The brain keeps the score, the body takes the hits, the mind spins the stories

Hi Friends!

You’ve probably heard the phrase “the body keeps the score.” Bessel van der Kolk’s book by that name changed how many people think about trauma—and rightly so. But lately I’ve been sitting with what that phrase leaves out, especially for the high achievers and perfectionists I work with.

Because in my clinical experience, the body isn’t keeping score alone. The brain is running the scoreboard. And the mind? It’s writing the play-by-play commentary, fraught with judgment. This piece is about that trifecta. And about what happens when you finally understand how all three are conspiring—not against you, but in a misguided attempt to keep you safe.

I’d love to know if this lands for you. Drop a comment.

I teach a summer graduate workshop on befriending the inner critic. We’re just getting started on identifying the inner narratives and origin stories of how they came to be. I tend to refer to these scripts as “parts” or “personas” and some students resonate with the idea of “algorithms” rather than visualizing a part. It’s all good. After a recent session on “validating” life experiences, I sent my students a follow-up note as I always do:

There are so many factors that form an inner algorithm; then it becomes a self-perpetuating pattern. A famous phrase in neuroscience is ‘Neurons that fire together wire together’ (Charles Hebb). The more we do or practice something—good or bad—the better we get at it. The power of neuroplasticity is influenced by experience-based learning and repetition, which strengthen neural pathways—like I-95 highways versus service roads.

I also offered the Netflix recommendation engine as a metaphor. If you watch standup comedians, your recommendations will prioritize comedians. If you want a British rom-com, you have to find it yourself. And you’ll have to select enough of them before the algorithm catches on.

The good news is: when you notice your algorithms, you can proactively change them. This is how you evolve.”

The students found this useful. For people who lead from the head, you kind of need heady language at first. If you begin at the heart or body level, let’s just say it’s more of a challenge. Even so, in the series we move through the EVOLVE steps described in my book. We’ve hit the first two: Embody the Present Moment and Validating Your Experience.

Inevitably, I lean on a phrase that’s become something of a mantra in my work, and builds on the shoulders of others:

The brain keeps the score, the body takes the hits, the mind spins the stories.

It’s a riff on van der Kolk—and an intentional one. Because in the TikTok generation, I worry we’ve simplified something incredibly complex.

The Body Keeps the Score was a landmark. It brought somatic experience into mainstream conversations about trauma and opened doors for body-based healing modalities that had long been dismissed. It helped people tend to their bodies and see symptoms as signals. For that, I’m genuinely grateful.

But somewhere in the translation to popular culture, we perpetuated an old dichotomy: Descartes’ separation of mind and body. In many clinical circles we threw that dichotomy out, but the mind-body split still has traction.

That’s not what modern science shows—and it’s not what I see in my office or with my students and clients.

The brain and body are not just two things in conversation. They are one dynamic system where the brain is making continual guesses about possible futures. Psychologist Dan Gilbert calls the prefrontal cortex an “experience simulator.” And the mind—the interpretive, story-making, meaning-seeking part of us—is embedded in that system too, shaping it from the top down even as the body shapes it from the bottom up. And Gilbert tells us humans are just terrible at predicting what will make us happy. Gilbert calls this affective forecasting errors.

But we’re pretty good at fixating on everything that can go wrong. In my observation, perfectionists are particularly prone to affective forecasting errors about failure. In other words, catastrophizing is a prediction error, not just a feeling and not just exaggerated storytelling. And recent perfectionism research by Curran and colleagues supports a worrisome upward trend among young people: fears of uncertainty and making mistakes.

For perfectionists especially, understanding this isn’t academic. It’s the difference between feeling crazy and finally making sense of yourself.

Daria (not her real name) was a newly minted lawyer when she first came to see me. She had more than two decades of flawless academics behind her, and she’d worked hard for every one of them. But now she was sitting in my office, exhausted, and convinced she was about to be found inept.

Her fear wasn’t irrational. It was almost elegant in its logic:

I can only see what is wrong.

People will find out I’m a fake.

If I mess up this presentation, everything I’ve built will collapse.

Classic self-oriented perfectionism. An imposter spiral. And beneath all of it, a nervous system that had learned one very clear lesson early in life: performance equals safety.

When Daria scored a 95 on a quiz in the first grade, her dad said (likely in jest), “What happened to the other five points?” Her brain filed that away as a criticism. Not as a memory, exactly. As a general warning.

