| Have you heard 'State not story' (sometimes 'Story follows state')? This comes from trauma therapy, specifically Polyvagal Theory. Patients have their life story and often think of it as the reason for their current problems, when in reality a huge portion of that might be their body, ie the state of their nervous system, informing a story they tell themselves, making mental illness an infinite loop. So for self management: Get into a happy state and you'll be productive. Body: -sleep -food -water -sun -posture -exercise Mind: -well basically "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman My main point being: How we learn what hard work is (the Hollywood version), and how work needs to feel (Stress! Panic! No sleep! Hustle! Endless To Do lists!) is very wrong and gives you anxiety => puts your body into a bad state. And if you are in the bad state and unproductive, people usually resort to "I'm not doing this right, I need to put me into the bad state harder!". See the endless tools you listed. The problem lies elsewhere. |
I also have mixed feelings about it. It feels nice at a surface level, but I'm not sure if the details follow. Are our brains really that bad at interpreting signals from the body? When I scrape my leg, I just feel that my leg hurts - but if I have lower but more persistent pain, my brain doesn't flag it as a leg issue, but instead starts telling me I hate my job?
More than that, I don't like how this view is typically used to peddle what I dubbed as "fuck off" advice. Take e.g. the "Body" list you've attached: essentially "sleep, diet, exercise". Aka. things that are often given as generic advice to solve one's mental problems. My personal experience (both of applying the advice on myself, as well as observing people) tells me that these do not work beyond fixing some extreme deficiencies - but they're the perfect thing to tell someone so they go away. They waste a year trying and failing to fix their problem, constantly blaming themselves for failing to stick to good sleep schedule / diet / exercise regime, but through that year they don't bother you anymore.
Even if these interventions did work like that - which I doubt they do - they're usually impractical. Getting into a perfect shape and sleep schedule is a years-long effort requiring sacrifices few people can make without throwing most of the nice things in their life away (it's not like they can cut out their job, so it's the personal time that gets sacrificed), and results are high-maintenance. So it isn't a good answer for the modern lifestyle, unless it brings order-of-magnitude improvements. Which we know it doesn't (otherwise everyone even moderately successful would be also fit and sleeping well).