Just A Few Reasons to Treat Your Body As Your Temple (Beyond Looks Alone)

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Just about everyone on the planet has heard the phrase “my body is my temple,” whether or not they personally adhere to that philosophy and live according to it.

The saying has some pretty obvious ideas, attitudes, and behaviours associated with it – ranging from things like frequent exercise, to making sure you’re drinking enough water, paying attention to healthy nutrition, getting enough sleep, and avoiding unhealthy habits such as smoking cigarettes.

Obviously, taking care of your physical appearance is one great reason to adopt this life ethos. Although it’s great to know that there are things such as facelift procedures out there, healthy living is certainly the surest overall path to looking your best, all things considered.

As it so happens, however, there are many great benefits to treating your body as your temple that go well beyond looks alone.

Here are some of those reasons.

Because it can directly impact how you relate to the world around you

There’s an old saying that goes “how you do anything is how you do everything.” On the one hand, the statement obviously isn’t totally, literally correct but it definitely gets at an important truth of life – which is that our habits, attitudes, and approaches to things tend to spill over and influence how we handle various different scenarios.

Viewing your body as your temple and treating it that way can help to make you more engaged, responsible, and switched on with regards to how you treat and interact with your immediate environment and the world around you, more broadly speaking.

It’s quite likely – for example – that you are less likely to feel comfortable with leaving your home in a messy state, if you view your body as a temple.

Because it’s a great way of safeguarding and maintaining your health

Health is a very precious thing, and heavily affects only the length of our lives, but the degree to which we enjoy our lives and feel a sense of thriving, among other things.

Generally speaking, we all tend to have a pretty good idea of what some of the most obvious “healthy habits” and “unhealthy habits” are – but the way things actually work out in everyday life is often a lot less deliberate, insightful, and carefully thought out.

The sad fact is that we mostly go through our lives more or less automatically, without paying much – if any – attention to the ramifications of our regular routines, day by day.

In this way, even the most unhealthy habits tend to fade into the background of our awareness and we end up ignoring the likely consequences until it’s too late, and we are confronted by major health issues.

Intentionally treating your body as your temple is a great way of safeguarding and maintaining your health, in large part because it helps to make you more consciously aware of your everyday habits and routines, and how good (or bad) they are likely to be for your overall health and well-being.

It’s difficult to explain to yourself why you are not getting enough exercise, and are eating a lot of takeaway, if you have consciously committed to the idea of treating your body as your temple.

Because it can help you to step into more harmonious routines and habits

It’s very common for people to want to come up with the best strategies, techniques, and “hacks” for being more productive, getting in better shape, and so on.

The thing is, on an everyday basis, it tends to be our regular habits and routines that have most of the impact on how our lives unfold in various ways – excluding especially dramatic actions, of course.

If you want to get in better shape, setting yourself a goal to weigh a certain amount by a particular date may not be the best path forward. For one thing, there’s a big gap between setting a goal and actually knowing how to achieve it.

In this example, getting started with a regular diet and fitness routine, and making sure to get a habit properly established, may be a much more successful path forward.

Treating your body as your temple is a great way of putting yourself into a mindset that naturally encourages various beneficial habits and routines that can put your life into a more harmonious balance.

For example, if you view your body as your temple, it will be very difficult for you to justify having a terribly erratic sleep schedule.

Because your mind and your body are intimately linked, and you will both feel and think better when you’re taking better care of your body

The idea of treating your body as your temple may appear, at first glance, to only affect directly physical things – such as your appearance and your health.

It’s important to remember, however, that your mind and your body are intimately linked – and whatever your spiritual beliefs, how you think and feel is clearly influenced by what’s going on in your body in one way or another.

When you’re well rested, are getting enough exercise, and are eating a healthy and nutritious diet, you will inevitably feel better than you would otherwise, and your mind will also be sharper and better able to handle the challenges of the day.

In fact, there’s even evidence that simply adjusting your posture can significantly affect things like your mood, and how confident you feel in any given situation.

Of course, none of this is exactly a mystery. We all know that we are more grumpy when we are feeling hungry, that we are less sharp when we are tired, and that we typically feel less confident when we judge ourselves to be out of shape.

For whatever reason, though, it often happens that we fail to directly connect our mental and emotional states, not to mention our overall sense of well-being, to how we are treating our bodies.

Because can help you to experience states of “flow” more easily

Have you ever been in a situation – either at work, or when engaged in a hobby of yours that you find especially engaging and meaningful – where you become completely absorbed in the activity at hand, and time seems to fade away altogether?

The famous psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow state” to refer to these “peak experiences,” and there’s a lot of evidence that getting into a flow state on a regular basis is fantastically beneficial for our sense of well-being, meaning, and engagement with life.

Getting into a flow state seems to have a lot to do with engaging yourself fully with a task, at a level where you are skilled enough to hold your own, but where the activity is still challenging.

At the same time, certain practices and outlooks on life seem to help facilitate flow states – with certain physical pastimes including Tai Chi and yoga apparently being quite powerful.

Treating your body as your temple can help you to ensure that you are well balanced, prepared, and “present” enough to enter flow states more readily, and more frequently in just about whatever it is you end up doing.