Physical Vitality (Earth)

It’s hard to pinpoint where the art of psychotherapy really began, or whether it is an art, or a science, or perhaps its own thing altogether. Its also getting harder and harder to define what therapy is, where its boundaries are, what its goals and aims are, or how anyone could possibly measure its success. It’s very difficult to really say anything at all about therapy that would apply to the field as a whole, other than perhaps “it’s about helping you to feel better”. But what does that really mean, and how do we go about doing it? The complexity of the question partially explains the myriad different therapies that spring up all the time – there’s Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for your thoughts, there’s Person-Centred counselling for your feelings, there’s EMDR for your trauma, psychoanalysis for your unconscious, Jungian therapy for your dreams, even psychedelic therapy for your Transcendent Self, but one thing they all have in common is that they mostly are concerned with the psyche – the mind, and your conscious experience of yourself.

What they don’t often pay much attention to is the body.

But we are more than just our minds, and if our goal is “to feel better” then we can’t ignore the body – we are embodied creatures, we have physical form, every emotion is felt in the body, every thought is produced by the brain, and our bodies are the only tool we use for 100% of the things that we do. There is no meaningful split between the mind and the body – try for a moment to imagine being nothing but a brain growing in a jar. You might be capable of thoughts and feelings, but what would you think? How would you feel? With no sense organs, no language, no exterior world to experience, from where could thoughts or feelings possibly come? What form could they take? We are embodied from conception, and our consciousness is modulated throughout our bodies (For example – consider how your conscious experience of yourself changes when you step on a piece of Lego). There is no “me” without “my body”, and if we are concerning ourselves with “feeling better” then we’d better not forget it.

So let’s pay attention – where should we start? The field of physical health is huge, and getting huger every year. And do we, as laypeople, have any business talking about it? We can, at the very least, look at the fundamentals – the foundational pillars of feeling good in our selves, that we do have at least some control over.

How’s my sleep?

How’s my diet?

How’s my exercise?

These three questions are the starting point for our felt sense of vitality – that feeling of having a spring in our step, being alive and alert, filled with energy, enthusiasm, and gratitude for being alive. Therapy can help with a lot of psychological and emotional issues, but it can’t cover for a poorly maintained body. No one can ignore the fundamentals. But the fundamentals are not always easy – instead of sleep we have phones to stare at, instead of nutritious food to cook we have processed meals to throw in the microwave, instead of using our bodies to move through the world we drive to work and sit down all day. To do otherwise costs time and money, which are in ever shorter supply. It’s all too easy to fall into a routine of compensation – we may try to make up for a deficit (say, tiredness) by adding in some other substance (caffeine) which causes a new deficit (restlessness) which needs to be compensated for (with alcohol) which causes a new deficit (poor sleep) which brings us back to feeling tired again and round and round we go.

What we’re really doing here is chasing a lost sense of vitality. We know something is wrong, is out of balance, and we’re using sticking plasters to try to fix it now rather than go back to the fundamentals, and fix what’s really out of balance. The reason is obvious and understandable – if I’m low on energy now, I want to fix that now, not in two months time, and I want to believe that a pleasurable snack can be the answer, rather than the unpleasant work of sacrifice and discipline.

So how exactly do we address this imbalance? How do we generate and maintain that sense of vitality?

The Vitality Budget

Your body burns a certain amount of energy each day through activities like moving, digesting, repairing, and exercising—this is your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), like a daily energy budget based on your habits. By gradually and consistently adding small amounts of movement or exercise, you can increase your TDEE. This encourages your cells to adapt by producing more energy (in the form of adenosine triphosphate if you really want to know), fuelling your sense of vitality.

But it’s not easy! The body conserves energy like a bank manager conserves cash deposits, prioritizing essentials. If you go for a 500-calorie run, you won’t burn 500 calories of fat. Only around half will come from stored fat, the rest will come from energy that otherwise might have been used for less urgent tasks like digestion or immune function. Exercise can also spike cortisol, cause short-term fatigue, or disrupt sleep and immunity as your body adapts. It’s like a brief ‘fight or flight’ mobilization, and it explains why new routines feel draining at first. But if we can keep up this routine, the body adapts. Over weeks and months it learns that it will have to have this extra 500 kcal available several times a week, and so factors it into the TDEE, the daily energy budget. This is then felt as increased vitality – the spring is back in the step – and other systems are no longer being drained. Cortisol levels return to normal, which will positively affect sleep and digestion, and so you start to spiral upwards, not down. Consistency and balance are key. You can’t outsource this – no one can run your miles for you. Vitality is one of the few areas of life where each one of us is ultimately responsible. This is both the good news and the bad news – you, and you alone, are in control. So where to begin?

Rule of 1% change

There is an axiom in therapy that change is hard – really hard. Our patterns have taken us a lifetime to develop, they’re not going to change overnight. Also, our patterns have developed subconsciously to keep us safe from discomfort, which evolved as a way to signal that something is wrong. And in ancestral times, if something was wrong then death was often round the corner – hunger meant death. Cold meant death. Burning precious calories meant death. For millions of years humans had to find ways to stay alive through harsh winters, foraging for food, avoiding injury and predators, and they had little to think about other than escaping death for another day.

Consequently we are optimised for survival, not happiness.

