Our Conversation About Exercise and Mental Health Needs to Start Over
We have a habit of treating exercise as a simple problem. People aren't moving enough, the thinking goes, so therefore they need more information, more motivation, a better program, and a stronger resolve. The solution is education and willpower, and it’s assumed those who struggle with exercise still need to try harder or want it more.
But spend twenty years working with people in fitness spaces, as I have, and a different picture emerges. Most people don't lack information about the benefits of exercise, they lack a relationship with movement that feels appealing, enjoyable, or even morally neutral. This gap between knowing exercise is ‘good for you’ and actually being able to engage with it without friction, shame, or self-blame is so much more than a willpower problem.
This is the question that we must start to ask: not ‘how do we get people to exercise more’, but ‘what kind of relationship with movement and their bodies do people deserve, and what's standing in the way’?
In fitness settings, there is a standard opening question: so, what's your goal? It seems sensible, I asked it myself for years. While those goals can give direction, the question carries embedded assumptions: that the goal is almost certainly has an aesthetic component, that the body is a project to be completed, and that success is measurable in weight lost or muscle gained. The conversation launches forward before it has properly begun.
What if we asked richer questions instead: what kind of relationship do you want to have with movement? What does exercise feel like for you right now? What has it felt like in the past?
These questions open a different kind of conversation entirely. They invite people to locate themselves in their own history. For many people (if not most), that history is complicated. It includes gym classes where they felt humiliated or excluded. Or on the flip side that their athletic performance was their whole identity. It includes being told, directly or indirectly, that their body was not good enough and movement was the punishment or and also somehow the cure. It includes years of using exercise to compensate, control, or shrink the body (certainly not listen to it or trust it). It includes injuries, exhaustion, obsession, and eventual abandonment leading to low self-efficacy as an exerciser. It includes, for a significant portion of the population, an entanglement with disordered eating that the fitness industry has too often made worse.
When we skip past all of that and head straight to goals, we miss the whole person standing in front of us.
We live in a culture that treats bodies, (particularly women's bodies, and those socialized as female, though not exclusively) as things to be managed, shrunk, disciplined, and displayed. Diet culture is not a fringe influence; it is the water most of us swim in. Its messages are so normalised that they pass as common sense: smaller is healthier, control is virtue, hunger is weakness, and your appearance is worth. That the body must be controlled, ignored, and continually improved and maintained in order to be acceptable.
Exercise has been conscripted into this framework so thoroughly that it can be difficult to imagine it otherwise. The language of fitness is saturated with control: burn, blast, shred, push through, no pain no gain. The imagery is relentlessly about a particular kind of body: thin, toned, almost always white and able-bodied, and above all, achieved through discipline. Movement is sold not as a way of inhabiting your life more fully, but as a way of earning your body, justifying your eating, or atoning for excess.
For someone with a healthy, uncomplicated relationship with food and body image, this framing might be background noise. But for the one in three people who will experience disordered eating at some point in their lives, it is something considerably more dangerous. Exercise, framed this way, is not a tool for mental health it is a vector for harm.
Eating disorder awareness has long flagged what the fitness world is slower to acknowledge: that compulsive exercise is a recognised feature of many eating disorders, that rhetoric about burning calories and controlling the body can trigger and reinforce disordered thinking, and that an environment built around appearance and thinness is not a safe or neutral space for a significant portion of the people walking through its doors. The question of whether exercise is good for mental health cannot be separated from the question of the context and framing in which that exercise is happening.
Embodiment as a crucial Missing Piece
Developmental theory offers another layer of understanding that mainstream exercise discourse rarely touches. Our relationship with our bodies is not formed when we first sign up to a gym as free-thinking adults. It is formed across a lifetime, beginning in childhood, and shaped by the many personal, social, and societal influences around us. The Developmental Theory of Embodiment (developed by researcher Niva Piran and colleagues) describes how our relationship with our bodies is shaped across the lifespan by personal experiences, mental framing of the body, systems of social power and social context and includes all the domains of bodily experience from self-connection or disconnection from the body, our ability to attune and practice self-care or to self-silence and neglect our needs, our eating and exercise behaviour, our gendered experiences, and how we are objectified and appraised for our physical appearance. From early childhood onward, we absorb messages about whose bodies are valued, who gets to take up space, and whether our physical selves are sources of agency and joy or objects of surveillance and control. Embodiment, the sense of being at home in one's body, of inhabiting it as a subject rather than being observed as an object of others’ gaze, is intrinsically connected to our ability to experience wellbeing and positive dimensions of mental health, and is not a default state for a whole lot of people. It is something that is either nurtured or eroded by the environments and relationships we move through. For many people, particularly those who have grown up in bodies marked as other by gender, race, size, or ability, and those with histories of trauma or disordered eating, disembodiment becomes habitual. The body is experienced as something to manage, hide, or overcome rather than as the living, sensing ground of the self.