Now, as a young adult making her way in the world, whenever a colleague raised an eyebrow or a supervisor sent an ambiguous email, Daria felt a red-hot flush through her body—shame arriving before she’d had a single conscious thought. Her brain had already done the math. It was running on a very old algorithm.

Here’s what I want you to understand about that flush of shame. It didn’t start in Daria’s body. It started in her brain—specifically in the predictive architecture that neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett describes so well in her work on constructed emotion.

Barrett’s research challenges the idea that emotions and sensations are hardwired reactions that happen to us. (We see something, we feel something, we take some action.) Instead, she argues that the brain is constantly running simulations or “summaries of neural inputs”—drawing on body signals and past experiences to predict what this current moment means and what the body will need to manage it. The brain is preparing an action first. Then feelings and experiences arise from that guess. All of this happens below conscious awareness. In milliseconds.

She uses a helpful metaphor: think of it like your “body budget.” The brain is a relentless accountant, managing metabolic resources—energy, oxygen, cortisol, movement, rest—based on its best guess about what’s coming. Sleep is a deposit. An all-nighter is a withdrawal. Chronic stress? That’s running a deficit you can’t see until the overdraft notice arrives.

But here’s the kicker: the predictions can be wrong. And for perfectionists, they often are. The brain serves up a somatic alarm—shame, dread, freeze—that is wildly out of proportion to what’s actually happening in the room. Daria wasn’t being evaluated by her parents. She was in a staff meeting. But her brain didn’t know the difference. It made a bad guess.

As Barrett stated an episode on the Huberman Lab podcast (around 1:45:00 min):

The body doesn’t keep the score. Your brain keeps the score, and your body is the scorecard.” — Lisa Feldman Barrett

The brain has already made its prediction. The body flushes with shame. And then the mind steps in.

The mind is a narrator. Emotions are part of the tale it spins. It takes the somatic experience, that racing heart, that tight chest, that sudden urge to disappear or overwork, and builds a story around it. I knew I’d mess this up. Everyone can see I don’t belong here. I’ll never be enough. I’m scared of making a mistake.

The therapist Deb Dana names this process “story follows state.” After the prediction of a threat, the physiological state arises. The interpretation—the meaning-making—comes after. But because it follows so quickly, and because we’ve been rehearsing these particular stories for years, we experience them as truth rather than a guess. In an instant.

I think of the 2022 sci-fi film title: Everything Everywhere All at Once.

This is where things can get particularly rough for high achievers. You are, by definition, skilled at analysis, reasoning, and building airtight arguments. Which means your mind is very good at constructing a case for your own inadequacy and the heroics needed to be the best. The inner critic doesn’t just whisper. It has a megaphone.

And then it hands its case to the nervous system, which fires up all over again, which feeds the body, which the brain reads as more evidence to add to the score. The loop tightens.

Daria had her mind loop very well rehearsed. She lamented her own brain. But rumination isn’t a character flaw. The brain is a pattern learner, as Barrett describes so well. “An emotion,” which is constructed in the brain, “is a recipe for action.” It’s part of a high-functioning predictive system that has learned the wrong things to predict.

“Just because something feels bad, doesn’t mean something is wrong. It just might mean you are doing something hard.” — Lisa Feldman Barrett

Here are just a few of the algorithms my graduate students shared aloud. For perspective, the age range is 27 to 62:

I’m not as good as others.

I’m worried about disappointing others.

My ‘inner manager’ is really strict. It’s my default.

Post-grad job search is sparking imposter feelings.

It’s hard to praise myself. It’s not in my nature.

Doubting myself all the time.

Shame feeding shame. Feeling paralyzed.

I want to be perfect at everything, even in knowing everyone else’s perspectives!

I’ve managed to turn off my inner critic and now I’m too chill. Unmotivated.

I want to make sure everything and everyone is okay.

I question every move. Did I hurt someone?

I don’t say no. I sign up for everything.

I don’t want to mess this up.

I rehearse everything. I overthink.

To the point and rather polite. In the past I used to hand out note cards written anonymously. Let’s just say the profanities abound. “You piece of $#%@.” And worse. The mind can be a mean machine.

Why “just breathe” isn’t enough—and neither is just talking

When I work with clients like Daria, I’m not interested in choosing between body-based approaches and cognitive ones. That’s a false binary, and it misunderstands how we’re actually wired.