Our physical body rewards us with pleasure when we eat calorie rich food, when we stay warm and safe, when we avoid what feels like a threatening experience. We have become somewhat hardwired to binge fatty, sugary foods, and to conserve energy, while staying ever-vigilant and scanning our environment for threats. This is why lying on the sofa, eating snacks, and scrolling social media can feel so good – our bodies recognise this behaviour as replenishing precious calories, conserving energy, and paying attention to our social environment – all things our caveman brain has evolved to prioritise! Choosing a different way to spend the day can feel like turning round a cruise liner – yes it can be done, but only with great effort and a massive turning circle. Hence, the Rule of 1% Change…

Popularised by writers such as James Clear and Darren hardy, the idea is that instead of chasing big transformations (which are hard, expensive, risky, and go against established patterns) we can instead look for a multitude of small gains, tiny changes, little areas of tweaking and optimising, that when stacked on top of each other can create big difference.

When Dave Brailsford took over British Cycling in 2003, he inherited a failing team with an empty trophy cupboard. To change this he based the new regime around the concept of “aggregation of marginal gains”, or the 1% rule. He looked at every area of team equipment, training, and performance, looking for any opportunity to optimise, even if each change would only produce a seemingly negligible difference. While other teams were hoping for some revolutionary new technology to give them an edge, Brailsford was focusing on fundamentals such as bike weight, aerodynamics, helmet design, and increasing performance in tiny ways, sometimes a fraction of a single percent, but which when stacked together, added up to massive change. Within a decade, the British Cycling team was dominating at the Olympic Games and winning the Tour De France.

At first, 1% changes can seem pointless – nothing much is going to change. But when you stack a few 1% changes on top of each other, you have nudged your daily life in a slightly better direction, and if you continue finding and stacking changes then they aggregate, each change produces more effect, transformation becomes easier, and you begin to spiral upwards instead of down.

Think of a snooker player – if his aim is off by 1%, he may still pot the ball if the pocket is close. But if it’s a long pot, that 1% error will aggregate and by the time the ball reaches the other end of the table, it’s nowhere near the pocket. It’s the same with us – if we start each week on Monday morning feeling only 99%, we might feel the need for a bigger breakfast, or a stronger coffee, and we’re back in the downward spiralling compensation cycle. This can go on for years, people making small, seemingly unimportant choices, that nonetheless add up over time to become routines and habits that leave us exhausted, anxious and depressed. The answer is not to overhaul everything, try to change it all in one go – New Year’s Resolutions almost always end in failure – the answer is to start attending to the details, find the 1% changes that are convenient and tolerable, and start aggregating the differences. Play the long game, don’t expect transformations today, but start today so that you’ll experience it in six months time, and still in twelve months, and in twelve years.

Ask yourself – how can I improve my sleep by 1%? How can I improve my diet by 1%? How can I improve my exercise by 1%? And then keep asking the same questions, every day.

We can probably all identify a handful of improvements we could make with very little effort – take the stairs instead of the lift, or stop scrolling in the bathroom – and these small, incremental changes are the building blocks of meaningful change. Pay attention to your habits, identify opportunities for small easy changes, and start spiralling upwards.

“Man is an animal, and his happiness depends upon his physiology more than he likes to think … Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.”
– Bertrand Russell

Some ideas to start with:

Sleep
Set a bedtime and stick to it – give yourself the chance to get 8 hours.
Limit caffeine after 2pm – caffeine prolongs your natural cortisol cycle, inhibiting sleep.
Turn the big lights off a few hours before bed – lower light produces melatonin, which will improve sleep.
No scrolling in bed – reading a book in bed will stimulate drowsiness. Reading digital content will do the opposite.
5 minute breathwork – meditation for as little as five or ten minutes can calm you very effectively. If meditation isn’t for you, box-breathing is a really simple alternative (you’re already breathing anyway, so why not optimise it for relaxation before sleep?)

Diet
Rule of thumb – if it doesn’t look like it came from an animal or grew out of the ground, think twice before eating it.
Limit carbs – carbs trigger the insulin response, taking glucose out of your bloodstream. This means less energy for you, as it gets stored as fat instead. Swap the sandwich for a scotch egg, or a pack of cooked meat.
Eat slower – take control of your calorie intake, and improve digestion, by taking your time with meals. Fewer mouthfuls per minute, smaller plates that can be refilled rather than a single big serving that you may pressure yourself to finish.
Limit alcohol – Pay attention to how much you’re drinking. Try one extra alcohol-free day this week, and note how you feel the morning after. Stop drinking an hour earlier in the evening, and have a glass of water.
Increase hydration – Start the day with a pint of water (perhaps with electrolyte powder?) to boost alertness and metabolism. Set reminders on your phone or in your head – have you had a litre by lunchtime? Another by dinnertime?
Digital Diet – Diet isn’t just food, it’s everything that we put into our system. This includes food and alcohol, but also drugs, medications, digital content, news, pornography – is your digital diet nutritious? What can you cut out or cut down on that isn’t offering you nourishment?

Exercise
Steps – a phone or smart watch can track your movement – set an easily achievable goal and make sure you hit it every day. If you drive to work, park a 5 minute walk away to get extra steps. Walk to the shop instead of driving.
Stretch – Take a minute before breakfast and before bed to stretch – raise your arms, rotate your hips, reach toward your toes, try a sun salutation, anything that feels good and lets you know where you’re stiff.
Strength – The benefits of strength training for both sexes, at all ages, can’t be overstated. But you don’t have to start at the gym. Bodyweight exercises at home are very effective – if you can do a press up then do at least one a day. Or a single squat, or a lunge, start small but be consistent.