Jog On

Have you ever wondered how something as simple as jogging could transform your relationship with fear, anxiety, and even yourself? In Jog On Journal, Bella Mackie—journalist and author of the bestseller Jog On: How Running Saved My Life—argues that running isn’t just exercise; it’s a form of therapy, a daily mental practice, and a way to rewrite how you live with anxiety. She contends that the rhythm of running and the deliberate act of journalling can help you untangle fears, concentrate your mind, and rediscover a sense of agency.

Mackie’s core message builds on her personal experience with decades of panic attacks, obsessive worries, and life-altering fear—and her discovery that movement, especially running, soothed the whirlwind of her thoughts. Through stories, structured reflections, and practical tips, she combines cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)-style exercises with running advice, creating what she calls a mental health ‘toolbox.’ In this guide, you learn how running can reconnect your body with your brain, build emotional resilience, and teach you to face fear both on and off the pavement.

The Body-Brain Connection

At its heart, this book argues that mental illness has a profoundly physical dimension. Anxiety, Mackie explains, isn’t just thought—it’s adrenaline, cortisol, and body chemistry running havoc. When you run, you don’t escape anxiety; you regulate it. The thundering heartbeat and shortness of breath, often mistaken for panic, become signs of strength. She details how exercise calms the overstimulated ‘fight-or-flight’ system and reeducates the body to distinguish danger from discomfort. You come to learn that fitness is not the end goal; balance is. As your body grows stronger, your mind starts believing it can survive what once felt impossible.

Journalling for Awareness

Parallel to the physical act of running is the reflective act of writing. Mackie invites you to use this journal as a Pensieve—a vessel to draw swirling thoughts out of your head and make them visible. You write down your fears, note physical sensations, track progress, and challenge worries with rational statements. In doing so, your thinking shifts from catastrophic spirals (“I’ll faint,” “I’ll die,” “I’ll go mad”) to logical self-reassurance (“I’m safe,” “I can stop at any time,” “This is my body working hard”). Combining writing and running transforms anxiety management from reactive coping into proactive living.

Realism Over Perfection

Mackie’s voice is pragmatic and dryly comic—she rejects glittery affirmations and emphasizes messy, incremental progress. The book isn’t about becoming an athlete. It’s about surviving bad mental health days and using movement to lessen their grip. You will exhaust yourself, get injuries, and feel bored; that’s normal. Each chapter alternates between ‘Mental Health’ reflections and practical ‘Running’ sections, acknowledging that the journey is cyclical. Improvement doesn’t mean cure—it means confidence. Her point is that a run and a journal entry can each act as temporary anchors when your brain feels adrift.

Hope Through Humor and Honesty

By fusing empathy with blunt honesty, Mackie reclaims self-help from saccharine positivity. Her most radical claim is that you must confront fears intentionally—‘scare yourself on purpose’—to rebuild emotional courage. She describes overcoming claustrophobia in lifts and travelling alone after years of agoraphobia. Running was her rehearsal for these trials; every jog was a small exposure therapy session. Her playful metaphors (“anxiety is like my rescue dog—responds well to training treats, badly to being ignored”) make hard truths digestible: that long-term healing demands repetition, discomfort, and kindness toward yourself.

Why This Matters

The Jog On Journal matters because it bridges two worlds—the internal experience of anxiety and the external discipline of movement. Mackie speaks to readers who’ve found traditional therapy insufficient or intimidating. By giving you pens and trainers instead of prescriptions, she turns healing into something tangible. In doing so, she reframes exercise not as punishment or perfectionism, but as liberation—the steady proof that you can put one foot in front of the other, literally and metaphorically, even when your mind insists you can’t.

One of Mackie’s most insightful sections dissects how anxiety hijacks the body’s built-in survival wiring. She likens anxiety’s persistence to a faulty smoke alarm—the fight-or-flight system fires up even when there’s no real blaze. Fear, she reminds you, is healthy when facing real danger, but anxiety is misplaced fear—a rehearsal for disasters that won’t happen. When that system misfires, the body floods itself with adrenaline and cortisol, creating racing hearts, dizziness, trembling, and exhaustion that keep the brain convinced it’s under threat.