Traditional talk therapy—including some cognitive-behavioral approaches—can miss something crucial: you can’t think your way out of a threat response. When the nervous system has tripped a wire, executive function goes offline. Language becomes blah, blah, blah. The story perpetuates itself. Round and round it goes. I’ve heard that from clients more times than I can count.

But purely somatic approaches, used in isolation, can also leave the cognitive patterns intact and running. The body settles; the story restarts.

What Daria needed, and what most of my perfectionistic clients need, was integration. A way to bring the the mind-body system into regulation with new patterns. In Barrett’s framework, they also need to balance the body budget. This means finding ways to interrupt the brain’s prediction keeping the threat response lit, like Daria’s fears of reputation damage.

For Daria, that meant simple energy practices—belly breathing, brief acupressure tapping, stepping outside. Skeptical at first (she was trained to look for evidence of criticism), she gave herself two weeks to give it a go. She noticed subtle shifts: a better night’s sleep, less irritability. Once her body budget was slightly less depleted, her mind had a little more room to work with.

Then we worked on the stories. Not to erase them or gaslight herself out of them. But to develop what I call kindsight—looking at those inner narratives with the same empathy you might offer a frightened kid. Because that’s often who’s running the algorithm: a younger version of you, trying to keep you safe with outdated information (or predictions). A little bully or fixer running in circles.

Her story began to change. I am competent. I deserve to be here. I work hard.

The simplistic Netflix metaphor seems to resonate the most, perhaps because it offers a possibility of control. (Forgive me, neuroscientists.) Here’s what I told my graduate students.

Your brain is like a recommendation engine. It serves up general predictions based on what you’ve experienced in the past and have on repeat. Ruminate on enough anxiety-filled self-criticism, and the algorithm learns to offer more of the same—automatically, before you’ve even noticed a situation is stressful.

But neural pathways are shaped by repetition. Which means the pathways that carry shame, catastrophizing, and not-enough-ness become wider and faster. These weren’t always interstate highways in the neural networks. They were service roads once, used to solve an immediate problem. A 95?! I need to get those other five points or else!

You can build new pathways, or more accurately, new predictions. Not by white-knuckling your way to positive thinking, but by proactively inserting different, beneficial experiences—often, repeatedly—until a new pattern begins to form. A pause before reacting. A moment of self-kindness when the critic shows up. A visualization of the encouraging voice that’s also in there, underneath the noise. So I rather like my version:

The brain keeps the score. The body takes the hits. The mind spins the stories.

But here’s what that framing makes possible: you can influence all three. Not perfectly. Not once. Over time, with practice and a lot of self-compassion.

Think back to the last time your nervous system fired up—before you had a single conscious thought. A flash of shame, a tight chest, a sudden need to disappear or overwork.

What score is it keeping?

Whose voice showed up in your head immediately after?

How old is that voice?

What was it protecting you from, back then? Why now?

What would it need to hear from you at this time?

How can you change the outdated prediction?

You don’t have to answer all of these. One is enough to start.

If this resonated with you:

My book, The Perfectionist’s Dilemma, brings this all together and offers a six-step EVOLVE process for rewriting your inner algorithms with self-compassion rather than self-punishment.

Buy My Book

And if you want to work through your own inner critic and rewire the patterns that keep you stuck, my online course Rewire the Inner Critic walks you through the process step by step. Designed for high achievers who are tired of being their own worst obstacle.

Resources

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Barrett, L. F. (2021). Seven and a half lessons about the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Cousineau, T. (2025). The perfectionist’s dilemma: Learn the art of self-compassion and become a happy achiever. Alcove Press.

Curran, T., Hill, A. P., & Pose, P. M. (2026). Perfectionism is accelerating over time: A cross-temporal meta-analytic review of 35 years of college student data. Psychological Bulletin, 152(3), 255–287. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000518

Dana, D. (2021). Anchored: How to befriend your nervous system using polyvagal theory. Sounds True.

Gilbert, D. T. (2006). Stumbling on happiness. Knopf.

Hebb, D. O. (1949). The organization of behavior: A neuropsychological theory. Wiley.

Huberman, A. (Host). (2023, October 23). Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: How to understand emotions (No. 139) [Audio podcast episode]. In Huberman Lab. https://www.hubermanlab.com

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.