The Case for a Physiology-First Approach to Mind, Brain and Performance

There is an assumption so deeply embedded in how we think about mental health, stress, and human performance that it rarely gets examined directly.

The assumption is this: that the mind is where experience happens, and the body is where the consequences show up. That psychological states are primary — generated in the brain, expressed through thought and emotion — and that the body’s role is to carry them, reflect them, and occasionally complicate them. That the correct direction of intervention is therefore top-down: change the thinking, regulate the emotion, build the psychological skill, and the body will follow.

This assumption is so pervasive that it shapes almost every mainstream approach to stress, resilience, and mental health. Cognitive therapy works with thought. Coaching works with belief and behaviour. Mindfulness works with attention. Even the most body-aware psychological approaches tend to treat physical symptoms as signals to be interpreted rather than processes to be directly addressed. The body is evidence of what is happening in the mind. The mind is where the real work is done.

The problem with this assumption is not that it is entirely wrong. It is that it is the wrong way around.

What the science of embodied cognition actually says

In 1991, three researchers — Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch — published a book that should have changed the foundational assumptions of cognitive science, psychology, and medicine. The Embodied Mind made an argument that was philosophically rigorous, biologically grounded, and profoundly uncomfortable for the dominant model of how minds work.

The argument, in its simplest form, was this: cognition is not something that happens in the brain and gets expressed through the body. Cognition is embodied — it is constituted by the physical state of the organism having it. Thought, emotion, perception, and decision-making are not purely neural events that happen to have bodily correlates. They are shaped, constrained, and in some cases determined by the body’s physical condition in the moment they occur.

This is not a metaphor. It is a biological claim with a substantial and growing evidence base.

Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, developed across Descartes’ Error (1994) and The Feeling of What Happens (2000), demonstrated that emotional decision-making is grounded in bodily states — that the brain uses the body’s physiological responses as input data for cognition, not as output signals of cognition already completed. Remove that bodily input, as Damasio showed through patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and decision-making deteriorates profoundly even when logical reasoning remains intact. The body is not reflecting the mind’s conclusions. It is participating in reaching them.

Mark Johnson, working with George Lakoff, extended this argument into territory that challenges the Cartesian model at its deepest level. In Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), they argued that abstract reasoning itself — not just emotion or perception, but the conceptual structures through which humans understand the world and make decisions — is grounded in physical experience. The image schemas that organise thought: containment, force, balance, path, centre and periphery — are derived from what it feels like to have a body moving through physical space. We do not just feel with our bodies and think with our minds. We think through our bodies, using embodied experience as the scaffolding for abstract understanding.

Johnson developed this further in The Meaning of the Body (2007) and Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason (2017), arguing that meaning itself is not primarily propositional but is grounded in the qualitative, felt dimension of bodily experience. This closes a gap that a sceptical reader might otherwise hold onto: even granting that body state influences mood and basic cognitive function, one might argue that higher-order reasoning remains relatively immune to physiological condition. Johnson’s work directly challenges that. Compromise the body’s functional state and you are not only affecting energy or emotional tone. You are affecting the quality of the conceptual scaffolding through which a person understands their situation and makes decisions about it. The implications for stress, cognitive performance, and recovery are not peripheral. They are central.

The most anatomically precise evidence for this position comes from a landmark 2023 paper in Nature by Gordon and colleagues, verified across approximately 50,000 participants in three of the largest neuroimaging datasets available. Using precision functional MRI, they demonstrated that the classic Penfield homunculus — the continuous map of body parts along the motor cortex that has been textbook orthodoxy for nearly a century — is interrupted. Woven between the effector-specific regions for foot, hand and mouth are inter-effector zones strongly connected to the cingulo-opercular network, which governs arousal, action control, error processing, and physiological regulation — including direct connections to the adrenal medulla and interoceptive processing in the insula. The authors termed this the somato-cognitive action network, or SCAN. Their conclusion is worth stating plainly: movement and cognition are not parallel systems that interact. They are anatomically interleaved at the cortical level. Physical training does not support cognitive performance as a downstream benefit. It engages the same cortical architecture that governs arousal, attention, executive control, and internal physiological state. The paper’s final observation — that this finding “could help explain why mind and body states so often interact” — is a landmark statement from a landmark dataset, nearly a century after Penfield’s homunculus became scientific orthodoxy (Gordon et al., 2023).

The embodied cognition research that followed Varela, Johnson and Damasio has been consistent and specific. Body posture influences risk tolerance and approach motivation (Cacioppo et al., 1993). Facial muscle activity shapes emotional experience, not just expresses it (Strack et al., 1988; Coles et al., 2019). Physical warmth alters social judgement (Williams & Bargh, 2008). These are not peripheral curiosities. They are evidence that the body is upstream of cognition in ways the dominant model does not accommodate.

