Why your mind-body connection shapes your self-relationship and is key to your health, happiness and everything

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Your mind-body connection shapes your self-relationship whatever is going on in your life. Your experience of pain, fatigue, stress, anxiety, or any other life ‘stuff’ is shaped by this connection. This will either help or hinder your experiences, which is something that many of us don’t know much about or even consider. In this blog you’ll learn about what the mind-body connection is, how it affects your self-relationship, why it is SO important and how to build a stronger connection with yourself and cultivate self-love.

Your mind-body connection shapes how you experience feelings

Mind-body connection: our thoughts, feelings and attitudes can affect our bodies and our physical health can affect how we feel and think. This is known as the mind-body connection.

As neuroscience advances, we are getting more and more evidence of how the mind-body connection drives our self-relationship and our experiences, for better and worse. Think about it. If you’re nervous about a test, for example,  your heart might beat faster, or your stomach might feel funny. That’s your mind affecting your body. On the other hand, if you’re feeling tired or sick, you might feel grumpy or sad. That’s your body affecting your mind.

It’s like your body and your mind are best friends who talk to each other all the time helping you stay healthy and balanced. However, for people who live with chronic illnesses, who have been experiencing stress for a long time or who experienced trauma or other adverse experiences in their childhood the mind-body relationship can be … well, complicated.

Why can the mind-body connection of people who live with chronic illnesses or stress be complicated?

As described above, your mind and body like a best friends who work together to keep you safe. When one of the friends isn’t doing well, it can affect the other. For people with chronic illnesses or stress, this can get tricky because of something called the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response.

This response is like an alarm system in your body that helps you react to danger. If you feel scared, stressed, or threatened, your body might:

• Fight: Get ready to protect yourself
• Flight: Try to escape
• Freeze: Stay still and hope the danger passes
• Fawn: Try to please or avoid conflict to stay safe

For people with long-term stress or illness, this alarm system might stay on too much, even when there’s no immediate danger. That can make their body feel tired, achy, or out of balance, and their mind might feel worried or overwhelmed. At the same time, feeling unwell can make it harder to calm down, which keeps the cycle going.

Understanding this connection can help people learn ways to calm their alarm system and take care of both their mind and body.

How does the mind-body connection affect your self-relationship

Before getting into the mechanics of this, it’s vital that to understand that the most important relationship you will ever have is the one you have with yourself: your self-relationship. It’s the only relationship that lasts from your first breath to your last. No one else is with you every breath of your way but you. It’s the longest relationship you’ll ever be in and like any relationship, it’s all about connection, and the quality of that connection. And if there’s one person that you’re connected to beyond any other connection or relationship that you have, it’s you. 

In the words of mindfulness expert, Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn “Wherever you go, there you are”. You can change relationships with others, jobs, even countries, but once the noise of that change has settled, you’ll find that it’s still you there in your new context. 

How do you strengthen your self-relationship through strengthening your mind-body connection?

The mind-body connection plays a big role in your self-relationship—how you feel about and treat yourself—because your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations are deeply connected.

Here’s how.

1. Emotions and self-image: When your body feels unwell or stressed, it can influence how you think about yourself. For example, if you’re tired or in pain, you might feel frustrated, guilty, or even less confident. These feelings can shape your self-relationship.
2. Thoughts and physical health: If you have negative thoughts, like worrying a lot or being hard on yourself, it can affect your body. You might feel tension, headaches, or stomach aches. Over time, this physical stress can make it harder to care for yourself kindly.
3. Stress and coping habits: Chronic stress can lead to habits that aren’t always good for you, like avoiding exercise, overeating, or isolating yourself. These habits can weaken your self-relationship because they make it harder to feel good in your own body and mind.
4. Healing and growth: On the positive side, when you strengthen the connection between your mind and body—like practicing mindfulness, exercising, or being kind to yourself—it can improve your self-relationship. You learn to listen to your body’s needs and treat yourself with more care and understanding. In other words, you learn to practice self-love.

Why strengthening the mind-body connection cultivates self-love

Think about it visually. The mind-body connection is like a feedback loop: how you treat your body affects your thoughts and feelings, and how you think and feel affects your body. Learning to balance and nurture both can lead to a healthier, kinder relationship with yourself. This is why cultivating self-love is key to sustaining good health and well-being.

How do you cultivate self-love?

