Mental Health is Physical Health
- Alan Bradshaw
- Jul 1
- 9 min read
Emily Forbes, Whole-Wellness™ Architect and Executive Coach
Emily's Bio
Emily Forbes is a Whole-Wellness™ Architect, Executive coach, former public sector CEO, and author of Too Hard to Swallow. Her work sits at the intersection of wellbeing science, nervous system understanding, and the realities of senior leadership — with lived experience of complex chronic illness at its centre. She is the founder of Wylde Wellbeing and creator of the Whole-Wellness™ framework, an evidence-based model that treats the body not as a liability to manage, but as the most honest intelligence we have. She is shortly commencing doctoral research to test and develop the framework further. She writes and works from the position that mental health is inseparable from physical health — that capability is not the same as capacity — and that the systems women are asked to lead within have yet to catch up with either truth.
Emily's Blog
It’s quite hilarious to suggest that you can have autonomy over an autonomic function in your body, isn’t it?
Autonomy — the ability to make choices about your own life — sits at the heart of the 2026 Delphi Consensus Taxonomy of Positive Mental Health[1]. One hundred and twenty two international experts across eleven disciplines and twenty-six countries to attempt reaching consensus on what positive mental health actually is. They identified nineteen core dimensions — and the highest-consensus ones paint a picture worth recognising. According to the experts, positive mental health looks like:
● meaning and purpose
● life satisfaction
● self-acceptance
● connection
● autonomy
● happiness
These are the dimensions that reached over 90%.. And I recognise all of this — not from theory alone, but from living it, from losing it, and from working alongside others navigating the same territory.
For nine years working as a CEO of a Town Council, I led teams, coached and galvanised councillors and staff through the challenges the public sector faced and worked hard to engage communities. Since founding Wylde Wellbeing, I directly coach and mentor women — bringing everything I witnessed in those leadership years into a more intentional, one-to-one space.
I also bring my own lived experience. As I navigate dysphagia, oesophageal dysmotility, gastrointestinal dysfunction, deep infiltrating endometriosis, psoriasis, allergies, hypermobility spectrum disorder, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue. This is an interconnected system of chronic conditions that shape every dimension of my capacity — physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and relational.
What I have observed — both as a leader and as a woman living with this complexity, and now as a coach — is something consistent: when women lose access to the dimensions of positive mental health set out above, it is never just one that disappears - it is a cascade.
When chronic illness strikes, meaning can feel threatened — who am I if I can’t perform at this level? Autonomy fragments — the body makes decisions the mind did not consent to. Energy evaporates. Connection becomes effortful or impossible. Isolation and loneliness increase. The systems around them — workplaces, health services, family structures — often fail to adapt, which compounds the loss further.
I’ve learned that you cannot separate any one of these dimensions from the others. You can’t have genuine autonomy if your body is not physically functioning. You can’t experience real meaning if you're dysregulated and overwhelmed with symptoms. You cannot feel connected if you are ashamed of what your body can no longer do. The mind does not flourish in isolation from the physical reality it lives in.
The Delphi Taxonomy captures something essential about what positive mental health looks like; and it’s incomplete in a way that matters profoundly.
The exclusion: what the taxonomy left out
The Delphi panel explicitly excluded two significant domains:
Spirituality — because it failed to reach the seventy-five percent consensus threshold. The experts deemed it too value-laden, too difficult to generalise across populations.
Physical Health — because the panel tended to view it as a cause or condition of mental health, not as a constituent dimension of it.
This reveals something important: the taxonomy reflects a largely Western, psychological view of wellbeing which authors acknowledged this limitation themselves and here’s what that exclusion means in real life.
The body speaks: why separation creates harm
In my book Too Hard to Swallow, I documented my own swallowing and oesophageal dysfunction — a very real, very physical condition. It was not a mental health issue. And yet it directly shaped my purpose, my emotions, my relationships, my sense of control over my own body and life. The body and mind are not separate systems; they are one integrated whole.