The most current and philosophically sophisticated version of this argument comes from predictive processing theory — Karl Friston’s free energy principle and Andy Clark’s extensions of it. In this framework, the brain is not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active prediction machine, constantly generating models of the world and updating them against incoming data. Crucially, bodily state is a primary input to those models. The physical condition of the organism shapes what the brain predicts, what it attends to, and how it interprets experience. A body in a chronic stress state is feeding the brain a continuous stream of threat-relevant data. The cognitive and emotional consequences are not incidental. They are the predictable output of a system whose inputs have been distorted.

The developmental argument: why the sequence is not arbitrary

There is a further dimension to this that moves the argument from philosophical to biological, and it is the one that makes the physiology-first sequence not just defensible but necessary.

The sequence in which human capacities develop is not random. It follows a biological order that reflects the architecture of the system itself.

Physiological regulation comes first. The infant regulates temperature, breathing, feeding, and basic arousal before anything else is possible. The body’s capacity to maintain homeostasis is the precondition for everything that follows. Without it, nothing else develops.

Neurological integration comes second. As the nervous system matures, the infant develops the capacity to regulate states — moving between arousal and calm, between engagement and rest — through the developing brain-body connection. This is not yet psychological in any meaningful sense. It is the nervous system learning to manage the body it inhabits.

Psychological experience and meaning-making come third. Language, narrative, self-concept, the capacity to reflect on experience and derive meaning from it — these capacities emerge last, built on the physiological and neurological foundation that preceded them.

This is not merely an interesting developmental parallel. It is a description of the dependency structure of the system. Higher-order capacities are built on and depend upon the layers beneath them. When the lower layers are compromised — when physiological regulation is disrupted, when the nervous system is running in chronic activation — the capacities built on top of them are operating with a weakened foundation.

Physiology first. Neuroscience as bridge. Psychology as integration.

This sequence is not a preference or a philosophical position. It is a description of how the system is actually built. Intervening top-down — at the psychological layer — on a system whose physiological foundation is compromised is not wrong. It is incomplete. The psychological work is real and necessary. But it is working against the dependency structure of the system rather than with it.

Where three independent traditions arrive at the same place

What makes this argument particularly compelling is that it has been reached independently by traditions that share no common methodology and were not in conversation with each other when they arrived at it.

Cognitive science and philosophy of mind — through Varela, Thompson and Rosch, through Damasio, through Johnson and Lakoff, through Clark and Friston — arrived at embodied cognition through the failure of computational models of mind to account for how intelligence actually works in biological organisms. The body turned out to be not peripheral to cognition but constitutive of it.

Clinical trauma science — through Peter Levine’s somatic experiencing work and Bessel van der Kolk’s decades of research — arrived at the same conclusion through the observation that psychological trauma is held in the body as incomplete physiological responses, and that talking about it, understanding it, and developing insight into it is often insufficient to resolve it. The body keeps the score not as metaphor but as measurable physiological fact (van der Kolk, 2014). Resolution requires working at the level where the pattern is held.

Recovery science and sports physiology — through Kellmann and Kallus’s decades of research on stress-recovery balance, through Picard, McEwen and colleagues on mitochondrial allostatic load — arrived at the same conclusion through performance data and cellular biology. Stress is fundamentally an energy event. Recovery is not the absence of stress but an active physiological process that requires deliberate input. The body’s functional state — its oxygen efficiency, mitochondrial capacity, autonomic flexibility — determines the conditions under which any higher-order performance is possible. Compromise the substrate, and the performance degrades regardless of psychological skill or motivation.

Neuroscience arrived there most recently and most precisely, through the Gordon et al. SCAN paper. The anatomical evidence that motor and cognitive systems are not parallel but interleaved — that the motor cortex is structurally continuous with the networks governing arousal, attention and physiological regulation — is the most rigorous scientific confirmation yet that the body-mind separation is not just philosophically incorrect. It is anatomically incorrect.

Three traditions and now a fourth. Different methodologies, different starting points, the same conclusion: the body is not downstream of the mind. It is the ground from which mind emerges, and the condition that determines what mind can do.

What this means for stress, recovery and performance

The practical implications of the embodied mind position are not abstract. They change what needs to be addressed and in what order.

