My Mind-Body Problem
31 Aug 2025Praise, condemnation, questions, and comments can be sent via email
I’ve recently gotten into cycling. For most of my teenage and adult life, I’ve avoided doing cardio workouts as much as possible. For a brief time in the pandemic I was running, but that was only because all the gyms were closed. I was a weightlifter for many, many years. I found myself attracted to the order of it, the routine, the careful apportionment of sets and reps to draw out progression.
Weightlifting requires some amount of coordination between mind and body, as does any exercise. The coordination is, in my experience, somewhat limited. I am consciously thinking about where my body is when I set up a lift, and when I was first learning to lift I was closely monitoring myself for deviations from proper form. After a certain number of years, however, most of that becomes automatic. The occasional adjustment is needed here and there, but by and large the lifting happens without any major work from the mind.
Cycling (and cardio at large) does, in my experience, require a great deal of mental effort. When lifting, I might be exerting myself for 30 to 60 seconds at a time, with about two minutes of rest breaking up sets. When cycling, I’m exerting myself for hours at a time. My body does not like being exerted for hours at a time. During this time, there is at least some amount of suffering happening throughout. Aerobic exercise breaks one of the fundamental treatises between mind and body: when the body is in pain, the mind does what it can to stop that pain. As I engage in such exercise, I find myself in a constant negotiation between mind and body.
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Dynamism of a Cyclist, Umberto Boccioni (1913)
What I am struck by when I engage in this sort of negotiation, the back and forth of slightly adjusting position, cadence, power output, etc., is that I didn’t find myself drawn to this sort of exercise sooner. Great swathes of my adult life have been dominated by a tension between mind and body. As I’ve written about before, I have never really had a great relationship with the physical stuff that composes me. I spend a great deal of time in debate with my body, contending whether or not the body has good reason to be feeling anxious, stressed, or tired.
The body, of course, is not responsive to reasons in this way. The body has its own rhythms, its own needs, and its own momentum. I might wake up in the middle of the night from a thunderclap, understand, rationally, that there’s a thunderstorm happening and I should go back to bed. But my body does not make such rational decisions. It decides it is time to be awake. I can tell my body that I have a big day tomorrow, and that it, too, will feel better with a full night of sleep, but nonetheless I remain fully awake.
For a long time, my strategy has been to attempt brute domination over the body with the mind. Just will the body to obey the mind as hard as I can. Mind over matter, right? Surely the noble faculties of reason and thought can prevail in any fight against the body.
Mind over matter, however, has its limits, and those limits are wherever the body draws them. I can command my body to start running. I can command my body to keep running. I cannot command my body to keep running indefinitely. Eventually, the body will get its way and I will stop running. The command of mind over matter isn’t really much of a command. The mind can, at most, pick from a menu set by the body.
This fact has caused me great distress over the years. I want control over my body. I want to be able to tell it exactly what to do at all time. Pick up the heavier weights. Use donuts to build muscle. Stop aging at 27. Start flying when I’m late for class. My body, of course, must draw the line somewhere. It does pick up heavier weights, granted that I am eating right, getting enough sleep, and allowing for proper rest days. But it can’t break the laws of biology, chemistry, and physics to fulfill my every fantasy. It is, after all, just a body.
Excavation, De Kooning (1950)
What I have learned is that the dance between mind and body cannot be not a system of domination. Mind over matter just doesn’t work, the matter will eventually rise up and overthrow its master. I have come to accept that my mind is not the master of the universe. It certainly isn’t the master of my body. It is, nonetheless, roommates with my body. The two must learn to cohabitate. There each share responsibility for keeping the place tidy, for ensuring that things are working smoothly.
When I’m cycling, I don’t tell my body to stop sending me pain signals. That would be the sort of mind-over-matter thinking the body is fully justified in resisting. Nobody is obligated to take orders from a tyrant. I do my best to shut up and listen. If the pain signals are too strong, I cut back the pace a bit. If I’m going up a hill, I promise some relief on the downslope. I shift my position in the saddle if needed. I accept that the body has real limits, and while it can be beneficial to approach them, it’s unreasonable to ask the body to exceed them.
I would still not say my relationship with my body is harmonious. But I’m learning how to make it less contentious. To borrow some words from Miriam Toews, the relationship is a truce that is not peace. I still have moments, rather frequently, where I want to command my body to act in this way or that. I still have moments where my body engages in civil disobedience. But there is the beginning of an understanding. I can forgive my body for having limits, and I hope my body can forgive me for asking so much of it.
Please let me know your thoughts! Thanks for reading!