Your feelings are your guide. How you feel is your signalling system in terms of both the state of your mind-body connection and self-relationship and how you are doing. Feelings, both emotions and sensations, are information. In basic terms, they let you know if you’re ok or not ok. 

Pain, fatigue, anxiety, and stress let you know that there’s something going on that’s unhelpful or even harmful to you and therefore needs caring for.  

Joy, happiness, love, and connection let you know that whatever is going on is helpful and nourishing to you, and you’re likely to need or want more of whatever it is. 

By the same token, your feelings about about yourself are your clue as to the state of your self-relationship. Are you on good terms with yourself? Do you struggle with yourself? Do you find yourself doing thoughts, feelings, or behaviours that are confusing or unhelpful to you? Here are the top three indicators that you’ve got a healthy self-relationship.

How you know you’ve got a healthy mind-body connection and self-relationship

1. You treat your feelings as information. You don’t dismiss, avoid, or numb your feelings.  
2. You know how to support yourself either by containing or completing your feelings, depending on what’s most helpful in that moment. 
3. You trust what your feelings are telling you and know how to read and respond to your feelings .

Is it possible to have a good relationship with yourself?

The short answer is yes. The somewhat longer answer is that when your self-relationship is robust and sturdy, you’re able to respond with awareness rather than react unconsciously to what’s going on for you. You can access equanimity, resourcefulness, stamina and even the powerful ability to create conditions for joy and savour mundane magic.  

So how do you get to that point? The Greek philosopher Socrates famously said: “Know thyself”, and that’s the starting point. There’s no point focusing on your destination, where you’d like to be in the future, if you don’t know your point of departure, where you are now. 

Step 1: At this moment, how do you feel about yourself and your self-relationship? 

I encourage you to ask yourself this question with sincerity and curiosity, remember it’s more helpful to be curious than critical. It can be helpful to name these feelings using four descriptive words (or no less than three or more than five). 

This is about information gathering and establishing a good enough sense of your current reality because this will give you the clues that will help you feel better. If you struggle to find descriptive words, start with whether you feel good or bad about yourself or whether you like yourself or not. 

Keeping it real

It’s not about pretending your self-relationship is anything else than it currently is, so choose the words to describe how it feels now, not how you’d like it to be in the future. 

One person I worked with used the words ‘non-existent, neglectful, ignorant and sad’. Difficult as that insight was, it was rich in clues in terms of what then to do about it. Learning how to care for that insight with kindness and compassion was empowering for them. Having someone to help them navigate this experience was essential. It was like a lighthouse showing the way in stormy weather as they improved their self-relationship. Developing the skills to read their feelings meant that pain, fatigue, stress and anxiety became easier to respond to and deal with. 

How my self-relationship was and how it is now

For me, asking myself this question was a 1000 watt lightbulb moment. I realised that my self-relationship felt awful and confusing. Not only that, it also felt destructive and dismissive.  I was dismissing my emotions and sensations (like pain, fatigue, stress and anxiety) because I was confused by them and didn’t know how to read them or respond to them. This then made me feel awful because they got worse and worse because I’d do behaviours that were destructive and didn’t know how to care for the root causes of what was going on. Being ignorant about my self-relationship was unhelpful and even harmful to my physical, mental, and emotional/social health. 

Finding what we don’t like seeing

One of the most sobering insights was the realisation that there was this ignorance when it came to health and emotional literacy. I’d always perceived myself as intelligent and had the academic credentials to validate that self-perception, so discovering this ignorance affected me profoundly.  No wonder I was struggling with pain, fatigue, stress, and anxiety (at this time, I had ME/CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), Fibromyalgia and was suffering severely with Complex PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). I wasn’t able to read and understand the information that these feelings were conveying, let alone respond to them in helpful ways. I was ashamed to be so ignorant and angry that I hadn’t learnt this already. 

Knowing my baseline in terms of the state of my self-relationship and my ignorance, I was then determined to change, to invest in this literacy and in myself. I realised that getting to know myself, I would be able to create the conditions for me to feel better, to truly feel well. Today, myself, and I have a great relationship and the four words I tend to use the most to describe my self-relationship are ‘sturdy, playful, steadfast and loving’.

Why are you bothering?

Now that you’ve got your four words to describe your current self-relationship, you’ve got your place of departure,  your baseline, you’ve got at least some of your clues. So what now?

Step 2: Start with your why bother? 