When a high-functioning professional reaches the ceiling of what psychological work can deliver — when insight is present, understanding is clear, behavioural change has been attempted, and yet the stress response continues to fire, the fatigue deepens, and recovery doesn’t come — the conventional explanation is that they need more psychological work, better strategies, greater commitment to the process. The embodied mind explanation is different: the physiological substrate on which the psychological work depends has been compromised, and no amount of top-down intervention will fully resolve a bottom-up problem.

This is not an argument against psychological work. It is an argument about sequence and completeness. The psychological layer is essential. But it functions most effectively when the physiological foundation beneath it is adequately supported. Change the body’s functional state — restore breathing mechanics, address autonomic dysregulation, rebuild cellular energy capacity, retrain movement patterns that have been carrying chronic tension — and cognitive clarity and emotional regulation often improve without direct intervention at the cognitive or emotional level. Not because psychology doesn’t matter. Because the substrate that psychological function depends on has been restored.

The body is not a vehicle for the mind. It is the condition of its possibility.

Why this approach is built differently

Most stress and performance approaches begin at the psychological layer because that is where experience is most legible. Thought, emotion, behaviour — these are accessible to conscious reflection and therefore to conscious intervention. The physiological layer is largely invisible to introspection. You cannot directly sense your heart rate variability, your CO2 tolerance, your mitochondrial efficiency, or the specific motor patterns your nervous system has automated. You can only notice their consequences — the fatigue that doesn’t clear, the reactivity that persists, the body that feels less reliable than it should.

This invisibility is precisely why the physiological layer tends to be addressed last, if at all. It requires measurement rather than reflection, and tools that operate below the level of conscious experience rather than through it.

The BodyMindBrain approach is built on the conviction that this sequence needs to be reversed. Not because psychology is unimportant — the psychological layer is present throughout, and the work that happens there is real and necessary. But because building psychological resilience on a compromised physiological foundation is building on ground that cannot fully support what is being placed on it.

Psychological intervention applied to a physiologically depleted system is trying to repair the roof while the foundations are still subsiding. The repair is real. The foundations need attention first.

The tools in this approach — breathing retraining, somatic movement, neurofeedback, IHHT, EMS — are not additions to a psychological model. They are the foundational layer that makes the psychological work land more fully, hold more durably, and produce the kind of change that doesn’t require constant maintenance because it is grounded in the body that carries it.

The honest position on psychology

It would be a significant misreading of this argument to take it as a dismissal of psychological work. It is not.

The psychological layer is where meaning is made, where beliefs are examined, where behavioural patterns are understood and changed, where the narrative of experience is held and revised. These are not trivial functions. They are what makes recovery more than just physiological restoration — what allows a person not just to feel better but to understand why, to make different choices, and to build a relationship with their own experience that is more conscious and more chosen.

The argument here is not that psychology comes last because it matters least. It is that psychology works most effectively when it has a physiological foundation adequate to support it. The sequence reflects the dependency structure of the system, not a hierarchy of value.

Body first. Brain second. Mind third. Not because the mind is the least important destination. Because it is the one most constrained by the systems beneath it, and most liberated when those systems are working well.

The bottom line

The dominant model of mental health and performance treats the body as the vehicle and the mind as the driver. The science of embodied cognition, the evidence from clinical trauma research, the findings of recovery physiology, and now the anatomical evidence from precision neuroimaging all point in the same direction: the body is not separate from mind. It is the ground from which mind emerges and the condition that determines what mind can do.

This changes what needs to be addressed, what order it needs to be addressed in, and what kind of change is actually possible. It is the foundational conviction on which this approach is built — not as a philosophical preference, but as the most accurate account currently available of how the system actually works.

Start where the system starts. The body leads.

 

 

What to read next: The Psychology of Nervous System Regulation How Stress Rewires the Brain and Body

Explore the tools: Somatic Movement Functional Breathing Training NeurOptimal Neurofeedback

Back to main guide: An Integrated Guide to Nervous System Training for Stress, Recovery and Performance

 

 

References

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Coles, N.A., Larsen, J.T. & Lench, H.C. (2019). A meta-analysis of the facial feedback literature: effects of facial feedback on emotional experience are small and variable. Psychological Bulletin, 145(6), 610–651.

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Johnson, M. (2017). Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason: How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding. University of Chicago Press.

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Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.

Levine, P.A. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books.

Picard, M., McEwen, B.S., Epel, E.S. & Sandi, C. (2018). An energetic view of stress: focus on mitochondria. Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, 49, 72–85.

Strack, F., Martin, L.L. & Stepper, S. (1988). Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: a nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 768–777.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking Press.

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Williams, L.E. & Bargh, J.A. (2008). Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth. Science, 322(5901), 606–607.