Mark: Most of us run away from pain. But what if the secret to healing your mind is to run directly towards a different kind of pain—the kind that leaves you breathless, with aching muscles and a stitch in your side? Michelle: That sounds completely counterintuitive. Like fighting fire with more fire. It sounds like madness. Mark: It does. But it might just save your life. That's the radical idea at the heart of Bella Mackie's memoir, Jog On: How Running Saved My Life. Michelle: And Bella Mackie isn't some lifelong fitness guru, right? That's what's so compelling. She's a journalist, daughter of the former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, who actually dropped out of university because her anxiety was so severe. Mark: Exactly. This book comes from a place of genuine crisis. It was written after her marriage collapsed, and she found herself at absolute rock bottom, realizing she had no tools to cope. That's where our story begins—at that moment of total collapse.

Michelle: I think so many people can relate to that feeling, even if the circumstances are different. The moment you realize your usual ways of getting by just… aren't working anymore. Mark: And for Mackie, it was a brutal awakening. She describes the immediate aftermath of a sudden breakup with this incredibly visceral quote. She says it feels like, "Somewhere, something in your body has savagely ruptured, and all you can think to do is to lie down on the floor and wait to be invited to walk down the inevitable tunnel of light." Michelle: Wow. That’s not just sadness, that’s a physical sensation of being broken. It speaks to how deeply intertwined our emotional and physical selves are. Mark: Precisely. And the book makes it clear this wasn't just about heartbreak. The breakup was the trigger, but the real problem was a lifetime of unmanaged anxiety. She tells this story from when she was eighteen, at a nightclub with friends. Michelle: Oh, I think I remember this part. It’s terrifying. Mark: It is. She has a massive panic attack. Her heart is racing, she can't breathe, she's dizzy. She genuinely thinks she's having a stroke or a heart attack. But she doesn't have the words for it. She doesn't know what a panic attack is. Michelle: And what do her friends do? Mark: They're drunk, and they just laugh at her. They think it's funny. So she's left feeling utterly alone, terrified, and ashamed. She just buries it. Michelle: That’s heartbreaking. And that shame becomes a pattern, right? She built a life around the anxiety instead of confronting it. Mark: A perfect way to put it. She developed all these avoidance behaviors. She became agoraphobic, she had intrusive thoughts, she even experienced something called disassociation, where the world around her felt unreal, like a movie set. It got so bad in her early twenties that she had to drop out of university. Michelle: Can you break down what that disassociation actually feels like? Because it sounds like something out of a horror film. Mark: She describes it as looking in the mirror and not recognizing her own face, or seeing people and feeling like they're just fake props. Her brain, exhausted from constant worry, was essentially creating a buffer between her and reality as a defense mechanism. But it was terrifying. Michelle: So all these years, she'd constructed this fragile life, avoiding triggers, relying on her marriage as an anchor. And when that anchor was suddenly ripped away, the whole structure just collapsed. Mark: Completely. The book details the final moments of her marriage, after her husband was in a traumatic car accident. He retreated into himself, and the distance between them grew. She was spiraling, and one day he just told her he was leaving. She was left with nothing but the raw anxiety she'd been trying to outrun her whole life. She had hit rock bottom.

Mark: And in that rubble, with no other tools, she did something completely impulsive and, frankly, a little absurd. One week after her husband left, she put on her headphones, blasted an angry song, and went for a run. Michelle: But she wasn't a runner. At all. Mark: Not even close. She chose a dark alleyway near her flat so no one would see her. She ran in short, painful bursts. She felt ridiculous, exhausted, and ashamed. She only managed to run for a total of three minutes, in stages. Michelle: That sounds awful. Did it even help? Mark: Here's the crucial part. She says she didn't feel better. But she realized that for fifteen minutes, she hadn't cried. Michelle: Wow. Okay, so this isn't about a 'runner's high' or feeling amazing. This is about distraction. It's about finding something, anything, that's louder than the pain in your head for a few minutes. Mark: That's it exactly. The physical pain was a welcome replacement for the emotional pain. It was a tiny, controllable victory. And surprisingly, she did it again the next day. And the next. It became her ritual. Michelle: It's the agency in that, isn't it? In a life that feels completely out of control, choosing to put one foot in front of the other is something you can decide to do. Mark: Yes. And slowly, it started to change things. She started exploring. She tells this amazing story about deciding to run past her usual boundaries, into the heart of London. Michelle: A place she would have actively avoided before, right? Because of the crowds and the overstimulation. Mark: The very places that terrified her. She ran across bridges, through Parliament Square, into Soho. She was so focused on her surroundings, on the physical act of moving through the city, that she didn't have time to be anxious. She describes this moment of stopping, looking around, and just feeling triumphant. Michelle: So she was accidentally doing exposure therapy on herself. By running through the places that scared her, she was taking back control. She was rewriting her mental map of the city from a place of fear to a place of strength. That's brilliant. Mark: It is. And the book backs this up with research. It's not just a feeling. One study she cites found that people who jogged for 30 minutes had a much more subdued negative reaction to an emotional film clip afterward. The exercise literally changed their emotional response. Michelle: And it’s not just about solitary running, is it? She talks about the community aspect, too. Mark: A huge part of it. She mentions a survey by Glasgow Caledonian University on Parkrun participants. They found that these runners scored significantly higher on the happiness scale than the general population. It's the combination of movement, fresh air, and community. Michelle: It makes so much sense. You're moving your body, you're achieving a small goal, and you're surrounded by people who are all there for the same reason. It combats loneliness and inertia in one go.

Michelle: So when you put it all together, this book isn't really a 'how-to' guide for running. It's a story about the power of agency. Mark: Precisely. It's about finding one, tiny, controllable thing in a life that feels completely out of control. For Mackie, it was the rhythm of her feet on the pavement. That one controllable act became a foothold, a place to start climbing back from. Michelle: And she's very clear that running isn't 'magic beans,' as she puts it. It's not a cure-all. She had to deal with profound grief when a close friend died, and the running didn't erase that sadness. Mark: That's such an important point. She realized running couldn't insulate her from the genuine sadness of life. It wasn't about suppressing emotion, but building the resilience to process it without falling apart. She had to learn to scale back the running and actually allow herself to feel the grief. Michelle: I think that’s what makes the book so credible and impactful. It avoids easy answers. It acknowledges the messiness of it all. Mark: And that's the core wisdom here. The goal isn't to outrun your problems. It's to build the physical and mental strength to endure them. As Mackie concludes in the book, "It’s not an exaggeration to say that I ran myself out of misery." But the happy ending isn't a life without problems. The happy ending is living with them. It's about finding the fortitude to carry on. Michelle: It makes you think... what's the one small, controllable thing you could do when everything feels chaotic? It might not be running, but what's your version of putting one foot in front of the other? Mark: A powerful question. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Find us on our socials and share what resonates with you. What's your 'run'? Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.