For hundreds of years, philosophers and psychologists have fought over the mind-body connection and this relationship continues to be just as fraught today. From the ‘obesity crisis’ to gender fluidity, the ways during which our psychological self pertains to the physical is complex and contentious.

Within the seventeenth century, René Descartes argued that the mind exists individually from the body and that the body cannot think. Such dualist considering has been the dominant attitude toward the body ever since encouraging us to take care of the considering mind and dismiss that which is corporeal. The truth is, quite worryingly psychoanalyst Susie Orbach argues we are moving towards a dematerialised existence where every part we understand about living, “will occur within the realm of thought, not within the physical, worldly body.” 

Nevertheless, having treated a spread of clients combating their very own mind-body relationship, encountering every part from anorexia to the fear of ageing, she believes: “Body anxiety is as fundamental as emotional anxiety,” and there may be an increasing need for recognition of this. 

This mental health awareness day, we address one in every of philosophy’s biggest dilemmas: the mind-body problem, exploring the rise in body anxiety and the ways during which our psychological selves increasingly manifests within the physical.

The mind and the body have at all times had a fancy relationship. Across time and culture, that which exists within the psyche has manifested itself within the physical with different body parts and body shapes imbuing specific symbolic significance. In pre-Nineteenth century China, small feet represented femininity and amongst a community in northwestern Niger, fatness in women is deemed beautiful signifying status and wealth. Bodies have at all times been of symbolic significance and at all times ascribed meaning – dressed, adorned, and decorated. 

Nevertheless, today within the west, the body is under increasing scrutiny. Latest technology, namely smartphones, in addition to the proliferation of social media means the physical self is being watched, ‘liked’ and judged 24/7. Our selfhood is increasingly defined through the corporeal as we provide the world an ever-increasing variety of our finest self-portraits, flattened yet artfully constructed, eagerly awaiting feedback. 

Given this increased scrutiny, the goalposts for beauty ideals are moving at obscene rates with our bodily aspirations increasingly unrealistic and achievable. While the actual constructing blocks of the body appear to matter less nowadays – a waif-like runway model or petite curvaceousness is equally beautiful – what’s of recognisable value are the conditions under which bodies are sculpted and crafted. As creator Jia Tolentino puts it in her essay All the time Be Optimising, embodying order and control, today’s ideal body is avidly self-surveilled and disciplined looking for to be “more appealing, more endlessly presentable”. 

“An hour of surveillance and punishment in a room of mirrors and equipment and routine,” says Tolentino, describing the unprecedented popularity of Barre classes as a disciplinary bodily ritual. She claims the overwhelming success of athleisure brand Lululemon is late-capitalist fetishwear. “To even get right into a pair of Lululemons, you have got to have a disciplined-looking body,” she says. Today, culture watches over you until you optimise, sculpt and craft as ‘fully perfect’ a body as possible. 

“61 per cent of 11-21 yr olds consider they should look perfect, one in five adults surveyed last yr felt shame about their body image and 57 per cent of 18-24 yr olds feel anxious due to their body image”

Taken at face value, self-optimisation and the striving for optimal health and fitness is a positive pursuit. “There are, after all, real pleasures to be present in self-improvement,” Tolentino notes. Exercise has a plethora of health advantages from increasing our happiness to creating us physically and mentally stronger.

But viewed through a mind-body lens, our incessant obsession with self-optimisation is troubling and could possibly be indicative of deeper psychological yearnings. 61 per cent of 11-21 year olds consider they should look perfect, one in five adults surveyed last yr felt shame about their body image and 57 per cent of 18-24 year olds feel anxious due to their body image. An obsession with self-optimisation fuels body anxiety since it relentlessly communicates that we will be more perfect, inadvertently suggesting that our current selves aren’t to be accepted because they aren’t adequate. 

