How Your Brain Builds Your Day: Movement, Meaning, and Your Body Budget

Your day starts in your brain.

Your thoughts, emotions, and overall experience are a combination of your remembered past and your sensory present. From that “place,” you decide what to do next – your actions, your behaviour, your next move.

This way of thinking is rooted in the Theory of Constructed Emotion by neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett.

Lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about Lisa’s work and how it shows up in actual daily life – in coaching, in movement, in skiing, and in all the “in-between” moments we usually ignore.

Before I start drawing lines between her work and skiing/movement, it’s worth framing the landscape a bit.

Classical brain stories vs what’s really happening

Broadly speaking, there are two camps in neuroscience.

The first is what I’ll call “classical neuroscience.” This is the stuff that shows up in everyday language: the “lizard brain,” the battle between rational and emotional thinking, the idea of being “triggered” as if emotions are buttons that get pushed. These concepts are everywhere – in pop psych books, coaching language, and Instagram quotes.

The problem? They’re mostly wrong. Classical theories might be tidy and familiar, but they don’t match what we now know about how the brain actually works. Despite still being everywhere in 2025, a lot of this story is a myth. That familiar “head vs heart” narrative is another version that feels intuitive, but doesn’t really match how the brain actually works.

So if we’ve all been fed a batch of comforting-but-misleading brain stories, what’s really going on “under the hood,” as Lisa likes to say?

This is where the Theory of Constructed Emotion comes in. It has several deeply researched components. One key idea, as I said at the start, is that your thoughts, emotions, and behaviour are a combination of your remembered past and your sensory present.

What does that mean in real life?

Piece one: Your remembered past

Let’s start with your remembered past.

Every thought, emotion, and action you take is shaped by all of your life experiences, from the moment you’re born to right now. Your brain is literally built from the sounds, environments, words, family dynamics, music, movies, friendships, pain, and everything else you’ve lived through. From all of this input, your brain builds predictive wiring patterns and “concepts” – its best guesses about what things mean and what should happen next.

Piece two: Your sensory present

So that’s piece one. Piece two is your sensory present.

Your sensory present is also a combination – it comes from both your external and internal senses. Externally, your brain is taking in what you’re seeing, hearing, and feeling in the environment. Internally, it’s tracking what’s going on inside your body: your breathing, heart rate, muscle tension, digestion, fatigue, and so on.

All of this mixes into a kind of present-moment “report” – what Lisa would call your affect – that your brain reads as more or less pleasant or unpleasant, and more or less activated or tired.

When you mix this sensory present with your remembered past, your brain is constructing concepts (old or new) that precede and shape your next thought, emotion, behaviour, or action.

The hidden accountant: your body budget (on and off on snow)

There’s one more important piece to touch on here: your body budget – or, more scientifically, allostasis.

Most people (including me, before diving into Lisa’s work) would say that one of your brain’s main jobs is “thinking.”

It turns out that’s another myth. Let me explain.

If we consider that one of our primary jobs as humans is simply to survive, then one of the brain’s biggest roles is to make sure that happens, day in and day out. That means managing the basics: enough sleep, decent food, movement, social contact, and everything else that keeps the body running. In other words, the brain is constantly working to manage and optimise our physiology – our body budget.

When you look at it this way, “thinking” actually takes a back seat to physiology in the overall survival picture. It’s not that thoughts don’t matter, but in the larger architecture of the brain, they’re secondary to the ongoing, behind-the-scenes work of regulating your body budget.

Are you really “triggered”? Predictions, not buttons

Let’s go back to that idea of being triggered for a second.

Since, through the combination of our remembered past and sensory present, we construct our experience, we’re also constructing our thoughts, emotions, and reactions. So while it can really seem, on the surface, like you’re being triggered by an event, what’s actually happening is that your brain is predicting and constructing that moment using its existing wiring. These constructions happen so fast that they feel like an automatic “response,” rather than something your brain is actively building in real time.

And when you add your predictions to your body budget, you get the source of the meaning you give a thought, an emotion, or an experience. In simple terms: meaning = predictions + body budget.

For example, if you slept like crap and had a fight with someone last night, your body budget is already in the red. Your brain is going to read that physiology differently, and snap — it’s more likely to predict threat, criticism, or “here we go again,” even in a fairly neutral moment.

Or flip it: maybe you’re starting a new job or trying a new sport. Your brain immediately asks, “What is this like that we’ve done before?” and pulls from old files — a similar sport or movement, past fears from trying something new, old embarrassments from another job, or the familiar “not good enough stories” — to build its best guess of what’s happening now.

And in both cases, the “meaning” of the moment isn’t baked into the situation itself — it’s coming from that mix of predictions and constructions + body budget.

So what does this have to do with movement and skiing?

Every squat, push-up, carved turn, or bump run — and every “good” or “off” day in your body — is your predictive brain and your body budget in real time.

Beginner skier: two very different days on the same slope

Now let’s put all of the above into a practical, real-world context.

Beginner skier. They’ve never been on snow – maybe they’ve never even seen a ski hill in person. Their brain has almost no “file” to match this situation; the prediction error is high, and their body budget is taxed quickly. In simple terms, what they expect and what they feel don’t line up, so their system has to work harder. Heart rate climbs, muscles brace, everything feels loud and intense.

Another beginner, with some past experiences in similar environments or a better body budget that day (they slept well, ate, and aren’t already stressed), might process the same day’s novelty with more curiosity than fear. Whether that first day on snow feels terrifying or weird-but-exciting is still happening on the same slope – and a lot of that difference in experience comes from their brain and body budget, not just from the hill itself.

What this means for coaching

From a coaching standpoint, we start with awareness. Every client, athlete, or student arrives with a unique body-budget baseline. Beyond basic check-ins about sleep, hydration, and stress, the real work is learning to read those baselines as real brain–body signals — with wide-ranging physical, mental, and emotional effects.

It also helps to really acknowledge that each person’s predictive wiring is present in everything they do. It’s running behind the scenes in real time — sometimes giving them an edge when they’re learning something new, and sometimes getting in the way of new skill acquisition or performance.

Zooming out a little, I’m reminded of a part of the CSIA’s ski-teaching methodology: “know your learner.” It’s a simple idea, but when you layer in predictions, concepts, and body budget, those three words take on new depth. The questions you ask your student or client might look the same, but the reasoning behind them – and the answers you hear – should guide that day’s structure and experience, and help define what “success” and “performance” look like for that day.

What this means for your own movement and skiing

From a movement standpoint, if you look at injury history through Lisa’s lens, you start to see a two-way conversation between biomechanics (how you stand, move, and load joints) and your brain’s interpretation of those positions: are these familiar? Are they safe? Does this feel good or just weird? Every person will have an interpretation that’s unique to them, so what lands for one person may fall flat for another, because no two people have the same body budget or remembered past. You also see this play out in movement sessions and on snow, where you prescribe a movement exercise or specific drill and it just doesn’t click. So your next action might be an investigative question, a reassessment, a different cue, or trying a totally different movement.

Takeaways for your next ski day and beyond

On snow or in life, your brain is always building your day from the inside out. If you can work with your predictions and your body budget, you change the story you’re skiing inside.

This article just scratches the surface of neuroscience and constructed emotion. Check out Lisa Feldman Barrett’s website to dive deeper.