The Body Is Not a Project

A theory developed by psychologists in the late 1990s describes what happens when people habitually monitor their own bodies from an imagined outside view, checking constantly how it looks rather than simply inhabiting it. That habitual self-monitoring is linked, across a large body of research since, to lower wellbeing and more body shame, not to better outcomes or higher standards actually reached.

There are days when movement feels joyful and days when it feels like one more demand. I have learned that the difference usually isn't the movement itself.

It's whether I'm doing it as something I live inside, or watching it as a project I'm managing from somewhere just outside my own skin. Three women sit close together in a photograph, different shapes, touching easily, none of them angled for a camera that isn't there.

Nobody in that image looks like they're checking their own outline. The theory doesn't argue for indifference to health.

It argues that treating your body as a permanent renovation project, always mid improvement, correlates with feeling worse, not with actually arriving anywhere better. I think the theory is really describing a kind of exhaustion specific to constant self-surveillance, the tiredness of never fully getting to just be inside your own body without simultaneously grading it.

I'm trying to let mine simply exist some days, without an agenda attached, the way it apparently gets to in a photograph nobody's grading. I'm trying to live inside mine more than I audit it.

Most days that's the whole difference between the two.