How Is Your Relationship With Your Body?

Your relationship with your body is not as obvious as you might think. It often stays in the background, despite the importance of it.

Often, your relationship with your body is either instrumental or functional. It is instrumental when you assume that your body is a means of influencing others. In this case, you take care of it so that you are happy with it or you decorate it to attract others. On the other hand, the opposite can happen. You can hide your body from others. You can also neglect it because you do not have a good self-image.

Your relationship with your body can also be functional. This means that you are only aware of it when you feel pain or get sick. When you are healthy, you forget that everything you do, feel and think, biologically takes place within it.

Apathy and obsession with the body

Some have a distant relationship with their body. They do not explore it and do not think much about it. It is also possible that they feel contempt or concern for it. For those who have a difficult bond, there are usually two extreme situations. First we have those who are superfluous modest and aware of their organism. Secondly, we have those who are basically indifferent to their bodies.

Those who become obsessed with their body are generally very anxious . They especially insist on cleanliness and fear bacteria. They also do not tolerate natural odors such as sweat, urine or feces. In fact, they do not look at them as natural scents, but rather as warning signs.

At the other end of the spectrum, we find those who deviate from the norm. A sign of mental illness is extreme indifference to body hygiene and the body in general. They prefer not to bathe or change clothes. They would rather stink and usually do not worry about it. If your relationship with your body falls into these categories, you need help.

Emotions and your relationship to your body

Emotions are not positive or negative. However, some of them can cause further disturbances in the body. By disturbances we mean the activation of the process that changes the normal balance in the body. These feelings are anger, sadness and anxiety. And of course there are those that are a combination or variant of the latter: frustration, stress, intolerance, and so on. All of these emotions are a response to stimuli that your body perceives as threatening.

Your emotions affect your relationship with your body. Many studies claim that it is obvious that emotions help restore organic balance in some cases. In other cases, they lead to disease. Research has also verified that anxiety leads to various diseases, especially infections and autoimmune diseases.

Researchers have also proven that anxiety negatively affects surgery. In turn, what we know as ‘stress’ tends to change the body’s normal healing process. Hormones released during stressful episodes can increase the chance of developing some types of diseases, such as cardiovascular disease. In addition, they also weaken the immune system.

Many people do not notice the impact that emotions have on their body. For example, they do not notice that their heart rate increases, or that their breathing changes when they feel certain emotions. They are also not aware of changes in temperature, tension in certain muscles, or the acceleration of certain processes.

Your relationship with your body depends on how sensitive and aware you are to the changes that are taking place in your body.