In the previous post, I wrote about the benefits of making subtle distinctions between the different unpleasant sensations that might arise in your body. For example, noting the difference between feelings of pain, stiffness, or tightness. These feelings represent your nervous system’s best “guesses” about potential problems in the musculoskeletal system, coupled with implied “suggestions” about what you should do to prevent them. These guesses and suggestions are not always accurate or well-advised, but they are worth listening to. If they give consistently bad advice, you can ignore them. In other words, stay in tune with your body, but maybe turn down the volume if the messages aren’t useful.
In this post I will focus on pleasant sensations in the body. The main argument is that if you attend to them, and note their specific character with precision, you can experience them with more frequency and clarity, and better predict the conditions that bring them about.
Before getting into that, I want to acknowledge that it’s generally easier for us to experience pain than pleasure. This unfortunate asymmetry has several explanations. First, it's easier to injure a body than to make it more functional and healthy, so there are far more circumstances that will tend to cause harm than benefit. Second, evolution tends to favors negative over positive mind states. Animals who are always attending to physical threats and dangers are more likely to survive and procreate than animals who are more carefree and focused on rewards. Evolution cares more about survival than happiness, so negativity bias is built into the perceptual machinery.