It would be taking things too far to say that I felt childlike when I ran, but it definitely gave me a sense of lightness and abandon that I only really see in young people (and drunk people, but they then have a sense of regret which I hope children don’t experience). This shouldn’t be a surprise; from an early age we are encouraged to skip, hop, dance, run and play team sports. As Louisa May Alcott wrote: ‘Active exercise was my delight from the time when a child of six I drove my hoop around the Common without stopping, to the days when I did my twenty miles in five hours and went to a party in the evening. I always thought I must have been a deer or a horse in some former state, because it was such a joy to run.’[7] We instinctively know that the young need to use their bodies, and not only for their physical health. Studies on this in the UK are somewhat limited, and usually cross-sectional, but a NICE study on children and exercise remarked on the results of one survey which reported a higher risk of depressive symptoms among 933 eight- to twelve-year-olds classified as inactive, and among children not meeting the standards for health-related fitness compared with those who were considered active.[8] Analysis of clinical trials looking at exercise and its effect on depressive symptoms in teens aged thirteen to seventeen seemed to show that physical exercise is an effective treatment strategy.[9]
I never gave myself the chance to learn this when I was younger. It would be simplistic to say that this was all because of anxiety, although it was certainly a contributing factor. I was chubby, rather unpopular and viewed sport as a hideous popularity contest. I hope that things have changed since I was at primary school, but sports were also determined by gender. You almost never saw girls on the football pitch, and it was perfectly acceptable for us to gather in sedentary groups around the playground as the boys burnt off their energy kicking a ball about. The divide is still marked – a 2013 study found that half of British seven-year-olds don’t get enough exercise, and the gap between boys and girls was one of the most worrying revelations.[10] Professor Carol Dezateux, one of the lead authors on the study, said of the findings: ‘There is a big yawning gap between girls and boys. We need to really think about how we are reaching out to girls … The school playground is an important starting point. Often you will find it dominated by boys playing football.’
The rate of exercise drops by as much as 40 per cent as children move through primary school.[11] And this decline didn’t stop for me at secondary school, where we were marched down to a sodden field to play hockey (I told you it was gendered, netball was the only other option). I would inevitably be picked last and then proceed to stand as far away from the action as possible. As we got a bit older, our options for exercise were an unaccompanied walk round the local park, or aerobics. Given that the park contained a) boys and b) cigarettes, guess where I went?
Women in Sport recently conducted research into the variation between girls’ and boys’ levels of exercise, and they found that just 12 per cent of girls aged fourteen got enough physical activity every week.[12][13] Despite this dismal number, 76 per cent of fifteen-year-old girls said that they would like to do more physical activity but were discouraged by the sports on offer to them. The other (and to my mind, sadder) reason that they gave for not participating was that they thought that sport was ‘unfeminine’. I remember that feeling clearly – a sense that exercise was just not dignified or elegant. It involved sweat and grunting and angry screwed-up faces, and could well end up in embarrassment, a thing all teenagers wisely (or perhaps just instinctively?) avoid like the plague.
As children leave full-time education, exercise rates can decline further. Sure, some will make time for a run or a gym session, but it gets harder. If you end up going to university, it’s unlikely you’ll be making time for sport when there’s so much work to do and terrible fancy dress parties to attend. There’s a reason why people gloomily talk about the ‘Freshers’ Fifteen’ – the old but accurate cliché that you put on weight in the first year of studying. This mirrored my experience, where activity meant getting out of bed past midday and possibly walking to the local shop for fags and crisps. A fairly normal experience for a student then, except that, unfortunately, this is also the age when some anxiety disorders are known to manifest themselves most severely – for example, OCD usually develops before the age of twenty.[14] While aspects of anxiety will be present in kids from a much younger age (phobias show up in children as young as seven), early adulthood is the perfect time for more serious aspects of anxiety and depression to hit, and hit hard. And that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone – after all, this is the time when the carefully regimented structures of education and family fall away and you are mostly in charge for the first time. Some thrive with the new responsibilities that they’ve been given, but many will not. I did not.
Having managed to leave school with most of my childish worries lying fairly dormant, I was knocked off my feet one day at university, when, completely out of the blue, I had a terrible panic attack in a courtyard. I was so unprepared for these feelings to rear up on me again that I deployed my trusty ostrich manoeuvre and tried to ignore it. Instead of questioning why it had happened, I simply avoided all thought of it. But the feelings of rising panic increased in a frighteningly short period of time, and within a fortnight I had developed a new symptom which horrified me more than any I had previously experienced: disassociation. The clever (not a compliment) thing about anxiety is that the moment you’ve got a handle on one thing (night sweats, panic attacks, dizziness, nausea, headaches – come sit by me), it’ll throw you another one, and you better believe it’ll be worse.
Disassociation (or derealisation) is a condition which makes the world suddenly seem unreal. Actually, I don’t think I’ve made this sound as heart-stoppingly awful as it is. It’s not just the world that feels unreal – it’s that the people you love the most seem fake, your home feels like a film set, your dog looks flat, your own face doesn’t look like your face. Everything feels staged and wrong and just … off. I later learnt that psychiatrists believe that it’s a sensation your brain employs when it’s exhausted from worrying – shutting your mind down (somewhat). So it’s actually an attempt at protection, but to me it feels a bit like a mate who sleeps with your partner and earnestly explains that they only did it to help you. I’m not saying thank you either way.
What would have happened if I’d just put on some trainers and tried to outrun these awful feelings? It’s something I’ve asked myself repeatedly in the years since. Nothing is as simple as that, and it would be insulting and irresponsible to even hint that it could be. Running is not a cure-all for severe mental illness, or anything else for that matter. It’s right to acknowledge that early on. But I often think of the girl I was in my twenties and wish I could go back and try other things, as many of my friends did when things got difficult. Your twenties are a time for experimenting, having fun and enjoying everything that life may offer you, or so we’re told. Instead, for many people, I think they are a time of massive insecurity, debt, and a sense of displacement – a decade of worry and fear. So I did what I could. I dropped out of Uni, went to a psychiatrist and took the antidepressants that I was swiftly prescribed. What else could I do? At this point, suicidal thoughts were creeping in, and even through my wildly unreal prism, I could tell that those thoughts would only lead somewhere I didn’t want to think about in further detail.
Despite all of this, I was