Photo by Olegs Jonins on Unsplash
This morning, I felt like I wanted to stretch my body.
This small fact may sound unremarkable, but it is probably the first time that I genuinely wanted to move, rather than felt like I should.
I’ve previously exercised because it was good for me, or it made me feel better. In my recent low-activity state, I’ve missed the psychological relief it gave me.
But nowhere did anyone explain to me that the body is actually meant to want to do these things. Rather than being a rag doll to command, it is a living, breathing organism with its own signals and impulse.
I spent a large part of last year trying to kick start my health at the gym. I had a personal trainer with a strength building regime. It did work – I gained muscle, felt stronger and generally much fitter.
But in many sessions, I felt like I was pushing my body through it. I was pushing my strength of will to force myself to lift weights. By the end of the session, I felt tired. My digestion worsened, and I would often spend the rest of the day recuperating at home.
I was getting stronger, but not healthier. In some ways, my body was struggling even more than it had been. It’s why I realised I needed to actually stop for a while. I needed to re-learn how to listen to my body. A life of neurodivergence and masking has meant it’s something I’ve not done in a long, long time.
What seems to be missing in modern day beliefs around exercise is that the desire is meant to come as much from the body as it does from the mind. If the body is not wanting to do something, that’s actually an important sign.
I’ve noticed this for myself. As the weather brightens up, I get some sense of pressure that I should go outside and enjoy it. Good Belgian weather doesn’t last long, after all. But if I do a quick check-in with my body, I find that it would much prefer resting at home.
When I have tried to override that by forcing myself outside, I end up exhausting whatever small energy I had left. This often means that I feel very wiped out for the next few days. I’ve had to learn that it’s often not worth the cost.
In the past, I always wondered how people had such discipline to wake up early to go for a run or do yoga. I never realised that it’s not all meant to be a battle of the mind. When the body wants it too, there’s an alignment which makes everything easier. But you can’t align with the body if you’re not listening to it properly.
Although not quite a physical activity, it’s similar to what I feel like with my writing. This will be my 220th article since January 2022 without missing a week. If this was just a question of discipline, I would have got tired many months ago. But now, my sense of expression is as much integrated with my body as it is with my mind. If I haven’t written anything in a week, it is as if I have an internal bodily impulse that tells me that it’s time to write.
So my conclusion is that we ought to listen to our bodies far more than we are currently doing. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that if you internally feel that you don’t want to do that exercise class, you shouldn’t go. The short term gain of psychological relief is not worth the longer term effect of telling your body that it’s signals do not matter.
We only get one body in this lifetime, so it’s probably worth listening to it.