A Step-By-Step Guide To Learning How To Love Your Body The Right Way
The body positivity movement seems like a good idea. But what if you don’t like aspects of your body? Does society telling you that you’re good enough the way you are right now actually help you learn to love yourself?
I’d say no. It’s just a sentimental band-aid put on a gaping wound. It doesn’t address the root cause of your dissatisfaction. It only dismisses the legitimacy of your dissatisfaction by telling you that you shouldn’t be dissatisfied. If you want real body positivity, you have to learn to love your body — and that requires work, giving yourself the freedom to change, and even hacking your brain.
Hacking Your Brain
How does hacking your brain play into honest-to-goodness body positivity? Hear me out:
How many times a day do you look in the mirror and think “yuck” about some aspect of your appearance? Every time you go into a bathroom? Every time you pass the mirror in the hallway? It adds up. And because our brains are use-dependent, every time we give ourselves the same negative feedback, we’re reinforcing that idea and strengthening the wiring in our brain for that thought and the consequent feelings. We’re basically creating a self-impairing vicious cycle about ourselves.
Because our brains are use-dependent, every time we give ourselves the same negative feedback, we’re reinforcing that idea and strengthening the wiring in our brain.
To learn to love our bodies we need to consistently have more genuine, positive thoughts and feelings about ourselves than negative ones, which will rewire our brain and the consequent emotions. But how do we react with genuine, positive feedback when we look in the mirror? Well, we have to change what we don’t like, so when we do inspect and analyze ourselves (which we always do), we’ll approve of what we see. And instead of thinking “Ugh, I hate my hair,” we’ll tell ourselves, “Damn, girl, you look good!”