How Many Ways Do You Look After Your Body?

It sometimes feels like there’s no escape from body advice. From the obviously toxic to the apparently benevolent, it’s hard to take a step online or indeed offline without coming up against someone’s ideas about how to make yourself look or feel better.

Yes, this post can probably not avoid being just one more example. But it’s about something that has been useful and intriguing for me in its simplicity, these past few weeks. And, crucially, it’s the kind of advice that stops at “here’s something to help you decide whether you want to do anything differently” rather than presuming to know that “you should do this differently”—which is almost always misguided.

It started with a Zoom chat with a friend who’s recently had a health crisis involving hospitalization. I found myself asking him, at some point in the middle of our conversation, “How much do you feel you’re doing to look after your body at the moment?” A few days later, in a yoga class, I found myself having the thought “Doing this would be good for him." Immediately after that, I thought, “maybe I should start a list of ‘ways I look after my body.’”

As soon as I got home I started my list, and immediately lots of (15 or so) big, little, and medium-sized things came to mind. I found it interesting how many things were on it and how varied they were: from plenty of hot tubs to very little caffeine. Then the next morning, journaling briefly about it, it occurred to me to add a companion list of “ways I expect too much of my body.” I did that and there was only one thing on it (later expanded to two), but it was a big one—more all-pervading than many of the looking-after examples. (Not to be coy about it: It was “Long working hours at the laptop.”)

Since then I’ve also added a couple of other sub-lists: “neutral/mixed things” and “things I might like to do more of.” And I’ve kept adding little dribs and drabs to the main positives list, as things that were too small or automatic to be noticeable immediately have been pulled into noticeability by the fact that there is now a place they can live.

I often think about, and feel gratitude for, how much my thinking is supported by written and spoken language—by letting the thoughts be externalized on paper or screen or in soundwaves. I know I’m the kind of person who depends on writing to do most of my complex thinking, but the basics of “extended cognition” are true for us all. Andy Clark is a British philosopher who’s spent a lot of time thinking about how thinking doesn’t stop at the skull. He offers a dense but rather lovely few sentences on what he calls the “cognitively pregnant unfolding” of gesture as a process of thought when we’re writing and thinking at the same time:

It is not always that fully formed thoughts get committed to paper. Rather, the paper provides a medium in which, this time via some kind of coupled neural-scribbling-reading unfolding, we are enabled to explore ways of thinking that might otherwise be unavailable to us. […] If we allow that the actual gestures (not simply their neural pre- or postcursors) form part of an individual’s cognitive processing, there seems no principled reason to stop the spread where skin meets air. (Supersizing the Mind, p. 126)

Making a list is a simple way of crystallizing thoughts by externalizing them. Even making a shopping list, you can feel this happening: Your inchoate sense of all the things you probably need to stock up on turns into a neat enumeration as you write, and then the result does double duty as a memory aid once you get to the shop (and triple duty by giving you the satisfaction and the visualized sense of completion that comes from crossing all the things off when you find them). So reality is being efficiently encapsulated and ordered in list-writing-as-thinking—of course by oversimplification (you’ll often forget something, and you’ll often not even think beyond the confines of your usual suspects), but everything has its costs.

We love lists because they do all kinds of cognitive jobs, really efficiently. A Psychology Today post by Robert Kraft gives a run-down of some of the cognitive roles that lists play. The most relevant in this context are perhaps the following four:

1. the way they support memory by allowing each new item on the list to act as a retrieval cue for the next
2. the way they mesh with our preferences for serial processing (the brain is a massively parallel processor, but we often funnel parallel into pseudo-serial for simplicity)
3. their simplicity and efficiency in both initial creation (a list is already a list when it has about three things on it), revisions (you can easily add more things later without lots of reworking as you’d do in extended prose), and use (a single glance gives you a quick gist)
4. the satisfaction of seeing something that almost immediately looks finished (however few things are on it, a list doesn’t tend to scream “incomplete”)

So, the structural simplicity of lists may well be valuable in many contexts. And when a list is employed in the way I stumbled across here, to explore a) present reality in b) an open-ended way that nonetheless c) has an “angle” to it, it may really come into its own.

If we want to change anything, understanding the starting state intimately is usually crucial. And even if we don’t want to change anything, intimate understanding tends to be important for protecting what’s already good.

Cognition Essential Reads

Left-Handedness and Cognition: New Insights

Men and the Hidden Costs of Overthinking

One of the most popular coaching models is the GROW model:

• Goal: What do you want?
• Reality: Where are you now?
• Options: What could you do?
• Will: What will you do?

It’s a powerful framework that can be adapted to innumerable contexts where change is sought. It’s easy to neglect any of the four elements, but neglecting R is perhaps most easily done, because it feels least forward-looking: We might assume that the client knows their own reality so it won’t get us anywhere to linger with it. But it often happens that this patient and curious kind of lingering, combined with an interesting yet open-ended question like “How many ways do you look after your body right now?”, can yield insights that mean the O and the W, and maybe also the G itself, will be enriched. Funny to think how much a little list might do.

In the second part of this post, we’ll explore why the idea of looking after our bodies might matter oddly much, given what an unassuming phrase it is.