What if muscle tension is sometimes signal jamming?
Why do we often experience feelings as in the body? For example, why do I feel anxiety in my chest rather than just “knowing” I'm anxious?
Here’s an idea: What if when you have a feeling in your body, sometimes it’s there for others to see? What if feelings use the body as a display?
I’m not sure exactly how this would work, but perhaps it's mediated by subtle muscle movements or vibrations.
But there’s a problem: What if you want to keep a secret? (A “Hostile telepaths problem”.)
For example, let’s say that John sometimes has a feeling in his neck that represents the information “I have the choice to leave the social situation I’m in right now.” (Maybe this particular feeling manifests in his neck because it precedes turning his head to move his attention away from a social situation, but who knows.)
And let’s say another part of John’s system essentially predicts, “If other people know that I’m considering this, they will react negatively. So we should hide the information.”
What do? How jam the signal?
What if… tense muscles! Make neck too stiff for muscle communication! Then secret can be kept!
I say this because I’m pretty sure this is what caused my chronic neck pain and muscle tension.
Maybe muscle tension is sometimes signal jamming.
I had this idea after talking to a pickup artist coach endorsed by Aella. His model is that women feel repelled when they notice muscle tension in a man’s body. This coach tries to help men become more attractive by helping men untangle their muscle tension.
Under this model, it would make a lot of sense that to feel cautious around men who show signal jamming (ie: muscle tension). After all, if the information was predicted to be good, why would he jam the signal?
(I proposed this explanation to the pickup artist coach and he liked it.)
What do you think? Is muscle tension sometimes signal jamming? Do you have examples to add?
There's definitely a deep relationship between conflicting feelings and muscle tension.
A lot of parallel threads in existing somatic theories:
- Wilhelm Reich talked about 'armoring' — chronic muscle tension that blocks the expression of emotions (he suggested releasing this through orgasm)
- There's an old Doug Tataryn paper about repression as a muscles 'storing' repressed feelings https://www.bioemotiveframework.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/BEF_dougs_1983_paper_on_emotions_muscles_and_the_cortex_-_ocr.pdf (beware hilarious OCR)
I think jamming is a decent enough analogy. If you are about to be punched — you constrict the muscle and fascia to resist the impact, but you can also use the same constriction to prevent an instinct to attack someone more powerful than you