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I recently came back from a run. It’s shocking to state those words. I believe it might have been many years since I last did so. However I found out recently that my levels show elevated cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to perform intense workouts frequently.

This is the first time in my existence that the driving force to exercise has been my health status. During earlier years, I ran because I aimed to be thinner. I’ve also run to alleviate feelings of anxiety – I was merely escaping from those feelings, not addressing it. Sometimes, I ran because I wanted to improve at running. That represented the meaning to me then to create a superior lifestyle.

Exercising with new motivation at present sparked reflection about the approaches I’ve connected with my body throughout my life and how this is changing as I move from youth to being a middle-aged person. I don’t think I’ve respected my own body, not deep down. I’ve prized it only for its functions and the aims it provided: seeking approval; escaping emotions; running a faster 5K run. Previously, I’ve not understood that my body is me, it embodies my life, rather than an instrument for achievements.

Much has been explored through history about the split between body and mind – a topic you will be relieved to know, I’m not going to precis here. What I’ve found most compelling is Sigmund Freud’s view that mental and physical selves are developmentally integrated right from the start, because physical maturation requires psychological development and vice versa. The newborn’s corporeal feelings – such as the corporeal experience of hunger – drive consciousness to build the capacity to recognise hunger as a feeling that can be sated by eating; and the emotional comfort and satisfaction consistently provided by repeated nourishment feeds the child’s mind just as the food fuels them corporally. Similarly mental events – like the wish to get up and grab an object, and the resolve to try again and again – are the reason and method physical strength increases. From our earliest moments, mind and body are interlinked in shared growth as connected as a spiral.

However I have noticed, in treatment with my therapist, that my mind and body may exist in a different kind of relationship – a less unified and increasingly manipulative. My consciousness may employ my physical self to retain and express aspects that my mind deems undesirable or unacceptable. In my sessions we’ve become aware how exist specific feelings that I worry I cannot bear; instead of experiencing them mentally, I subconsciously force them to my physical self, where they get stuck as physical symptoms.

I previously experienced digestive discomfort – which had nothing to do with food intake, but acted as a kind of physical reflux of the more acidic feelings I was unable to process in my mind. This wasn’t a deliberate decision, but after it was introduced to my attention through therapy, and my fear and insecurity and anger and terror became palpable and put into words rather than changed into bodily feelings, it vanished. It’s uncommon for me with digestive issues now.

The most severe episode I had this severe heartburn, I didn’t sleep for several nights in a row. I believed I was forfeiting my mind. I went my doctor, who arranged all sorts of scans and tests, but no issues were found physically wrong. It was a different physician who told me that the origin may be mental. My psychoanalyst agreed. I was surprised, but I recognized it to be true.

When a patient experiences a bodily issue, they might feel insulted at the suggestion that there might be an emotional origin. It can seem this as being disrespected, being told that their symptom is imagined. And of course such cases occur – people can have their pain dismissed or wrongly assessed. However, sometimes it might be that the physical symptoms exist – no question – and the source is mental, the unconscious employing the physical self to manifest emotional hurt or fury or whatever emotion the conscious self fails to handle. Sometimes, we may believe our emotions matters solely only through expression as bodily symptoms. We persistently neglect our mental states as individuals, as a society and culturally; why else do we accept the appalling elimination of psychological therapies in public healthcare?

Personal insights have taught me that a superior lifestyle is unattainable when we are stuck without realization in ways of relating, inside us and socially, that originate in devaluation, use and transaction. Such patterns are frequently more straightforward to spot “out there” in broader culture. It’s likely less comfortable to consider how they got out there, and to identify these forms inside us and in intimate connections, in the dynamics of our minds.

But it’s valuable to continue. Upon wearing my running shoes once more after such a long decade, heading out not to get bodily change, or to get rid of an emotion, or to improve a personal best, {it