Why do we experience feelings as located in the body? For example, why might we feel anxiety in our chest rather than just knowing “I’m anxious”?
One hypothesis is that feelings are (by default) in the body so other people can see them.1 Mind-reading.
But what if you’re surrounded by people will harm you if they read what’s going on in your body? (ie: hostile telepaths) What if you don’t want your mind to be read?
For example, let’s say John sometimes has a feeling in his neck that represents the knowledge that “I can leave this social situation if I want to.” (And maybe this felt information is in his neck because it the motivates turning of his head to leave a social situation, who knows.)
And let’s say another part of John’s system predicts, “If other people know that I’m considering leaving, they’ll react negatively… So we should hide awareness of this knowledge.”
If the information is natively in John’s neck but there are incentives for his nervous system to hide the information, one way his nervous system can “jam the signal” is by creating excess muscle tension. With excess muscle tension, his neck can no longer be used as a display, so his secret can be kept.
Muscle tension as signal jamming.
This is my understanding of what used to incentivize my chronic neck tension.
I’ve also met dating coaches with similar hypotheses: Tense men repel women, so relaxed men do not repel women. It’d make sense from the female perspective: If a guy is hiding information from you, shouldn’t you assume it’s bad?
I’m not sure exactly what the mechanism would be—perhaps subtle muscle movements, lack of movements, or vibrations.
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