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I recently came back from jogging. It’s shocking to state this fact. It seems it might have been ten years since my last. Yet I found out recently that my levels show somewhat raised cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to do sweaty exercise regularly.

For the first time ever in living memory that the reason to exercise has been my bodily well-being. In my youth, I ran because I wanted to lose weight. I’ve also run to manage feelings of anxiety – I was just running away from those feelings, instead of dealing with it. On other occasions, I jogged because I aimed to improve with jogging. That represented what it meant to me then to create a superior lifestyle.

Exercising with new motivation currently got me thinking about the methods I’ve connected with my physique throughout my life and how this is changing as I progress from early adulthood to midlife. I don’t think I’ve honored my own body, not truly. I’ve prized it solely for its roles and the objectives it fulfilled for me: trying to attract others; escaping emotions; achieving a quicker 5K run. Until today, I’ve not understood that I am my body, it is my life, as opposed to something that produces results.

A great deal has been discussed for ages about the separation between body and mind – which you will be relieved to know, I’ll avoid detailing here. What resonated most compelling is the Freudian perspective that mental and physical selves are innately connected from birth, because bodily growth necessitates mental growth and the reverse is true. The newborn’s bodily experiences – for example the bodily feeling of hunger – motivate consciousness to cultivate the skill to recognise hunger as an emotion that can be sated by nourishment; and the emotional comfort and contentment consistently provided by feed after feed supports the child’s mind just as the food fuels them bodily. So too mental events – like the wish to get up and reach for something, and the resolve to try again and again – are why and how muscles grow stronger. Since infancy, mind and body are interlinked in shared growth as unified as DNA strands.

But I have noticed, during therapy with my psychoanalyst, that mental and physical aspects may exist in a different kind of relationship – a more separated and increasingly manipulative. My mind may employ my physique to store and display aspects that my mind considers unacceptable or unacceptable. In analysis it emerged that exist certain emotions that I fear are too much for me; in place of experiencing them psychologically, I subconsciously shift them to my physical self, where they remain as physical symptoms.

I used to get digestive discomfort – unrelated to my diet, but represented a form of bodily backlash of the harsher emotions I couldn’t digest mentally. This wasn’t an intentional act, but after it was introduced to awareness through therapy, and my dread and insecurity and anger and alarm were experienced and articulated rather than changed into corporeal symptoms, it resolved. I seldom experience from stomach problems now.

The worst time I experienced this severe heartburn, I didn’t sleep for many nights straight. It seemed I was forfeiting my sanity. I went my doctor, who organised various diagnostic procedures, but everything was physically wrong. The situation was an alternate medic who told me that the root might be mental. My analyst concurred. I was shocked, but I also knew it was accurate.

If an individual is suffering a physical symptom, they can be offended if told that it may have an emotional origin. They might feel like disrespect, the idea that their condition is imagined. Certainly it’s a real phenomenon – some face their suffering ignored or misdiagnosed. Yet occasionally it could be that the physical symptoms are genuine – no question – and the origin is mental, the subconscious employing the physical self to convey certain suffering or anger or any feeling the conscious self fails to handle. At times, we might assume our feelings matters solely if manifested through the body. We often undervalue our psychological well-being personally, collectively and within our culture; for what reason can we allow the terrible killing-off of psychodynamic psychotherapy through health services?

Personal insights have shown me that a better life is unattainable while caught without realization in modes of connection, within ourselves and with others, that stem from disregard, use and exchange. These dynamics are often easier to recognize “externally” in wider society. It’s likely more challenging to consider how they got out there, and to see these patterns inside us and among loved ones, in the dynamics of our mental lives.

However it’s worth persevering. After donning my trainers once more post a long hiatus, heading out without aiming for a better body, or to eliminate a sensation, or to beat a personal best, {it