When the Body Speaks: The Label Is the Lens

I work with many people, but teenage boys and menopausal women often stand out. On the surface, they’re worlds apart. But they share one thing: intense hormonal shifts. And when the body changes, so does the way we interpret the world.

We only have our bodies to experience life. The body is the interface — the filter and translator between the outside world and the mind. Everything we feel, think, or believe is shaped by how the body receives and processes information. Before anything makes sense, it passes through that interface.

The heart races. The gut tightens. We give it a label — and we choose that label. And the label we choose is deeply personal. It reveals how we’ve learned to live. Two people may feel the same thing, but if one calls it excitement and the other anxiety, their experience — and response — will be entirely different. The label becomes the lens.

And we don’t choose that lens randomly. As my youngest son once told me, you can only name an emotion if you’ve felt it in intensity. You don’t really know what jealousy is — even in its mildest form — until you’ve felt it fully. After that, you can label it, because now you have a word that matches a felt experience.

We learn to interpret our bodies. That helps us succeed in the world. We develop a personal system for reading our inner signals. But when hormones shift — during puberty or menopause — the signals change. What used to mean one thing now feels unfamiliar, yet we still apply the old label.

A menopausal woman wakes at 3 am with a pounding heart and thinks: “Something must be wrong in my world.” But maybe it’s not anxiety. Maybe it’s just estrogen dropping. A teenage boy gets into the car after school. His mom says hello and asks about his day. He snaps at her. He labels what he feels as anger at her — but it’s not. His blood sugar is crashing. He hasn’t eaten. The body speaks, and we misread it.

I was raised — like many professional women — to think with my head, not my heart. Rationality was praised; emotion dismissed. I sharpened my thinking and ignored my feelings — until my body changed, and thinking harder didn’t help. I had to relearn how to feel — not through emotion, but through attention. To pause and ask: what is this body trying to tell me now?

The more accurately we can read our bodies, the better we respond to life. We know when we’re in real danger — and when we’re not. Misreading the body leads to misreading the world. That’s why writing down what we’re feeling — and revisiting it later when things are calm — can be incredibly useful. It gives shape to the chaos. And while people going through hormonal shifts often struggle to make sense of their emotions in the moment, it’s just as important for those around them to understand what might be happening.

Because the language of the body doesn’t only affect the one who’s speaking — it shapes every conversation around them.