Fear vs. Anxiety

Mackie frames fear as ‘the sensible cousin of anxiety.’ Fear gets you out of burning buildings; anxiety tells you the building will catch fire every day until the thought consumes you. This differentiation changes everything. Once you treat anxiety as an unreliable narrator, you regain perspective. She encourages you to identify five times this system worked appropriately and five when it didn’t—to train your brain to distinguish emergencies from imagination.

Breaking the Cycle

She describes the exhaustion that follows days or weeks of heightened adrenaline—aches, headaches, trembling, and emotional crashes. To interrupt that cycle, Mackie gives actionable methods: exercise to use up adrenaline, meditation to quiet mental noise, laughter to reset hormones, and human connection to activate the ‘tend and befriend’ response, where safety replaces fear. Saying “I am safe” aloud, she writes, can short-circuit panic spirals. (Dr. Claire Weekes taught similar mantras in Self-Help for Your Nerves decades earlier.)

Reprogramming Self-Talk

The key is self-compassionate dialogue. “Our internal voices are so often complicit in making us feel worse,” Mackie says, urging readers to practice gentler countertalk like “I can do this” instead of “I’m a mess.” Anxiety thrives on self-recrimination; stepping back and observing a worry neutrally begins the rewiring. In the end, anxiety isn’t a moral failure—it’s a biological glitch that can be soothed with patience, humor, and consistent practice.

When Mackie laces up her trainers, running isn’t about cardiovascular fitness; it’s about survival. She describes her first run after a painful breakup as ‘a secret challenge’ and ‘a kind of rebellion against despair.’ That small act began a transformation from fear-driven immobility to physical freedom. Over time, she connects the runner’s rhythm and breath to CBT’s logic—both require awareness, pacing, and deliberate repetition.

Building Habits Through Small Wins

Borrowing from Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, Mackie explains that every habit depends on a trigger, routine, and reward. The trigger could be anxiety itself—the restless need to escape. The routine becomes running. The reward is feeling calm, proud, or simply tired enough to sleep. Her advice is grounded: run slowly, rest often, repeat weeks when necessary, and celebrate five-minute jogs without judgment. Consistent effort builds confidence, not competition.

Physical Sensations vs. Panic Signals

Early runners often mistake normal exertion for panic. Mackie patiently demystifies sweaty palms, pounding hearts, and shortness of breath as hard work, not illness. She teaches readers to reinterpret symptoms—a technique reminiscent of sports psychologist Michael Otto’s Exercise for Mood and Anxiety. Every time you tolerate discomfort, your brain learns that fear doesn’t equal danger.

Progress Without Perfection

Her mantra is simple: there’s no race, not even with yourself. This realism transforms running from another yardstick into a recovery ritual. Mackie’s humor (“eat cheese and drink wine after your first run”) reinforces that mental health isn’t all carrot sticks and discipline—it’s balance. When you shift from exercising to running for your mind, every jog, whether joyful or dreadful, becomes therapeutic time earned back from anxiety.

Mackie’s chapters on coping mechanisms show how anxiety tricks you into self-defeating behaviors. She catalogs maladaptive habits—avoidance, reassurance seeking, compulsions, overcontrol—and exposes how they reinforce fear loops. Her confessionals are brutally honest: avoiding perfume because of imagined allergies, repeating friend names while brushing her teeth, or seeking constant validation. Each behavior, she says, brought brief calm but long-term confinement.

Recognizing False Friends

Bad coping mechanisms are seductive because they minimize short-term distress. Mackie compares them to training treats for her rescue dog—quick comfort, zero growth. Avoiding scary places keeps you ‘safe,’ but also keeps fear powerful. Routines that feel protective can become prisons of predictability. She suggests writing down each habit, examining how it helps, then how it harms, revealing that anxiety behaves like a tyrant appeased by obedience.

The Shift to Adaptive Coping

Good coping skills, by contrast, are active and restorative. Guided self-help courses, CBT, mindfulness, creative hobbies, talking openly, medication, and nature exposure all populate her toolkit. Her CBT exercises mirror therapy homework: list worry thoughts, write realistic outcomes, rate your anxiety before and after. In doing so, you teach your brain to challenge catastrophizing automatically.

Talking and Connection

She is especially passionate about breaking silence. Sharing mental health openly, she argues, normalizes suffering and dismantles stigma. Her anecdote about a male reader confiding in his wife demonstrates that vulnerability breeds relief, not rejection. Anxiety thrives in isolation; community dissolves its secrecy. Mackie’s formula: awareness + honesty + exercise = a sustainable path toward control without perfectionism.