Heather Widdows, creator of Perfect Me, argues that beauty ideals have taken on an ethical dimension whereby we (mostly women) attribute, “Implicit moral value to the day-to-day efforts of improving looks”, and failing to achieve this is framed as a failure of self. The body has taken on such heightened symbolic meaning in recent times due to mechanisms we’re using to relate to 1 one other. 

Digital media encourages the performance of the physical self where sculpted, disciplined and controlled bodies are recognised and rewarded with ‘likes’. Nevertheless, while research done for Dove shows that it takes 124 likes to feel accepted, most are inclined to receive only a fifth of this. It is a worrying statistic which indicates the distorted reality we live where are are continually organising our bodies and selves to fail. In a dematerialised, Instagram world, our self-worth is derived externally, where the infamous John Berger quote that: “Women appear and watch themselves being checked out” is increasingly true for all genders and all bodies. 

In our culture of self-surveillance bodies becomes the vehicle of self-hood, the vessel through which our psychological experiences and existential yearnings play out. Whether it’s reconstructive jawbone surgery within the pursuit of masculinity or obsessive gym workouts, juice cleanses and waist training within the pursuit of beauty ideals, we increasingly see our bodies not as places to live from, but quite places to perform. With this, our bodies turn out to be our own personal fiefdoms which we’re presupposed to order and control to be deemed socially acceptable. 

Akin to Widdows thesis, failure to discipline the body is construed as a failure of self. Not only will culture-at-large scorn you to your negligence nevertheless it is probably going you may even introject this experience, turning inwards to be hypervigilant, punishing your body for its imperfection. But as we learn through the mind-body problem, control of the body shouldn’t be so easy. The self is a fancy phenomenon made up of a lifetime of experiences – trauma, pain, love, loss, joy – and it is thru our bodies these emotions play out. 

Nobody articulates the toxicity of this vigilant self-surveillance higher than Roxanne Gay. In her memoir Hunger, Gay writes about her own experiences of living in a fat body, recalling the traumatic events which led her to inhabit her current form. The book illuminates the ways during which fatness involves be the embodiment of pain, a cloak of protection and disguise to ward away the male gaze. The body becomes the manifestation of protection following her experience of rape as a teen. “I ate and ate and ate within the hopes that if I made myself big, my body can be secure,” she explains, using food to punish herself and to make herself less attractive avoiding external danger and threat. 

“Whether it’s reconstructive jawbone surgery within the pursuit of masculinity or obsessive gym workouts, juice cleanses and waist training within the pursuit of beauty ideals, we increasingly see our bodies not as places to live from, but quite places to perform”

Gay so neatly details the complexities of the mind-body relationship, exploring the vicious cycle of self-destruction and the painful challenges of attempting to escape it. She is obvious in her explanations that she is greater than aware of “the issues” that manifest in inhabiting fatness. But she is stuck within the pain of her trauma and afraid of the popularity and exposure that will come if she is to embody a more perfect, more optimised body. “There may be a moment after I am dropping pounds after I feel higher in my body. I breathe easier. I move higher. I feel stronger.” Gay notes. “I get terrified. I begin to worry about my body becoming more vulnerable because it grows smaller. I start to assume all of the ways it could possibly be hurt. I start to recollect all of the ways I even have been hurt.” 

As Hunger so eloquently explores, fat bodies aren’t – as society ascribes – lazy, gluttonous and undisciplined. Fat bodies, like all other forms of bodies, are vessels carrying a lifetime weight of experience and emotion. Nevertheless, as latest technology continues to take stead and rewrite the principles of the body, an “All the time Be Optimising” mentality is fuelling incessant self-surveillance. As such, the pressure to embody perfection is heightened, as we see an alarming increase in body dissatisfaction, body anxiety becomes the norm. 

Relatively than attaching ourselves to those heightened social pressures, may we take a step back and remind ourselves of the age-old mind-body problem. Our bodies shouldn’t simply be places to perform, but quite places to live from. As such, just as we’d attend to problems of the mind with great care and a focus, so too should we attend to the body with the identical level of detail. Our body anxieties are our emotional anxieties and we must come to recognise this.