I’ve done the work. The real, deep and difficult inner work. Years of processing the grief of losing my former identity, career and rebuilding who I am now. Psychological frameworks to understand my triggers, somatic tools to regulate my nervous system, accepting what I cannot change. I’ve read the books (I’ve even written one). I’ve done everything the mental health taxonomies say you should do.
And then I had faecal incontinence in a public garden while I was trying to do all the right things — getting rest, spending time in nature, making social connections, being present with my family.
My body made a choice my mind didn’t consent to.
For years, I thought the answer was better coping strategies. Stronger resilience. More sophisticated psychological frameworks. I thought if I could just get my mind right, my body would follow.
It didn’t.
What the soul says, the science evidences!
Dr Bessel van der Kolk’s [2] work shows us that trauma affects the body - including autonomic, hormonal, immune and sensory systems. Dr Gabor Maté [3] argues that emotional wounds have direct physiological consequences — that chronic stress is not merely a psychological state but a biological one, with measurable impact on immune function, inflammation, and disease. The gut-brain axis is no longer theory — it is measurable neurobiology. Research confirms [4] that gut dysbiosis is linked to depression and anxiety through multiple bidirectional pathways: neurotransmitters, immune signalling, and metabolic by-products all travelling between gut and brain in constant conversation. Dr Sula Windgassen [5] makes this vivid: the mind-body-environment connection is not poetic language. It is physiology. It is how we function.
When mental health frameworks exclude physical health, we create a false division — and a dangerous one. We risk telling people that their symptoms are not real, or that they are solvable through thought work alone, when the body needs rhythm, nutrition, nervous system regulation, alongside any medical interventions.
Your body knows before your mind does
The body keeps the score. It always does.
Here is what neuroscience reveals that the taxonomy cannot capture: your nervous system is constantly scanning — not just your thoughts, but your body’s internal state and the environment around you. Stephen Porges called this neuroception: [6] the automatic, pre-conscious process by which your nervous system assesses safety or threat, before a single conscious thought has formed.
Interoception[7] is the counterpart — your conscious capacity, sensibility and awareness to accurately notice and interpret those internal signals. My heart is racing. My shoulders are tight. My stomach feels twisted. My breathing has become shallow. These signals are not noise. They are your body’s primary language, often more truthful than what your thinking mind is telling you.
When you are in chronic stress, burnout, or navigating chronic illness, interoceptive awareness often breaks down. You stop noticing the signals. Or you notice them and override them — I’m fine, I can push through — because the systems around you have taught you that your body’s needs are secondary to performance.
This is where the cascade begins.
A different move entirely
This is where the Whole-Wellness™ Theory of Capacity — a framework I am developing, grounded in lived experience and research, and one I will be testing rigorously through doctoral study — makes a different move entirely.
It doesn’t separate the mind from the body. It doesn’t assume capability automatically translates to capacity. It doesn’t ask you to fix your psychology and wait for your body to catch up. Instead, it starts with a radical question: what if we stopped trying to separate ourselves into pieces and started honouring the fact that we are one integrated system — physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social and environmental — all of it connected, all of it mattering?
Whole-Wellness™ operates across five integrated domains:
• Physical — the literal biology: sleep, nutrition, movement, the functioning of organs and systems, nervous system state
• Mental — cognition, decision-making, focus, the capacity to think clearly under pressure
• Emotional — the granularity of feeling, emotional regulation, the ability to name what is happening inside
• Spiritual — meaning, purpose, values alignment, identity, the question of who you are beyond your role
• Social and Environmental — the systems around you, the relationships that sustain or drain you, the structural support — or absence of it — available to you
These do not exist in silos. A woman navigating chronic illness and leadership is not managing five separate challenges — she is managing five domains in constant conversation with each other. Her physical fatigue affects her thinking. Her spiritual meaning-making shapes what she can physically sustain. The systems around her either replenish or deplete her capacity across all five domains simultaneously.
