Mental Health Awareness Week and the Body Image. Blog#29
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week with an emphasis this year on Body Image. I am hosting a workshop Friday 17th of May at 3pm in Aviation House in Holborn, London. If you wish to attend contact me. If you can’t make it here is a brief overlook of how I will structure that workshop.
Some alarming numbers from the mental health foundation
One in five adults (20%) felt shame, just over one third (34%) felt down or low, and 19% felt disgusted because of their body image in the last year.
Just over one third of adults said they had ever felt anxious (34%) or depressed (35%) because of their body image.
One in eight (13%) adults experienced suicidal thoughts or feelings because of concerns about their body image.
Just over one in five adults (22%) and 40% of teenagers said images on social media caused them to worry about their body image.
Research has found that higher body dissatisfaction is associated with a poorer quality of life, psychological distress and the risk of unhealthy eating behaviours and eating disorders.
Let’s dismantle the mechanics of the mind to understand why we are so body conscious
We own 2 minds. The rational, analytical and intelligent conscious mind that we use everyday to solve problems and take decisions. This mind is only 5% of our mind. The subconscious mind on the other hand is 95% of our mind. It runs the autonomic nervous system and contains every single piece of information we have ever seen, heard, witnessed, felt or experienced from the moment we owned a consciousness as baby. It is an emotional mind.
The subconscious emotional mind is not only a memory bank but also an automatic pilot system that is the collection of all associations it has collected during childhood. It is called the belief system. Beliefs are the lenses and filters we perceive and experience the world through. We borrow them from our upbringing. There is not one universal truth and reality. Only our interpretation of it. Beliefs are numerous. Every single one of our action and reaction are connected to one particular belief. By the age of 7/10 about 90% of our beliefs are solid. We are essentially our beliefs. Hence my motto: Life is a placebo.
An example relevant to the topic of that article
Jane has been a bikini fitness body building competitor for few years. Her life consist of training most days, eating the same boring clean food everyday, spending a fortune in supplements, avoiding common social activities as it would jeopardise her discipline and generally hating her life. All this for a mere hour of glory on the stage 3 times a year in front of strangers, being painted brown and orange and pretending to be happy and healthy when actually suffering a state of extreme tiredness and dehydration.
People may ask her why she is putting herself through that in exchange of such little reward. Her answer to that, her justification, which is what the conscious mind thinks would be perhaps:” I love being on stage, I love competing. I love pushing my body and mind to the extreme. I live for it”. The real underlying reason is a belief stored within her subconscious mind and that could be:” I am not enough. I believe that for me in order to be enough I must do certain things, I must behave in a certain way, I must look a certain look...” and that is connected to another belief:” If I am not enough I might get rejected and if I get rejected I might not survive”.
It is important to highlight that I am not judging anyone’s lifestyle or motive. I am only showing my perspective from a therapist’s perspective. Some people will see sense. Some won’t. I always tell people:”Only you know what is best for you because it is your life and no one else’s, but it is important to understand the mechanism of our mind in order to take the best decisions”.
You are enough
The main toxic belief we inherit from our observation of the world as children is: I am not enough. If we were we wouldn’t worry about what others think or say about us, we wouldn’t obsess over the numbers of followers and likes we get on the social medias, we wouldn’t care about the way we look or the way people look at us... So how do we tackle this ? Here are some Mindset strategies.
Change the narrative
There is a voice in our head that is constantly reminding us how we are not enough. It is our ego, our inner critic, the self negative talk, the monkey chatter... It is constantly putting us down and we essentially allow ourselves to get hypnotised by it every day and all the time. We need to realise that that voice is an aspect of our auto pilot and we can absolutely upgrade it. A thought creates a feeling, an emotion in the body, so we want to choose kind and compassionate thoughts to elicit empowering feelings and emotions. Instead of thinking:” I look fat in those clothes. I hate my body. I wish I was different”. We want to focus on the good stuff and think:” I like my eyes, I like my smile, the sound of my laughter. I have numerous qualities. I can and I will invest some time at the gym tonight after work because I believe in looking after my health and well being, but I am already content with the way I look right now”.
The most important aspect of that tool is making it a new habit. Sometime people tell me:” It doesn’t work”. So I ask them “How long have you been practicing ?”. “5 full minutes”.So I ask them:”How long have you been suffering from those disempowering beliefs ? “25 years”... It takes time to undo old bad habits and form and keep new and better habits.
Change the perceptual environment routine
The mind is like a CCTV camera always picking up on everything that is happening inside and outside of us each moment at a time. Our perceptual environment is what we perceive via senses and sensations. Which means that as much as our inner world is manifested in our outer world, our outer world also affects our inner world. So for instance it is interesting to know that there are 43 muscles in the face and whenever we activate a certain face we are sending off a specific message to the subconscious mind. Because the mind does what it thinks we want it to do, if we grin that will trigger and/or reinforce the corresponding feeling for the body to feel. Research and studies have demonstrated that changing our facial expression literally changed the brain chemistry. They asked a group of people suffering from manic depression to smile for 20 minutes, even if they didn’t feel like it, and they started to feel better on the spot. So we want to SMILE !!!...until we feel it.
The same is true for our body language and posture. Instead of walking crouched down with the hands in the pockets or crossed on our chest and staring at our feet we want to look up, lift our chest, walk tall and proud, to send the message to our mind that we are confident, that we feel safe, that we and nobody else is in charge of our happiness.
We want to treat ourselves with make overs. Dress in a way that make us feel gorgeous, colourful, joyful, cool or sharp. We can change our clothes, our hair, our make up, our accessories. We want to create a better reflection in the mirror for our mind to admire and be proud of.
The last aspect of our environment are people. Any toxicity is to be avoided whenever applicable because people who put us down all the time are essentially along with our inner critic hypnotising us into believing that we are not enough. In case we can’t physically distance ourselves from toxic people for one reason or another we must:
Change our need of approval
One of the hardest thing to master for many of us is to never take anything personally. We must change our habits of reaction. Whatever people think or say about us is only ever a manifestation of their own insecurities. So when a colleague or family member criticises the way we look we can think:” He or she suffers from deep insecurities, those insecurities are theirs not mine. I don’t need or want to be infected by them, I am enough. With love and compassion for them but most importantly for me I am choosing to ignore their noise and I am choosing to feel great about myself”. And as they feel that they have no longer any power over us because we are not reacting anymore, because we are telling them that we actually love the way we look and couldn’t care less about other people’s opinion, they eventually either drift away or are inspired by our courage.
The social medias are a tool. Not truth. Not dogmas or universal canons of enoughness for the world to abide by. A tool is only as good or as bad as the way we use it. We want to regain control and become master of that tool as opposed to the slave of it. So a good idea would be to switch off all notifications on our devices and only check them out sparsely in our own time as a starter. Then take everything with a pinch of salt. The social media is virtual reality. People there don’t act, behave or speak in the way they do in real life, so we must remember that it is only an imitation of life, it is entertainment, distraction, smoke and mirrors. Per se and used that way there is nothing bad or harmful about the social medias.
The ultimate resource
Those tools work mainly at a superficial level because they are operated from the superficial conscious mind. Our baggages come in all size and shape. For those whose life is affected gravely by their obsession of the body image RTT (Marisa Peer’s Rapid Transformational Therapy) is the quickest and most powerful protocol on the planet to address any deep emotional imbalance. Contact me today for a free 20 minutes discovery call.