Why look inwards?

“My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.” (Carl Jung, The Red Book, p. 232)

It is well known by now that regular physical activity is one of the most impactful things you can do to optimise your health and longevity, not to mention the plethora of psychological benefits. However, a majority of people in the West struggle to be consistently active, or active at all. And this isn’t for lack of desire; while some have no interest, it seems the majority of sedentary individuals would in fact like to become more active to varying degrees, yet they face numerous barriers to doing so.

Of course there are some genuine logistical or physical barriers, but more often than not the barriers that really stop people being (more) active are psychological in nature. This is something I increasingly came to realise over years of working as a personal trainer and then a sport and exercise psychologist, not to mention through my own physical activities. And even the barriers people declare as logistical or practical often have a psychological component, raising the question of whether any barrier is not psychological to at least some degree.

For example, one of the most commonly cited barriers to exercise is “lack of time”, but if you look closely at how that barrier plays out for most people you’ll notice it’s rarely the case that they have zero minutes available in the week to exercise. It’s that they can’t fit in the type of activity they would prefer, they choose to prioritise other activities, or emotions, stress and distraction are at play. How we engage with logistical and practical challenges is what really matters.

So there is my first argument for turning our attention inwards towards our psychology, as opposed to relying solely on personal trainers, workout programmes, behaviour change apps and nutrition plans. This isn’t to say these practical sources of support aren’t important, and indeed they may be sufficient for some people. But for many they aren’t enough by themselves to create sustainable change, because the biggest barrier is not a lack of information about diet and exercise. There are clearly psychological barriers for people to making effective use of these practical resources, however it is often unclear what they are, because many involve processes and contents that are unconscious - we aren't aware of them, or we are but we don't understand them.

The limitations of the conscious mind

Take a classic phenomenon like the head-heart (cognition-emotion) mismatch, where our emotions and behaviour seem impervious to our logical thinking. We think or understand something intellectually (e.g. "I care about doing this form of exercise"), but we feel something totally different (e.g. we really don't want to do it and feel prepared to let it slide).

Here we understand and know about one side of our psychological experience, but not the other. This is often what is behind the famous intention-behaviour gap, wherein we don’t follow through on our conscious intentions, even if we think we really want to. I went through many phases of dropping out of track sessions when I used to train competitively - I was dead-set on completing them, yet my emotions would overcome me every time and I would feel "unable" to will myself on anymore. Or consider the classic getting home from work and feeling "unable" to muster the mental energy to get out to the gym. In such scenarios, the solutions of our conscious minds are exhausted, as evidenced by the fact that we can’t simply will ourselves to act through logic.

From my perspective, we need to understand more about what’s really going on so we can better target our solutions, which is a key role of psychology. Things are usually more complex than we think, and in not allowing for that complexity we set ourselves up with low-resolution and unrealistic expectations and then despair when our attempts at problem-solving fail. This in itself is often the main barrier for people - expecting to be able to resolve a psychological conflict over physical activity in a more simple way than reality will allow.

Furthermore, it isn’t just frustration and defeat that ensue from not listening to the deeper layers of our minds. Ignoring unconscious experience (i.e. attitudes, feelings, urges, desires, habits that we don't understand or conflict with our conscious intentions) can result in increasingly intense compensatory activity. In other words things get worse or the consequences add up, because ignoring these experiences means affording them autonomy, and they do not go away simply because we do not want or attend to them. They keep repeating and hence start to form patterns, for which we develop narratives that become a part of "who we are" or "what I'm like in this domain." Unmet needs and their accompanying emotions grow, ultimately eclipsing and exhausting our conscious will. Negative experiences build and endow an activity like exercise with increasing amounts of unpleasant feeling, making it harder and harder to want to persist.

All of this relates to the rather profound quote from Carl Jung himself up the top of this post - not attending to what goes on internally can lead to an increased alienation from what we really think and feel, so that we find ourselves increasingly in situations where our brains and bodies just seem to resist what we consciously want to do - pesky gremlins become full-on dragons. In these cases the antidote is to look inwards to understand what we're missing and what's really going on under the thin veneer of our conscious understanding.

Your approach to physical activity

Another argument for looking inwards relates to the potential role physical activity can have in your life. Everyone has their own motives and attitudes that drive their physical activity behaviours, but from my perspective physical activity is not just a way of improving your physical health (although, this is by no means a trivial thing - your body is, after all, literally the physical vessel that takes you through life and has the potential to open up or limit the experiences you can access).

Physical activity can also be psychologically transformative - a vehicle for infinite self-development. If physical activity is approached in this way, not only are you supporting both physical and psychological development at the same time, but the two enhance each other. For instance, making physical activity about psychological development as well as physical can lend more motivation and importance to it, and likewise physical activity can be an arena in which you can observe your psychological experiences and reactions, revealing patterns and hence informing your self-understanding.

Connecting with your mind at a deeper level can also serve as a rich source of meaning, if that is something that interests you. Of course this depends on personality and outlook - there is variation in the degree to which people are interested by psychology or the process of self-enquiry, but for those who are keen to know these richer psychological realms there are opportunities for exploring the mysteries of the mind, accessing transcendent experiences and greater self-knowledge. All of this is together can make physical activity a more meaningful and satisfying experience.

These are just some of the reasons for taking a psychological approach to physical activity. In looking at our psychology we can develop more accurate understandings of our feelings and behaviours and hence target our problem-solving efforts more effectively. It's the equivalent of moving from trying to walk a path in total darkness to walking the path with a lantern to hand. This way we can work towards aligning our behaviour with our true values and creating a more positive and meaningful experience around physical activity.

Chloe

Psychology of Movement