Mind and Body:

I noticed a long time ago that we do a really weird thing when we talk about ourselves in Western culture: we treat our minds and bodies as inherently separate pieces of ourselves. When I was getting my Bachelors in Psychology I noticed we even do this in class and research. We have all seemed to collectively forget the ways our minds and our bodies are inherently connected. When I tried explaining this point to peers and professors I was mostly met with confused silence. Apparently this way of thinking is so ingrained that we have a hard time imagining alternative ways to think about ourselves. So I wanted to write this piece to explain my observations, offer a different way of thinking, and point out the benefits of allowing ourselves to be complicated and interconnected people!

What is Dualism?

Dualism refers to any cultural value which sets one mutually exclusive idea opposed to another: good and bad, right and wrong, true or false. These are the simplest forms. But there are more complicated ones too (healthy vs unhealthy, healing vs. harm) and the more you look for dualism, the more you find it. Our society is littered with them. This is because sorting actions and thoughts into clear categories makes it easier for us to predicate how others will react to them. It gives us a sense of control which lowers our anxiety and bolsters confidence. Things like cancel culture and political polarization have reaffirmed the value and usefulness of this kind of black and white thinking.

If you’re already feeling uncomfortable with these ideas it might be a good time to take a break and take some deep breaths, because I’m about to throw all that security and predictability in a blender. The dangerous thing about dualism is that it’s not real. It offers a false sense of security: it only serves us so much, and then it falls apart. Like when philosophers realized that truth is a concept and destabilized the soft scientists for a decade in the mid-20th century. Or when I visited Greece and realized smoking is way more accepted there than it is in Canada. Or in any of my therapy sessions when I explore with client’s the way that even the best choice for our health can still be harmful to ourselves or others. What dualism fails to prepare us for are all the millions of situations where there just isn’t any simple conclusion. The world is complicated and contradictory, and so are the people who live in it. The mind-body question is a perfect example of that.

What is Mind-Body Dualism?

Mind-body dualism is the assumption that my mind (my thoughts, my memory, my intelligence, and my personality) exist in a separate place than my body. You can notice this when we talk about body-focused concerns like illness or body image. We tend to say ‘My body feels’ or ‘This part of my body is’. But, why? If I describe my body as sore, or fat, or achey, or thin, isn’t that the same thing as saying ‘I feel’ or ‘I am’? I noticed that we can get really uncomfortable when we try to equate the experience of our body with our experience of our whole selves. I think that that’s because we’re taught to hold a lot of shame in regards to our bodies (sickness, tiredness, and physical appearance) so we subconsciously create distance.

I believe we also have a hard time believing that everything that exists in our minds can somehow fit in our bodies. Thoughts, memory, intelligence, personality, knowledge, experience, ideas, hopes, plans, dreams… the list is endless. My body is not. So it’s easier to imagine it as a data cloud. But even data clouds have physical housing.

Solving Mind-Body Dualism

As I said, dualism isn’t real, and it’s not to be trusted. I’d like to remind you that your mind (your physical brain) resides within your body, making your mind intrinsically a part of it. And therefore all the things our mind houses, are housed by our body as well.

But I can do better. Did you know that your emotions are mainly made up of neuro-transmitters which are produced not in your mind, but in your stomach? In fact, there is increasing evidence that suggests that the emotional center is in the gut, and not the head. (You can read more about that on Harvard Health Publishing and the Cleveland Clinic.) And what about the way we make decisions? Some choices are picked up through our senses and transferred to the brain to be considered and resolved, before that information travels back to our body to relay. But not all of them. The more reactive and automatic a decision is, the less time it spends in the body. It may only make it to our spinal cord, or even the looped nerves below our skin layer of our hands (like when you touch a hot mug and then drop it immediately). Is it still a choice if we’re just doing it automatically? This therapist says, because even these reactions can be learned and changed… maybe? 

I talk a lot in sessions about choices that have been learned and ingrained so deeply that it doesn’t feel like we have control over them, even if we think we should. Most of us would consider reacting to an argument by yelling or reacting to rejection by isolating ourselves a choice; Even if we can appreciate it’s not one we have total control over. But these aren’t body-reactive choices, they're mind-reactive. 

