Hi everyone, it's Keisonga. Just a reminder that you can listen to all of our
podcasts at free on the Headspace app.
Hi there, I'm Dr. Niru Bukshi, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio
Headspace and to Wednesday. By now you probably know that this week we're
talking about feeling at home in our bodies. One thing I want to start with is
just an acknowledgement that our bodies are amazing. They are incredible. They
keep us alive, help us engage with the world and do the things that we love to do.
But oftentimes how they look is under way more scrutiny than the amazing
things that they actually do. We're bombarded with images about what we're
supposed to look like or ideas of what our bodies should look like and this
is some pretty unrealistic or even just flat out and possible standards. But
despite all this it is possible to develop a healthier self-image which is
exactly what we're gonna talk about today. And yes this is more than just
deleting your TikTok.
Body image is really simply defined as the way that we view ourselves and
how we navigate the world around us. I think this has become such a hot topic
lately because everybody's gotten opinion on what their own body and what
everybody else's bodies around them should look like. When we're children it is
when we really actually start to have an awareness of our bodies and how our
bodies move and function. And in my research there are studies that show girls as
young as seven eight nine years old being more aware of how their bodies look
in comparison to other girls in their same environment at the same age as
them. I was thinking about recently I volunteered with a local girl scout
troop and I was helping the girls scout sell cookies outside of a local grocery
store and it was just so fascinating to me to hear the way that adults who
would approach the booth were talking with these girls who were in the fourth
and fifth grades and they would say things about well you know I'm too fat so
I shouldn't be eating cookies or you know those cookies aren't good for you
right girls and at this young age when a fourth or fifth grader is being asked
a question by an adult that ends with right there's this automatic pressure
that they feel to agree whether they do or not but there's this pressure because
this adult is asking them to agree with them and it really reinforces then where
they're at in this time in their lives when the body comparison starts and
here are these figures of authority adults telling them you know that their
own bodies aren't valuable or that they don't appreciate the way that their
own bodies look and so then that can kick off this firestorm of negative
self-perception and that even if I feel good about my body I'm supposed to
criticize my body and oftentimes we see that that's the way that teenagers and
adolescents communicate with each other is in ways that they think that they
need to improve their bodies and ways that they think they need to change their
bodies and that then just builds as sort of the way that we're supposed to think
about ourselves so as we're working through this idea of how we think about
ourselves and how we think about our bodies it's important to take a pause and
think about how is it that I'm talking to myself and are these words that I
would actually use to describe a friend so then we take that pause and we
think why am I treating myself in a way that I wouldn't treat somebody that I
care about and so it might be helpful when you take a look at yourself in the
mirror if the first thing that pops into your head is something that you don't
like about yourself that to me signifies that maybe this is a problem and we
can look at how do we do things differently if you can try to take a moment and
show your body some gratitude today and I highly recommend trying out the
befriending our body's course in the headspace app tomorrow you'll hear
about how to build a healthy relationship with food I'll see you back here really
soon