When exercise is offered as a mental health intervention without attending to this, it can inadvertently reinforce the very disconnection it promises to heal. If movement is another context in which the body is treated as an object to be optimised, another place to performance and assessment, or another experience where the message is ‘your body is not enough as it is’, the mental health benefits are either absent or actively undermined.
We need to explore how to have a relationship with exercise that doesn’t move people further away from embodiment but instead can become a practice of connecting to the embodied self via the process of attunement. Through this pathway, movement practices can be a place to return to yourself. A space in which the signals of the body, including breath, sensation, effort, and ease, are not things to push through or override, but connection points to listen to.
The concept of attunement comes from developmental psychology, where it describes the way a caregiver responds to an infant's emotional and physical states by matching them, and reflecting them back, helping the child learn that their inner experience is real and legible and important. It is the foundation of self-trust. In the context of exercise, attunement means learning to develop that same quality of responsiveness toward yourself. It means moving in ways that are informed by what your body is telling you, rather than overriding those signals in pursuit of an external metric. It means building a practice that can flex with the reality of your life which may be gentle when you are depleted, vigorous when you are energised (if you like that), and present to the actual experience of being in your body on that particular day.
This is almost the opposite of what most fitness culture teaches. Fitness culture teaches you to distrust your body's signals and push through tiredness, ignore discomfort, override appetite, and to measure progress by external markers rather than internal experience. It reinforces treating the body as something to be conquered. Attuned exercise, by contrast, treats the body as a source of information, of intelligence, and of sensory input. It connects naturally with the principles of intuitive eating and the recognition that the body has wisdom worth listening to, that self-trust is not ‘permissiveness’ but a sophisticated skill, and that health (especially mental health) is not something you achieve by fighting with yourself.
This is also where the concept of taking up space becomes important. For many people, women and other marginalized people especially, exercise has been about making the body smaller, more palatable, and generally less. Attuned movement can be a practice in the opposite direction: in occupying your physical presence with confidence, in moving in ways that are strong and expansive and joyful, and in discovering what your body can do rather than policing what it looks like.
Reframing the Mental Health Conversation
There is robust evidence that exercise supports mental health. Reduced anxiety, improved mood, better sleep, greater resilience; the research is consistent. But evidence that exercise can benefit mental health is not the same as evidence that any exercise, in any context, for any person, will do so. The how and the why matter enormously. With so many people who struggle with exercise, these are nuances that need to be explored and talk about.
Movement supports mental health when it increases a person's sense of agency and self-efficacy, when they feel capable and competent rather than failing and inadequate. It supports mental health when it is a source of genuine pleasure, or flow, or social connection. It supports mental health when it helps a person feel more present in and connected to their own body, rather than more alienated from it.
It does not support mental health, and may actively undermine it, when it is driven by shame, obligation, or self-punishment. It doesn’t build wellbeing when it becomes compulsive and joyless, and another item on an unforgiving self-improvement list. It harms us when the culture surrounding it is one of thinness, control, and relentless self-critique.
The conversation about exercise and mental health needs to grow up and bring in some nuance. It needs to move past the simple prescription of ‘more movement’ and ask deeper questions about the relationship between the person and exercise within the context of industries and systems of power that profit from this tension. It needs to take eating disorder awareness seriously, not as a niche concern but as a lens that reveals something important about fitness culture at large. It needs to draw on what developmental psychology tells us about embodiment, self-trust, and the lifelong shaping of our relationship with our physical selves.
It also needs to hold out a genuine alternative vision and not ditch the baby with the bathwater and include the possibility of a relationship with your body not only isn’t dysfunctional but that is characterised by curiosity, attunement, and true self-care. One that celebrates our aliveness rather than managing appearance. One that treats the body not as a problem to be solved, but as the very medium through which we experience being here at all.
That is what my work with Attuned Exercise is reaching toward. And maybe it is what a great many people, exhausted by decades of being told to try harder and want it more, have been waiting for.
Martha Munroe
