In “How to Change Your Body,” Saga Briggs invites readers on an enlightening journey that transcends the conventional boundaries of physical health and wellness. Briggs’ work isn’t your run-of-the-mill self-help story; instead, it delves deeper into the intricate relationship between our bodies, minds, and the social fabric that binds us.

Through compelling scientific evidence, personal anecdotes, and insightful interviews with leading experts, Briggs challenges readers to reconsider the traditional narratives surrounding health and fitness. The book argues that true self-transformation (or transmutation) begins with a deeper understanding of our interconnectedness, the roles of our relationships, and the psychological underpinnings of our physical selves.

Take a look at an excerpt below.

How to Change Your Body: Introduction

During lockdown in March 2020, as the pandemic diffused into life in Berlin, I had an upsetting but revelatory dream: I was a blank canvas,  and other people were the paint that coated me, enlivened me, brought me into being. Without others, I was nonexistent, or at least incapable of seeing myself. Weary of keeping my body alive in such a state of crisis, my brain pivoted out of uncertainty and woke me up.  

Oddly enough, in the days of research following the dream, I found that scientists, philosophers, and clinicians were starting to ground this idea in their work: the quality of our connection to ourselves begins with our connection to others—not in a good conversation over coffee, per se, but in the felt experience of “being seen” by another—and this quality is determined very early in our lives. 

At the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, Joona Taipale, Ph.D., a senior lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, believes individuality is a developmental process. We are not born with a sense of separateness from others, he says; rather, it’s a gradual process of recognizing our otherness, which develops during infancy. 

In developmental psychology, the prevailing notion is that the other— the “object”—is assumed to be differentiated from the self at the time of birth. But Taipale challenges this idea. “In the psychoanalytic tradition, this picture is turned upside down,”  he writes in his 2017 paper, The Pain of Granting Otherness: Interoception and the Differentiation of the Object. “Instead of taking the separateness of others as a point of departure, it argues that the capacity to grant the  ‘otherness’ of others is preceded by a long and complex development—a  painful process in and through which the object is gradually placed outside  the area of the subject’s omnipotent control.” 

For example, as infants, there’s no reason to assume our mother’s breast  (or our mother, for that matter) isn’t part of us until we develop a sense of agency. Over time, we come to realize this isn’t the case, as we learn the breast (and mother) isn’t always immediately there when we want it, but we begin life under the illusion that it is. “From the point of view of an external observer, the infant and the  mother are, of course, two different and distinct entities,” he says, “but  the situation looks very different if considered from the point of view of the infant.” 

Taipale’s contention? We are born connected. 

A team of French neuroscientists takes this notion one step further.   “While cognitive psychologists have long tended to consider mental functions—including self-awareness—as isolated entities, recent arguments pointed out the fundamentally social nature of self-awareness,” writes Nesrine Hazem, Ph.D., who conducts research for the Social and Affective  Neuroscience Laboratory at ICM in Paris. “By experiencing the self as the object of another’s attention, infants may develop an initial representation of self and others as psychological entities. 

Rather than suppressing self-experience in adulthood, social contact would then give rise to the experience of being a cognitive-affective agent. Thus, a fundamental property of  social contact throughout the life span would be to enhance self-awareness.” Her team’s own work substantiates the link between not only social contact and self-awareness but the fundamentally body-based nature of both. “We showed that hearing one’s own name spoken by another person and being touched by another person both increased bodily self-awareness,  just as perceiving direct gaze does. 

This provides the first empirical demonstration that social contact, irrespective of sensory modality, elicits bodily self-awareness. In doing so, it supports the notion of the social nature of the  self—i.e., that human self-awareness emerges in interpersonal contacts.” 

Why does any of this matter? Nearly every mental illness under the sun—anxiety, depression, addiction, schizophrenia, eating disorders,  posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—is associated with impaired bodily awareness. If the social self-awareness theory is correct, it suggests they are interpersonal disorders too. 

Psychedelic science, a rapidly growing field showing great promise in advancing human health, seems to be revealing a common thread throughout these illnesses: relational disconnection. Not just to ourselves, our bodies, and others—but also to the very fragile threads tying these three things together.

One of the main drivers behind the therapeutic effects of psychedelics is now thought to be a change in one’s experience of social relationships. As the research is beginning to suggest, that means a change in one’s experience of oneself and one’s body. These things can’t be separated.

He concedes that there’s a correlation between self-loss and connectedness, but his studies show that “only connection seems to be correlated with beneficial outcomes related to well-being. I think a lot of researchers are maybe barking up the wrong tree in terms of ego dissolution, and this feeling of social connectedness is where the real action is at. My prediction is that these processes related to social connectedness  and attachment will end up being the real mediator in at least some of the therapeutic benefits.” 

If social awareness, self-awareness, and bodily awareness are inextricably linked, this implies that one important reason psychedelics work to treat a wide range of afflictions is that they have the capacity to change one’s experience of bodily feelings, not just one’s thoughts.

In Pollan’s book, one depressed patient who had taken psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, described his experience as follows: “Once I was in this state, it was beautiful—a feeling of deep contentment. I had this overwhelming feeling—it wasn’t even a thought— that everything and everyone needs to be approached with love, including  myself.”  Although the effect lasted a few weeks, it eventually faded in the following months, and his depression returned. One year later, he wrote, “The insights I gained during the trial have never left and will never leave me. But they now feel more like ideas.”

This notion hasn’t escaped more recent psychedelic studies. The Watts  Connectedness Scale, for example, provides the first scientific model for measuring feelings of connectedness during psychedelic experiences. Dr.  Rosalind Watts and her research team published a paper in 2022 describing their initial findings on the relationship between psilocybin and connectedness in participants with depression. As you might expect, study participants reported feeling more connected to themselves, other people, and the greater world after ingesting psilocybin. Interestingly, few people reported feeling more connected in a singular domain without experiencing greater connectedness in the others. 

“Based on the findings of this study, we now predict, for example, that an individual reporting feeling connected to a sense of meaning and purpose as well as their body and emotions would also report feeling connected to other people; or that someone describing feeling connected to nature would also report feeling connected to humanity at large and their own emotions,”  they write. “Overall, high scores on one domain (self/others/world) suggest  high scores on others, just as low scores in one aspect suggest a disconnection across multiple domains.” 

Psychedelics

One of the main reports from people experiencing the positive benefits of psychedelics, both in clinical and nonclinical settings, is the sense of “connectedness” and “unity” they feel with the world, themselves, and others.

Current projects in her laboratory include 1) investigating individual differences in responses to psychoactive drugs, 2) the effects of drugs at different phases of the menstrual cycle, and 3) the effects of psychedelic-type drugs such as MDMA and LSD on mood and neural function. I spoke to her about her research on MDMA and sociality.

---

---

In her book “How to Change Your Body,” Briggs shows us a path that intertwines our physical, mental, and social strands into a cohesive glimpse of bodily, mental, and spiritual well-being. This book challenges us to rethink our approach to change, emphasizing that the most profound transformations occur by altering our perceptions and nurturing our connections to ourselves, others, and the world.

Click here can purchase your copy of “How to Change Your Body.”