“Listen to your body”

“Listen to your body.” Sounds simple.

Every trainer says it. Every doctor says it. Every bloke at the gym who’s read half a book says it.

But what the f*ck does it actually mean? Your body doesn’t talk. It doesn’t text you to say the knee’s had enough or the brain needs a night off.

What it has is a set of dials. Four of the big ones are sleep, hunger, stress and pain.

Most men have one in the red right now and haven’t looked at it in months.

Each dial says one simple thing.

Sleep says you’re running on less than you need. Hunger says eat. Stress says something in your life is too heavy and you’re carrying it anyway. Pain says stop doing that.

The signals aren’t subtle. The problem is we’ve learnt to override them.

Tired? Coffee. Hungry? Later. Stressed? Pint. Pain? Ibuprofen and crack on.

Each override works, once. Do it every day and the needle doesn’t come back. You just stop reading the dial.

Sleep is the dial we read worst, and there’s a study that shows exactly how badly.

Van Dongen and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, 2003, put healthy adults on four, six or eight hours in bed for fourteen nights straight. The six-hour lot got steadily worse at every test they were given. After two weeks they were performing about as badly as people who had been kept awake for two nights running.

Here’s the bit that matters. Asked how sleepy they felt, they said a bit, on the first couple of days, and then it barely moved. The performance kept falling. The feeling didn’t.

So the dial you check by asking yourself “am I tired?” is broken. You have to read it off the gauge: how many hours, how many nights. I’ve written about getting to sleep faster if that’s your problem.

Hunger is the easy one to read and the one we blame on everything else.

Bushman, DeWall, Pond and Hanus, Ohio State, published in PNAS in 2014, measured blood sugar in 107 married couples every evening for three weeks. Then each person stuck pins into a doll that stood for their spouse, as many as they felt like.

Lower blood sugar, more pins. The lowest readings put in about twice as many as the highest.

A voodoo doll isn’t a punch. But the next time you’re furious with your missus at six o’clock and can’t name the reason, check whether you ate at one.

Stress doesn’t announce itself as a thought. It shows up as a jaw you’ve been clenching since Tuesday, a gut that won’t settle, a fuse that’s got shorter.

Those are readings. Most men treat them as weather.

The honest way to read the stress dial is to stop for a minute and actually scan: head to feet, what’s tight, what hurts, what’s racing. I wrote about that in How to be mindful and it takes less time than a cigarette.

Once you’ve read it, you can reset it. Four in, hold four, four out, hold four. Box breathing works and it works in a toilet cubicle at work.

And your emotions are on this dial too. Feeling flat for a fortnight is a reading, not a character flaw. Say it to a mate. Say it to a therapist if the mate isn’t enough.

This is the dial men are proudest of ignoring.

Push yourself. Discomfort is the price of getting better at anything, and I’m not telling you to stop when it burns.

Pain is different. Sharp, one-sided, there the next morning. That’s the body saying stop doing that, and the men who don’t listen spend six months out instead of six days.

Same with everything else. A symptom that’s hung around for weeks isn’t something to google at midnight. It’s something to tell a doctor about.

The old version of this post listed twelve benefits. Three matter.

• You catch things early. The lump, the chest thing, the mood that’s been low since spring. Early is cheap. Late is not.

• You stop burning out. Burnout isn’t a surprise, it’s a dial that sat in the red for a year while you told yourself it was a busy patch.

• You’re better to be around. A man who has slept, eaten and isn’t clenching his jaw is a better boyfriend, a better mate and a better dad than the same man running on empty.

Once a day, read the four dials. Not meditation, not a journal. Thirty seconds.

How many hours did I sleep? When did I last eat? What’s tight? What hurts?

If one’s in the red, do the one thing that resets it. Go to bed. Eat. Breathe. Rest the knee. Say no to the thing you don’t have the capacity for, which is a post of its own in Boundaries.

Your body’s been telling you all this the whole time.

You just had the music up.