Every runner—and every recovering anxious person—hits setbacks. Mackie treats injuries like metaphors for emotional obstacles: they arrive unexpectedly, cause disappointment, and tempt you to quit. Her early experience with shin splints left her furious and discouraged, yet she reframed the pause as proof that progress isn’t linear. As with mental illness, rest isn’t failure—it’s part of healing.

Listening to Pain, Not Ignoring It

She lists common injuries—Achilles pain, plantar fasciitis, runner’s knee—and insists that pushing through pain worsens damage. The real skill is learning discernment: knowing when discomfort is productive and when it's protective. Her humor softens the frustration (“I burst my own eardrum with a cotton bud—injuries aren’t signs you weren’t meant to run”). Anxiety sufferers can apply the same principle: rest doesn't erase your worth—it ensures longevity.

Diversifying Your Toolbox

When running must pause, Mackie promotes a ‘toolbox approach’—a suite of mood stabilizers beyond exercise: cycling, yoga, baking, sunlight, nature walks. By diversifying, you’re not reliant on one coping method. (Psychologists call this “behavioral activation”—variety prevents mental freefall.) Maintaining such tools ensures continuity between body healing and emotional steadiness.

Reframing Setbacks as Lessons

Her conclusion is grounded optimism: injuries, interruptions, and low motivation are inevitable, but resilience grows from patience. Just as four years passed without further injury, four years of running also sustained her mental health. In both spheres, progress rewards those who keep faith in small recovery steps—proof that strength isn’t avoiding falls but rising again, body and mind aligned.

Late in the journal, Mackie unveils one of her most transformative techniques: purposeful fear. After regaining stability through running, she began deliberately confronting long-avoided situations—crowded spaces, elevators, solo flights, even trapeze lessons. This isn’t bravado; it’s exposure therapy, reframed through humor and empowerment. Running itself was her first exposure—an act of facing the body’s panic head-on.

Understanding Exposure Therapy

She describes how gradual desensitization rewires the brain. Start by imagining the feared situation, then look at photos, stand nearby, engage briefly, and eventually act. Mackie’s Tube example—taking one stop after a run, then two—shows how repetition erases fear’s novelty. What begins physiological (“my heart races”) becomes psychological mastery (“I can do this, it’s boring now”).

The Role of Physical Confidence

Physical strength fuels courage. Having proven you can handle the discomfort of exertion, your brain extends that confidence to emotional arenas. Mackie argues that exercise isn’t just instrumental; it’s symbolic proof that fear can be endured and outlasted. When you internalize that truth, you approach challenges—whether social or professional—with new steadiness.

Why Facing Fear Frees You

Her tone shifts from self-deprecation to genuine exhortation: use your newfound strength. Anxiety shrinks life into a small circle of avoidance; courage expands it again. Mackie no longer measures recovery by lack of panic but by how wide her world has become. The takeaway: don’t wait until fear subsides before living—move first, and fear will catch up slower every time.

Mackie closes her journal with honesty rather than easy triumph. Running didn’t cure her anxiety—it became armor. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s persistence. She urges you to treat every jog, journal entry, or moment of calm as proof of commitment to yourself. Pride, she insists, is earned not by speed or medals, but by the decision to keep trying.

Recognizing the Ups and Downs

Some runs will be euphoric, others monotonous or awful, yet all count equally toward healing. She counters the myth that only joy-filled workouts matter, asserting instead that dull, rainy, painful sessions build resilience that glittery highs can’t. Emotional maintenance works the same way—steady, repetitive self-care outlasts bursts of inspiration.

Balance and Punishment

Her sharp humor rejects self-punishing health culture. “You’re not training for a gold medal; you can have wine and croissants.” This levity serves a psychological purpose—it protects against obsession and guilt. Mackie’s ‘running monk’ warning reminds readers that true wellbeing allows indulgence, rest, and joy alongside discipline.

Self-Acceptance as the End Goal

Ultimately, Jog On Journal isn’t about transforming into a serene optimist. It’s about feeling proud that, in spite of anxiety, you choose motion. Mackie’s closing exhortation—‘keep running, keep challenging yourself, keep doing it even when it’s hard’—encapsulates the book’s ethos. Recovery, like a marathon, exists not in speed but in the decision to show up for yourself, mile after mile.