By Lauren Linford
We’ve all felt it. Maybe it happens while you’re watching your favorite TV show or scrolling through your Instagram feed. In this increasingly connected digital world, we are constantly bombarded with perfectly curated images of dreamy vacations, lavish homes and clothing, and “perfect” bodies. It can be overwhelming and often leads us to feel a profound insecurity; the sense that things are not right with our bodies.
The voices of fitness bloggers, fashion influencers, and beauty YouTubers, though motivating, typically reinforce some pretty unrealistic standards for what our bodies should look like. The resulting feelings of inadequacy can lead to obsession and despair fueled by failed fad diets and exercise routines that never give you the “bikini body” you hoped for.
Thankfully, like a shining light at the end of a dark tunnel, a new fitness trend has emerged: Body Positivity. The movement was kicked off by the Dove “Real Beauty” ad campaign in 2004 which celebrated the natural physical variation seen in all bodies--no matter the shape, size, or color. Since then, movements on social media have emerged encouraging body love instead of resentment and disdain. In recent years, more and more beauty lines and clothing retailers have begun to shift away from size-00-only models to models of all shapes and sizes.
“As we redirect our energy away from obsessing about our appearance, we have more bandwidth to do the things that are most important to us.”
These subtle shifts, slowly but surely, have begun to challenge some of the unrealistic body and beauty standards that are so deeply ingrained in our cultural psyche. After all, having a healthy body image is associated with good physical and mental health as well as decreased rates of depression. Not to mention that as we redirect our energy away from obsessing about our appearance, we have more bandwidth to do the things that are most important to us, like nurturing important relationships, setting and achieving meaningful goals, having fun, and focusing on our health (instead of our appearance).
The Body Positivity movement has done a lot to challenge traditional beauty standards on a cultural level, but the real challenge is knowing on an individual level how to ward off the relentless urge to obsess about our bodies and appearance. How can we develop a truly healthy relationship with our bodies? Research in positive psychology is revealing a new “secret” to improving body image: self-compassion.
The idea of self-compassion has been around in Buddhist and Eastern Philosophies for over 2500 years; only within the last two decades has it become popular in the world of Western psychology. Having self-compassion means that you have an attitude of kindness and positivity toward yourself in the face of challenges and shortcomings. Self-compassionate people respond to their own failures as they would respond to those of a dear friend: with comfort and encouragement instead of harsh criticism or beratement. Self-compassion can be broken down into 3 parts:
Self-kindness – being nice to yourself
Common Humanity – the ability to use your suffering to connect with others while understanding that suffering is part of the common human experience
Mindfulness – maintaining awareness of what you are feeling and not indulging in negative self-talk
Research has found self-compassion to be associated with a myriad of positive outcomes related to well-being. One of those outcomes is (you guessed it) positive body image (Barnard and Curry, 2011). Because self-compassion allows us to accept ourselves despite perceived flaws and weaknesses, self-compassionate people are able to see past their own physical imperfections. Research has found self-compassion to be a protective factor against the development of eating disorders, body dissatisfaction, body comparison, and the internalization of thin-ideal media.
Recent studies have also found that implementing self-compassion practices can help you to increase in both self-compassion and body satisfaction. In 2014, researchers had a group of women listen to meditation podcasts practicing self-compassion over the course of several weeks. Compared to the control group, these women showed significant improvements in both self-compassion and body satisfaction– improvements that were maintained at a 3-month follow up. Other studies implemented writing exercises, workshops, and therapist-led groups based in self-compassion that demonstrated similar improvements in body image (Rodgers et al., 2018; Seekis, Bradley, & Duffy, 2017; Palmeira, Pinto-Gouveia, Cunha, 2017).
So how can you learn about and increase your self compassion? Here are a few research-based first steps.
Learn about self-compassion. Self-compassion does not always come naturally to us--it’s a skill that can be learned. Like any other skill, it is difficult to practice if you don’t know much about it. You can learn about self-compassion in our Self-Compassion Module. The first five or six pages of the Self-Compassion Module will teach you all the fundamentals of self-compassion as well as the research basis behind it all. You can also read books on the topic such as researcher Kristin Neff’s book “Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself”
Clean out your Social Media. One of the most self-compassionate things you can do is to remove influences that may make you feel bad about yourself and replace them with more positive ones. For instance, you may want to go through your social media and unfollow any accounts that cause you to objectify your own body or the bodies of others. This is a personal choice and you know yourself best, so practice being mindful of how you respond to certain images and decide which accounts to unfollow. Replace them with body positive bloggers and well-being accounts like @beauty_redefined and @mybestself101.
Join a support group. Common Humanity--one of the three components of self-compassion-- helps us connect with others through our struggles. Body image issues are overwhelmingly common and you may be surprised by how many support groups are available in the community or on college campuses. Joining a support group will help you gain strength from others who share similar challenges and work on developing self-compassion together.
Make self-compassion a habit! Much like learning to play the piano, there is only one way to really learn self-compassion -- practice! You can find a menu of research-based self-compassion practices here: https://www.mybestself101.org/selfcompassion-strategies. As of this posting, our own research group is wrapping up a study examining how these practices can help with well-being, body image, and self-compassion skills. Participant feedback from this study has been very encouraging, and feedback and results from the study are being used to create an enhanced online course in self-compassion with even more resources and guided support. The new course launches on 9/9/2019! In the meantime, experiment with some of the recommended practices in the self-compassion module, and see how it can change your view of yourself!
