An integrative approach to physical, mental and emotional fitness

© Julia Welstead

Large numbers of us spend a great deal of time working hard to maintain or improve our physical fitness, yet we are less likely to take positive steps towards maintaining our mental and emotional fitness.  While we may have largely got over the historical stigma attached to mental troubles, we still do not pay much attention to our emotional health until we are suffering some sort of distress. In physical terms, this is like waiting until one has a broken leg before deciding to take up running.

As any good athlete will be aware, getting our physical needs met healthily (through exercise and nutrition) is a vital part of being mentally healthy, and equally, mental/emotional wellbeing is a key aspect of physical fitness and athletic achievement. The two go hand in hand: our physical health impacts on our mental health and vice versa.

The human body is designed to move: historically we needed to move in order to survive, in terms of hunting and foraging for food, escaping predators, creating and maintaining communities (safety in numbers, cooperation and procreation). Equally, the human brain is designed to seek information from the outside environment, solve problems, discover new ways of doing things, store information that aids survival through risk assessment (friend or foe, edible or poisonous) and communicate. In today’s environment, through our own success in inventing and developing new systems, new ways of doing things, we no longer need to walk or run many miles a day, and we no longer need to be constantly vigilant to danger. Laudable though our achievements as a species are, it means we can have developed a tendency to become both physically and mentally sedentary.

We are all well aware of what happens to a sedentary body: aches and pains, stiffness, weight gain, injury and illness. A sedentary mind can suffer equally. Our brain is an expectation machine and problem solver. Unfortunately it is not fussy what it exerts its energies on! If we feed it new information and set it positive, forward looking goals and expectations, it will go to work on these with great zeal. If, however, we leave it to its own devices, it will search through old memories or conjure up future imaginings and set to work on those. Being set to survival mode (without this our ancestors would not have survived and we wouldn’t be here today) means that negatives are more likely to have been retained than positives (it’s great to remember where that berry laden bush is, but more important to remember where the tiger lives). A brain left to its own devices will resort to rumination, worry and misuse of the imagination, leading to stress, anxiety and depression. All of which leads to being less able to perform well physically. It is vital, therefore, to maintain good mind health alongside good body health.

Human givens therapy is a truly bio-psychosocial model of emotional and mental wellbeing, which draws much of its strength from 21st century brain-science. Thanks to great advances in neuroscience, including the wonders of brain imaging and mapping, a whole lot more is known about how our brains really work, and a more integrative approach to psychotherapy is emerging, which distils the best knowledge into the most effective therapy. The overarching organising ideas of two innovative psychologists, Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell, now provide us with a new and deeper understanding of the ways in which the human mind works, and how to help it heal when it is ailing.  This has given rise to what is now known as the ‘human givens’ approach to psychotherapy, where the focus is on helping each individual to develop their skills so they can better meet their own emotional and physical needs, using the innate resources with which they were born.

Beyond our obvious physical needs for food, water, warmth, shelter and safety, and, our bodily need for exercise, fitness and health, we have certain emotional needs which can prove just as vital.

• Security: safe territory and an environment which allows us to develop fully
• Attention: to give it and receive it are both forms of nutrition
• Sense of autonomy and control: having the ability to make responsible choices
• Being emotionally connected to others
• Feeling part of a wider community
• Friendship, intimacy: to know that at least one other person accepts us totally for who we are
• Privacy: the opportunity to reflect and consolidate experience
• Sense of status within social groupings: acceptance within the tribe
• Sense of competence and achievement: feelings of success
• Meaning and purpose: which come from being stretched in what we do and think.

Along with physical and emotional needs, we have been given guidance systems to help us meet those needs.  These ‘given’ resources which help us to meet our needs include:

• The ability to develop complex long-term memory, which enables us to add to our innate knowledge, and to learn
• The ability to build rapport, to empathise and to connect with others
• Imagination, which enables us to focus our attention away from our emotions, to use language and to problem solve more creatively and objectively
• A conscious, rational mind that can check out emotions, question, analyse and plan
• The ability to ‘know’ — that is, to understand the world unconsciously through metaphorical pattern matching
• An observing self — that part of us that can step back, be more objective and be aware of itself as a unique centre of awareness, apart from intellect, emotion and conditioning
• A dreaming brain that preserves the integrity of our genetic inheritance every night by metaphorically defusing expectations held in the autonomic arousal system because they were not acted out the previous day.

Our ‘human givens’ (needs and resources) can be thought of as inbuilt, biological templates that continually interact with one another and look for their natural fulfilment in the world in ways that allow us to survive and thrive as individuals, as communities, and in a great variety of different social groupings.

It is the way those needs are met, and the way we use those wonderful resources, that determine the physical, mental and emotional health of any individual. Much of my work is in helping people to develop the necessary skills to ensure they are able to do exactly that. For instance, learning to use one’s imagination to rehearse success is a powerful and effective way to overcome the continual negative rumination which can lead to depression, addiction or anxiety.  Using that imagination to build resilience so as to deal with real stressors is proving to be one of the most successful therapies available.