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I recently came back from jogging. It’s surprising to state this fact. I believe it might have been many years since I last did so. Yet I recently discovered that I have elevated cholesterol, and the recommendation was to do sweaty exercise regularly.

This is the first time in my existence that the driving force to exercise has been my physical health. When I was younger, I ran because I wanted to slim down. I also jogged to cure my anxiety – I was merely escaping from those feelings, not addressing it. Sometimes, I jogged because I aimed to enhance in running. It signified what it meant to me back then to develop a better life.

Running for a different reason currently prompted contemplation about the methods I’ve connected with my physical self over my lifetime and the way it’s evolving as I progress from being a young person to being a middle-aged person. I don’t think I’ve honored my body, not truly. I’ve valued it just for its capabilities and the aims it fulfilled for me: aiming to appeal; escaping emotions; completing a speedier 5km. Up to now, I hadn’t realized that I am my body, it embodies my life, instead of a tool for outcomes.

A lot has been discussed through history about the split involving physical and mental aspects – a topic you will be relieved to know, I’ll avoid detailing here. What has struck me most intriguing is the Freudian perspective that mental and physical selves are developmentally integrated from birth, because bodily growth requires emotional evolution and conversely. A baby’s bodily experiences – such as the bodily feeling of hunger – propel consciousness to cultivate the capacity to identify hunger as a feeling that can be sated by nourishment; and the emotional comfort and satisfaction repeatedly brought by feed after feed nourishes the child’s mind just as the milk fuels them bodily. Likewise psychological experiences – for instance the urge to stand up and grab an object, and the persistence to try again and again – are why and how physical strength increases. Since infancy, mind and body are intertwined in shared growth as connected as DNA strands.

Yet It’s become clear, in sessions with my therapist, that my mind and body might experience a different kind of relationship – a more separated and increasingly manipulative. My psyche might utilize my physique to store and display things that my mind considers unacceptable or unacceptable. In my sessions it emerged that there are particular emotional states that I am afraid are too much for me; rather than experiencing them in my mind, I subconsciously shift them into my body, where they remain as corporeal issues.

I often had this as indigestion – not connected to my diet, but represented a type of bodily backlash of the harsher emotions I was unable to process mentally. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but after it was introduced to awareness by my analyst, and my anxiety and sensitivity and rage and panic could be felt and expressed verbally instead of transformed into physical sensation, it disappeared. I rarely suffer with digestive issues currently.

The worst time I experienced this terrible acid reflux, I didn’t sleep for many nights straight. I felt I was slipping away from my mind. I consulted a general practitioner, who arranged various diagnostic procedures, but there was nothing corporally problematic. The situation was a different physician who suggested that the root could be mental. My psychoanalyst concurred. I was surprised, but I also felt it was accurate.

When a patient is suffering a bodily issue, they might feel insulted if told that there might be a psychological cause. It can seem like disrespect, the idea that their symptom is fabricated. Certainly such cases occur – people can have their suffering discounted or wrongly assessed. But in some cases it could be that the physical symptoms are genuine – certainly – and the origin is mental, the subconscious employing the body to express some pain or rage or any feeling the conscious self fails to handle. Occasionally, it’s easy to think our experience only has value when it is expressed through the body. We continually disrespect our mental states on a personal level, collectively and culturally; why else do we accept the appalling reduction of psychodynamic psychotherapy on the NHS?

Personal insights have revealed that a superior lifestyle cannot be built when we are stuck unconsciously in patterns of interaction, within ourselves and in relationships, that stem from disrespect, use and dealings. Such patterns are frequently more straightforward to spot “out there” in broader culture. It may be less comfortable to think about their origins, and to see these forms within ourselves and among loved ones, in the economy of our mental lives.

However it’s worth persevering. When I put my jogging shoes once more following many years, heading out not to get a better body, or to eliminate a sensation, or to beat a 5km time, {it