Behavior: How to Be Fit but Neurotic

He is as healthy as a hound dog. He lifts weights, jogs, does pushups, plays squash on his lunch hour and likes to get out there with the kids and make like Joe Namath. Yet, in his prolonged obsession with physical prowess, the middle-age fitness fanatic may be exceptionally vulnerable to mental illness.

This somewhat unsettling conclusion was reached by Scottish Psychiatrist J. Crawford Little after analyzing the cases of 72 neurotic male patients. Among 44 men who were intensely concerned with their athletic ability, Little reports in the journal A eta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 32 suffered from neuroses that had been set off by physical ailments. Often they were trifling, such as a sprained ankle or a bout of flu. Of 28 nonathletic neurotics, however, only three had mental problems that could be traced at least partially to physical sources. Most of the athletic patients had been fit all their lives and had had happy childhoods, successful marriages and stable personal relationships. But, Little says, "they were overinvolved with physical fitness and health and had come to value them very highly." Thus, in their late 30s and early 40s, when strength started to deteriorate, the athletic patients had become very sensitive to their physical condition.

"This kind of man," says Little, "needs only a slight illness to trigger off a serious neurosis that often lasts for years and is very difficult to cure. The most valuable thing in life—his fitness—has been taken away, and he can't fill the gap." Most of Little's nonathletic patients could take physical illness in stride. Their neuroses had more familiar origins: problems in marriage or work.

How can health buffs protect themselves against middle-age neurosis? Little, who is 47 and confines his exercise to the mild seasonal Scottish sport of curling (a kind of bowling on ice), suggests that they take up painting or rose growing—almost any avocation other than strenuous athletics. "Unless he has something else to fall back on." the psychiatrist warns, "a man playing hockey or football beyond the age of 42 is asking for trouble."