In my previous job as a health coach, we were instructed to focus solely on the physical aspects of health and wellness – weight management, improving nutrition, increasing physical activity, stress management [but only the physical aspects like stress management techniques], and smoking cessation. The reason was that staff members simply weren’t trained to deal with the emotional aspects.
While I can’t argue with the rationale behind the policy, it seems a false dichotomy at best. The physical and emotional are intertwined in intricate and subtle ways, and each manifests itself in surprising and unexpected areas of life. A classic example might be emotional eating, where the seeming physical problem of eating too many sweets or junk food stems from a deeper emotional concern. The act of eating is a symptom, a coping mechanism, a red flag. If your attempted solutions do not address the underlying concern of emotional eating, then your efforts will only be partially successful, at best.
Or for those wracked with insomnia and other anxieties around falling asleep and staying asleep, changes to the physical environment can do much to increase relaxation and sleepiness, such as ensuring proper bed temperature and mattress firmness. Altering eating habits and exercise patterns can have beneficial impact on sleep, as well. Thus a seeming emotional issue – anxiety, frustration over low sleep quality, and the corresponding irritability, can also be traced to physical factors.
Thus to treat one without the other is to ignore a powerful set of influences on total health and individual well being. The world moves in vast complex ways, and so too do our daily lives. If we accept that there is a mind-body connection, it follows that this connection should permeate multiple levels of our lives, allowing us to move in vast complex ways as well.
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