代償思考 · Daishō shikō
What is compensatory thinking?
Compensatory thinking is a term coined by Tatsuya Onuma, an acupuncturist in Japan. He proposes that when bodily sensations are hard to pick up, we may try to fill in what we cannot sense with thoughts or stories. He uses the idea to ask how recurring thoughts relate to what we feel in our bodies and what is happening in our lives.
僕はこれを代償思考というふうに呼んでいます
“I call this compensatory thinking.” (English translation)
Tatsuya Onuma, Karada no Kyōyō Radio, episode 50 · August 3, 2026
Listen from 04:37 (original Japanese audio)Replaying a conversation at bedtime
Onuma describes a night he recognizes from his own experience. He gets into bed and starts replaying a conversation from earlier that day. He thinks of what he could have said differently. He knows that going over it again will get him no closer to an answer, yet his mind keeps returning to the scene. Alongside what he is thinking, Onuma asks what he can feel in his body at that moment.
The name comes from an analogy with movement. When shoulder pain makes it hard to lift an arm, a person may lean to make up for the movement they cannot get at the shoulder. This is called a compensatory movement in rehabilitation. Onuma asks whether thoughts or explanations sometimes fill a similar gap when bodily sensations are hard to make out.
Read Onuma’s essay (Japanese)
How this relates to rumination and the cage of thought
Rumination describes repeatedly dwelling on distressing events or concerns. Compensatory thinking is Onuma’s proposal about what thinking may be making up for in some of those experiences. He calls it the “cage of thought” when words and interpretations keep going round in our heads, detached from what we feel in our bodies.
Listen to the cage of thought section from 23:47 (Japanese)
What to notice in your own experience
When the same scene comes back, what can you feel of your breathing or of your back against the bed? What positions did you spend the day in, and when did you get to rest? If work messages keep coming late into the evening, the way work is organized and the time you have to rest are also part of the picture.
The idea offers questions to ask about your own experience. Repeated thoughts alone cannot tell you what is happening in someone’s body or why their thoughts keep returning.
What the related research examined
In episode 50, Onuma refers to a 2007 study by Norman Farb and colleagues. They compared brain activity when participants thought about qualities they associated with themselves and when they paid attention to what they were experiencing at that moment. The study did not test whether difficulty sensing the body causes thoughts to recur.
Read the study by Farb and colleagues