At the centre sit two things: Awareness — the capacity to read what is actually happening inside the whole system — and Agency — the capacity to act on what you notice. Interoception is the neurobiological mechanism [8] that makes both possible
What if you stopped asking “am I capable?” and started asking “does my body have the capacity?”.
What if mental health wasn’t something that happened in your head at all?
Your Interoception Check-In: A Five-Domain Reflection
This Mental Health Awareness Week, the theme is Action. Here is one action that costs nothing and requires only honesty: pause and check in with yourself across all five domains.
Not how you think you should be feeling. How you actually are.
Physical
• When did you last notice what your body was telling you — before it had to shout?
• Are you moving through your days on rhythm and recovery, or on adrenaline and override?
• What does your energy actually feel like right now, underneath the performance of being fine?
Mental
• Is your thinking clear and spacious, or fragmented and full?
• When did you last make a decision that felt genuinely considered — rather than reactive?
• Where is your attention being pulled that you haven’t consciously chosen?
Emotional
• Can you name, with precision, what you are feeling right now — or does it just feel like a lot?
• What emotion have you been carrying this week that you haven’t yet given space to?
• Where are you performing an emotion that isn’t true?
Spiritual
• Does what you are doing day to day feel connected to what really matters to you?
• When did you last feel a genuine sense of meaning — not achievement, but meaning?
• Who are you, underneath the roles you are currently holding?
Social and Environmental
• Are the systems around you — your workplace, your relationships, your healthcare — supporting your capacity or depleting it?
• Where are you giving more than is sustainable, and what would it mean to name that out loud?
• Who in your life sees you — not your performance, but you?
There are no right answers here. This is not a diagnostic tool. It is an invitation — to begin listening to yourself with the same rigour and care that 122 experts gave to defining what positive mental health looks like.
Because you already know what it feels like when you have it. And your body has been trying to tell you when you don’t.
Mental health is physical health
The nineteen dimensions are aspirational, helpful and point toward something real about what humans need to thrive. But they’re not necessarily written for bodies that don’t co-operate! If you’re living with chronic illness, chronic pain, dysregulation, disability, invisible dysfunction — then the real work isn’t improving your mental health in isolation. It’s learning to design a life that honours your capability and your capacity across your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual and relational wellbeing.
The Delphi Taxonomy asks: what is positive mental health?
Whole-Wellness™ asks: how do we sustain capacity across all dimensions?
These are not competing questions. They are consecutive ones.
Because mental health is not something that happens only in your head. It never was.
References
Barrett, L. F., & Simmons, W. K. (2015). Interoceptive predictions in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(7), 419–429.
Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1), 1–23.
Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655–666.
Cureus, (2025) doi: 10.7759/cureus.80810
Garfinkel, S. N., Seth, A. K., Barrett, A. B., Suzuki, K., & Critchley, H. D. (2015). Knowing your own heart: Distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness. Biological Psychology, 104, 65–74.
Iasiello, M., van Agteren, J., Ali, K. et al. (2026). A Delphi consensus study on the dimensions of positive mental health. Nature Mental Health, 4, 746–753. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-026-00617-5
Maté, G. (2003). When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. Knopf Canada.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking / Penguin Books.
Windgassen, S. (2026). It’s All In Your Body. Hodder & Stoughton.
This piece was developed with AI as a thinking and structuring partner. The argument, the lived experience, the framework, and the direction are entirely my own.
wyldewellbeing.uk | Mental Health Awareness Week | May 2026
[1] Iasiello, M., van Agteren, J., Ali, K. et al. (2026). A Delphi consensus study on the dimensions of positive mental health. Nature Mental Health, 4, 746–753. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-026-00617-5
[2] The Body Keeps the Score, 2014.
[3] When the Body Says No, 2003
[4]https://www.cureus.com/articles/350433-the-bidirectional-relationship-between-the-gut-microbiome-and-mental-health-a-comprehensive-review#!/
[5] It’s All In Your Body (2026)
[6] The Polyvagal Theory, 2011
[7] Craig, 2002
[8] (Barrett & Simmons, 2015; Garfinkel et al., 2015).
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