What Came First: The Body or the Mind?

We’ve all heard the age-old question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
In the world of human experience, there’s an equally fascinating variation: What came first, the body or the mind?

Most people assume the mind takes the lead. After all, we think, feel, decide, and reflect. It can feel like our thoughts are running the show.

But here’s the catch: many of those thoughts are just running commentary, and, as I often say in my therapy room, your thoughts are the last part of the system to get the memo.

In reality, the body lays the foundations for the mind. And far from being the captain at the helm, the mind is often a well-meaning narrator catching up with what the body and brain have already set in motion.

This won’t be news to advertisers and marketers who have built an industry on understanding that instantaneous, emotional reactions drive buying behaviour. Not rational decisions.

The Brain’s Interpreter: Gazzaniga’s Split-Brain Revelations

In the 20th century, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga conducted a series of fascinating experiments with patients who had undergone a corpus callosotomy, a surgical procedure that severs the bridge between the brain’s two hemispheres.

What he found was striking: when the two hemispheres couldn’t communicate, the left hemisphere, responsible for language and storytelling, began to invent plausible explanations for actions initiated by the right hemisphere, even though it had no access to the reason why.

For instance, when a command was flashed to the right hemisphere (“stand up”), and the patient followed it, the left hemisphere was clueless about the original instruction. Yet, when asked why they stood up, they’d confidently say something like, “Oh, I wanted to get a drink.” The mind filled in the blanks to make sense of the behaviour.

This revealed something interesting:

The mind doesn’t always initiate action, it often rationalises it.

Your Body Moves First, Then Your Mind Explains

Our nervous system operates with millisecond precision. Before you’re even consciously aware of a decision, your brain and body have often already acted. Muscles fire. Breathing shifts. Posture adjusts. These changes can influence mood, perception, even memory.

Ever tried to “think” your way out of anxiety while your shoulders are up to your ears and your breathing is shallow?

It doesn’t work.
Because the body is upstream of the mind. The more you can influence your bodily state, the more masterful you can be of your mind.

Breathing Patterns: The Mind Follows the Breath

Breathing is one of the clearest illustrations of body-first intelligence.

When your breathing is fast, irregular, or stuck in the chest, your nervous system gets the message: we’re under threat. The body shifts into sympathetic dominance—fight, flight, freeze.

No matter how hard you try to think positive, your physiology is telling a different story.

But when you train your breathing—slower exhales, nasal breathing, engaging the diaphragm, moving the lower ribs, you shift your state. This is by far the best way to remain composed and in command of yourself in a challenging situation.

Muscles: A Window into Emotional State

Muscles don’t just respond to emotion, they help generate it.

• Tight traps? That’s not just bad posture, it’s your body bracing against threat.
• Weak glutes or slumped posture? Your nervous system might be stuck in freeze or low-energy conservation mode.
• Loosen the body, mobilise the hips, strengthen weak muscles, engage the breath and suddenly there’s more energy, more presence, more readiness.

Training the body is more than aesthetics. It’s reprogramming your internal signal system.

Why This Matters

In the work I do, whether through neurofeedback, oxygen therapy, or muscular reconditioning this principle is clear:

The mind performs in line with what the body allows.

We cannot treat the mind in isolation and expect true, lasting transformation. Our thoughts, decisions, moods, and narratives are built on a physiological foundation.

When the body is dysregulated, the mind tries to make sense of chaos.
When the body is in balance, the mind gets to be the intelligent narrator it’s meant to be, not the frantic firefighter.

So… What Came First?

When it comes to stress, resilience, performance, and well-being, the answer is clear:
The body leads. The mind follows.

If we want to change how we think, we must start with how we breathe, move, and regulate.

The cognitive revolution started in the 1950s and it has taken 75 years to filter down into popular thinking and mindset work. Meanwhile, science and our understanding have moved on.

The body is not the servant of the mind.
It’s the stage on which the drama of the mind unfolds.

Ready to train the system that fuels your thoughts?

Explore how technologies like Neurofeedback, Whole-Body EMS, and IHHT Oxygen Therapy can help you regulate from the inside out—so your mind doesn’t have to do all the heavy lifting.