This is about clarifying why you’re bothering to make any changes at all. Why don’t you just continue as you are? We humans are wired to want to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Are you wanting to avoid feeling awful, e.g. pain, fatigue, stress or anxiety? Do you  want to move towards feelings of pleasure, e.g. joy, happiness, contentment or love? Why are you bothering to do something about your self-relationship?

Many people dismiss this question claiming it’s negative, standing in the way of achieving anything. I, however, feel that there is a difference between asking this question rhetorically and asking it from a place of curiosity. 

“It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it – and that’s what gets results”

After all, like the 80s pop song says, “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it – and that’s what gets results.” When we say “Why bother” as if it has an exclamation mark at the end, it’s rhetorical with no expectation of an answer. However, when we get genuinely curious about this question, it takes us to the very heart of the matter. What is it that you want less of in your life? What do you want more of? 

It can be helpful to do a thought experiment. Imagine yourself at the end of your life, would the current state of your self-relationship continued over the whole of your lifetime be what you’d like to see? If the answer is yes, that’s marvellous. Keep doing what you’re doing. If the answer is no, then why not?

How do you build a connection with yourself?

Now that you’ve got your ‘Why bother’, you’ve got something to remind you why you’re making this effort. You can remind yourself why you’re leaning into seeing and feeling what you’ve been struggling with. 

Assuming you’d like to improve your self-relationship or strengthen what you’ve already got, then what do you do? Well, like with any relationship, it needs understanding and care. You need to get curious about how you are showing up in your day, what thoughts, feelings (remember, feelings are both emotions and sensations) and behaviours are you doing? Remember that feelings are information a bit like indicators, they indicate how you are doing. That means they function a bit like indicators on a car dashboard. By learning to read your feelings dashboard, you become more skilled at reading and understanding yourself. 

Feelings are like indicators on a car’s dashboard

Each dashboard indicator shows you a particular feeling and whether it’s purring along nicely or whether there’s an issue. Let’s start with the indicators that we all share: Fuel, water, speed and rev-counter. 

Are you getting enough fuel? Is it good enough quality? What about water, are you getting enough water? These may sound like irrelevant factors but both are essential to you being able to function. 

Then there’s the speedometer, how fast are you talking, walking, chewing, typing etc.? Now this isn’t so much about slowing down as it is about whether your speed is appropriate to what you’re doing. If you were to put a number on your speed, what might it be? Are you doing 70 mph in an area where it’s more prudent to drive at 30 mph? Maybe you’re doing 5 mph an hour where you need to be doing at least 60 mph.

 

The rev-counter is about effort, how much effort are you applying? If you’re typing, are you hammering the keyboard? Are you gripping the cutlery? Are you white-knuckling the steering wheel? If you drive a car you’ll know that you can drive at 60 mph in third gear, but it’s a lot of effort and damages the gearbox. It’s best to hold the reins on the horse lightly, not too tight and not too loose. 

Observing these four indicators and learning what they are showing you about you is a great start. You’ll observe what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. 

Customised indicators

It can take a wee while to figure out the indicators that are more customised to what’s going on for you now. Think about what you’re struggling with? Sleep? A person? Symptom? Particular behaviour? One of my personal indicators is my laundry basket. When my laundry basket is full to the brim, I know that I need to check in with my practical self-care. In my experience, it’s helpful to identify about five indicators, give or take a couple. 

Observation and awareness

Everything starts with awareness, so our invitation to you is to start by observing the main four indicators and some of your personal indicators. 

Step 3: Make notes, talk about these indicators with people you trust. Invite them to offer their observations about you and your indicators if that feels helpful. Learn by paying attention. 

Like in every relationship, as you start to understand what makes you tick, what works and what doesn’t work, you’ll know what to care for. And like with every relationship, if it’s in a bad place, it’ll take some time to build trust and time to develop and strengthen. Self-love, like all love, needs care and tending to, to not be taken for granted. Don’t take yourself for granted. 

You’re not alone

It can be challenging to do this on our own, none of us can see the back of our own heads. Reach out to a trusted someone, either a loved one or a professional like a therapist.  Talking to others helps you put things into words, and it helps you hear your own experience. Being heard by someone you trust has power and provides clarity, healing, and comfort.  

These three steps may be the most important gift of self-care you’ll ever give and receive, from you to you. It’s the key to health, happiness and everything. 

Want to learn more about your self-relationship? Check out this blog: “Be your own Valentine: how self-love improves your relationship with yourself and others”