On a day-to-day basis, both men and women often deal with the thought, “I hate my body.” More often than not, they deal with their body as a burden. However, while having a body and dealing with it is difficult, learning to love your body can sometimes be even more challenging.
Signs That it Is Impacting Your Mental Health
The toll of disliking your body can show up in many different ways in your life. These are a few of the ways you can tell if your dislike towards your body is negatively impacting your mental and emotional wellbeing.
- The stress you feel towards how you view your body affects how you spend and manage your time.
- You experience dysphoria, a state of feeling uneasy or unhappy. This could be related to anything, including your financial situation, personal life, work life, as well as our bodies. If your feelings about your body ever reach the point where you feel hopeless and as if the discomfort of being in your body will never end, you have experienced dysphoria.
- You feel triggered by any sort of body discussion.
Benefits of Loving Your Body
It is important to have positive feelings about our bodies because having only negative feelings about an issue we cannot get rid of makes us feel stressed and upset, and that is not a productive way to go through life. Moving into a space of loving, or at least accepting, your body helps you to have less stress in your life at large. It can help you be a happier person, too.
Reminders for the Next Time You Hate Your Body
It does not happen overnight, or even after a week of nights. If you have been hating your body for years, it is going to take some time to repair that relationship.
- Start with body acceptance. It is a huge leap to go from hating your body to loving it, so the first step in your journey should be to attempt accepting it.
- Commit to reminders. Body acceptance and love do not come naturally, therefore you need to commit to their practice. Keep reminding yourself of all the ways your body is constantly working to keep you alive.
- Quit exercises that are not fun. Your one goal when exercising should be to de-stress and have fun. If exercise feels like a punishment, then you are doing it wrong.
- Do kind things for your body. You could thank your body for all its work by taking a nice warm bath. You could relax for an evening instead of socializing when you feel tired. You could buy a new lotion and massage your arms and legs while you moisturize. Anything that you can do to give your body the love it deserves is more than enough sometimes.
- Practice stress-relieving activities. Taking on a stress-relieving activity, such as breathing exercises or taking a walk, is good for all aspects of ourselves. Even just a few short minutes can have an effect on you for hours afterwards. Practicing stress-relieving activities can also help you to think more rationally about your body and to operate from a less upset mental space.
The point of this is not to make you feel guilty for not appreciating your body, but to remind you that you are more than your weight or shape and that the numbers you see on the scale are not the most important thing about you and neither are the calories you eat. I hope that the next time you catch yourself thinking, “I hate my body,” this reminder pops into your head.