My point is, whether the choice is made in my hand, my spine, my stomach, or my head, it’s all a part of the same process. So why have we been acting all this time like it’s not? These aren’t categories, they’re parts of a connected spectrum. I try to think about my mind and body as the same thing - just different names of different (overlapping, integrated) parts of the same system. When we change our stance on mind-body decision making we allow ourselves to consider more the factors which lead to our behavior, which allows us to more easily forgive ourselves for choices we didn’t mean to make. It also gives us more opportunities to make changes. Now choice isn’t just about will power, it’s about biology, chemistry, and cognition, all of which can be treated separately, and together. You can see how this perspective helps us to take care of ourselves. Health is mental health – physical self-care means mental self-care. Behavior and well-being are whole-body issues, and require whole-body solutions. 

Concerning body-image, I do think viewing a person’s mind and body as one has important implications for the way we treat and talk about bodies. When we hold our bodies separately from the rest of ourselves it’s much easier to be disrespectful to them, and allow other people to be disrespectful to them. But, when we consider our bodies the same as ourselves, that’s a very different picture. As I mentioned in my Autonomy post, I’ve tried to adopt a ‘You disrespect my body, you disrespect me’ approach to body boundaries. If I wouldn’t let my mind be insulted or used a certain way, then the same goes. 

Emotional-Rational Dualism

Another reason I believe we separate the mind and body is because we have so much (so much!) messaging in our society about the difference between emotionality and rationality. We value rationality highly. And we consider emotionally-motivated behavior less valuable. It’s not too big a jump to say that the mind represents rationality and the body's emotionality in the above paragraphs. And just like the mind, we hold a lot of shame around our feelings and our emotional expression. So of course we have to separate them, because if we don’t we always run the risk of allowing emotion to enter our logic and ruin it.

Here’s why that kind of thinking doesn’t hold up: First of all, we simply can’t separate emotion from our thoughts. They are unavoidably connected in a bidirectional loop. Our thinking will change our mood, and our mood can dictate our thinking. There are certain thoughts that I only notice myself having when I’m PMSing or high. Our cognitions are chemical. And there are certain thoughts that have a higher tendency to send me into a swoop of joy or slip of despair. More than that, emotion always has a reason. It’s always reacting to something and trying to communicate something. (This can be hard to visualize if you’ve never considered it before, so take a look at my post about anger for some examples.) Emotion is logical, even if it doesn’t always make immediate sense. So how can we separate it?

We tend to assign these values to gender roles, or age demographics. Teenagers are reckless. Toddlers are explosive and infants are docile. Some kids are excitable, others are thoughtful. Women are personable and emotional. Men are cold and rational. There’s that categorization again. This sort of stereotyping makes it easy for us to criticize ourselves and others by targeting our most vulnerable spots. Society tells us that we have to be a thing, and then tells us we shouldn’t be that thing. It’s a trap. And it’s still not real. Everyone is emotional and rational in equal turns. Women can be calculating and manipulative. Men can be angry and aggressive. Teenagers can be awkward and nerdy. See how our stereotypes contradict each other? This makes it so that it’s impossible to avoid them or the shame they inspire.

Conclusion

The best way to challenge dualism is not just by acknowledging that a person can be many different things in a given period of time, but also that a person can be two contradictory things simultaneously. The CBT/mindfulness wise mind exercise encourages us to practice emotional self-reflection and rational thinking at the same time. In fact, many therapeutic techniques encourage us to embrace and take advantage of our contradictions. Which really challenges the premise that dualism is a useful way of thinking. Because opposites actually work best when they’re working together. We need to acknowledge the unhealthy habits we can’t break in order to change the ones we can. We need to challenge our understanding of right or wrong in order to decide for ourselves which values are most important. We need to appreciate that what is true for one person will always be false for another if we ever want to empathize or communicate effectively. We need to embrace our embarrassments as well as our successes to make the most of life.