Gary Barlow from Take That writes about a fist of pure emotion. Smokey Robinson seconded that emotion. Emotion took the Bee Gees over.

What is emotion and how does it affect us physically? Can you separate emotion from a physical reaction?

Well, habit results in emotion. Emotion results in habitual reaction. When I get angry, I feel it in my arms, as if my fists want to punch someone. When I get anxious, my stomach tightens. When I get sad, my head droops.

Once at my Alexander Technique training course, I turned up with a churning head and a churning stomach. I knew what was bothering me, a situation in life that connected all the way back with some childhood patterns. I was reacting as I always had done. I asked my teacher, Ben, if I could address all this just through working on myself (in the AT fashion). He said, 'Let's see.' So he worked with me, reminding me where my head was, the chair, my feet on the ground. After a while I noticed that I did indeed feel better.

He didn't know what was bothering me, and it wasn't his job to sort it out. He could help me to quieten my nervous system, my body, and slowly I did calm down and feel much easier.

We tell ourselves that we need to 'deal with things'. Therapy, counselling, all that, address particular instances of trouble, trauma, and work on reframing them, or working them through, or whatever the particular method involves. That's absolutely fine, and by understanding where our lives fit together, we can come to terms with a lot of things.

But if you don't address the physical habits that come with these emotions, instances, baggage, then you habitually react to everything that comes your way in the same way you've always done.

Say you had some kind of childhood trauma. Well, you can look at that through therapy. But then in adult life, someone hurts you in a different way, makes you angry, sad, disappointed, whatever; you react in the way you always have.

What you can do, and this is where Alexander Technique lessons can help, is to work through your reactions. In a lesson, you'll have very gentle instructions that focus on simple actions like sitting, standing, lying down. But your reaction to those actions might mirror your reaction to more complex triggers.

You might be surprised that if you can learn to react differently in a lesson, that new training will start spilling into your daily life, your relationships, your decisions, your general outlook on life, and with a calmer response, your body will feel like there's a lot less going on and be grateful for it.