and started checking whether you’d hit your protein target. You stopped noticing fatigue and started consulting a readiness score.
I still wear my Garmin every day. I track my workouts, I try to get my 10,000 steps.
But somewhere in the last year the obsessive checking just... stopped.
I used to live and die by the data. Now I glance at it and make my own call.
I’m not sure exactly when that shift happened, but I think it started when I realised the metrics were answering a different question from the one my body was asking.
And if you've been stressed for a long time, it gets worse.
Stress actually scrambles the signals. Most of us genuinely can’t tell the difference between being tired, being anxious, and being hungry. They all feel like the same thing. When your body's been in overdrive for that long, every signal comes through blurry.
A researcher at the University of Washington has spent 20 years developing an evidence-based protocol specifically for people who’ve lost this connection.
Her clinical trials found that people who relearn this skill don't just get better at reading their bodies. Their cravings drop. Their emotional regulation improves. They start looking after themselves more.
Not from new information. From hearing what was already there.
Every spring, same story
I see it everywhere, every year, and at this point it’s so predictable.
Someone comes out of winter and decides this is the year! They sign up for a race, buy new trainers, set the alarm for 5:30am because someone on a podcast said early risers are more successful. (Those studies are about correlation, not causation, but that’s a different newsletter.)
By mid-May they’re injured or exhausted or both, and by June they’ve quit and they’re blaming themselves. Because obviously the problem is discipline.
The problem is not discipline.
The programme asked them to ignore every signal their body was sending, and then told them to 'listen to their body.'
I don't know a more elegant summary of the entire wellness industry's problem.
Your experiment this week: The 60-second check-in.
Before your next workout, pause.
Not a meditation, not a full on ritual. Just 60 seconds of actually asking:
How does my body feel right now? Not what the plan says I should do today. Not what I promised myself on Sunday. What is my body actually telling me? Tired, sore, flat, ready, fired up? And how confident am I that I’m reading that signal accurately and not just overriding it because there’s a plan?
You don’t skip the workout. You don’t change the programme. You’re just noticing what’s actually there before you start. The noticing IS the practice.
What you’re doing is training yourself to detect the signal, check your confidence in it, and notice the gap between what you feel and what you think you feel. 60 seconds. No app required.
If your body says “I’m flat” and you go anyway, fine. At least you heard it. That’s the whole point. Most of us never even ask.
And if you’re not training right now, try it before your next meal instead. Same question, different signal: is this actual hunger, or is it habit, boredom, or the clock?
Try it for a week. Notice what shifts.
Instead of waiting for some big, clear broadcast, you get curious about the quieter stuff.
The 3pm fatigue that isn’t about caffeine. A full feeling you blow past because there’s still food on the plate. Your body arriving in a hotel gym completely flat while your brain is already planning leg day.
That’s where the information is. It always was.
Take it from someone who spent 18 years in corporate Singapore optimising everything she could get her hands on, took that same energy into wellness, strapped on a Garmin, and eventually figured out she was doing the exact thing her clients pay her to unlearn.
The body doesn’t shout. More like a very patient colleague you keep putting on mute.
It’ll wait, it always does. But it would be nice if you could hear it before something has to hurt to get your attention.
With love from Panama,
Noemie x
P.S. If the “subtract before you add” idea landed, that’s the foundation of the MAKE SPACE Method™. Live June cohort details coming soon!
P.P.S. Going live on Substack for the first time next week! It’s happening Thursday 30 April at 12pm ET and I’m beyond excited! Think Q&A + coaching + coffee chat together. I hope the wifi in Panama holds up. Details in Notes this week.
Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, podcast host and the creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™, a science-backed framework for sustainable habits and mental health. She writes on Substack about burnout, habit formation, and evidence-based behaviour change psychology for people who want practical tools without the self-help BS.
The 60-second check-in only works if the person already believes the signal is worth checking. Most people override it not because they lack the technique but because decades of external metrics taught them the body is unreliable and the data is the truth. The practice has to be preceded by something harder: learning to trust the signal in the first place. Without that, the check-in is just another item on the list.
The gym story is so painfully relatable — the brain already doing leg day while the body is still in the airport.
The gap you name between detection accuracy and actual confidence is the part that stuck with me. It's not that people ignore the signals. They genuinely believe they're reading them correctly. That's a harder problem than discipline.
And the tracker point — that external rules quietly replace internal signals until you can't tell the difference anymore — I see the same thing happen with desires and goals. Not just with bodies. Years of external benchmarks for what success looks like, what you should want, what the right timeline is, and suddenly you genuinely can't tell what's yours and what was installed. The signal gets replaced so slowly it doesn't feel like a replacement.
The body doesn't shout. Neither does the thing underneath all the noise, apparently.