Small Actions to Improve Your Relationship with Your Body
By Nicole Willett
Check out the video if you’d rather listen than read!
Liking let alone loving our bodies can be a huge challenge and it's not the norm for a reason.
If you haven't already, check out the video or the post that breaks that down those reasons but SPOILERS: it has nothing to do with what your body looks like or weighs.
It’s about conditioning from various angles, starting when we are young and continuing over our entire lives.
All of this is learned - which means it can be unlearned. We can recondition our brains to see our bodies in a different way (literally and figuratively) and change the way we feel about them.
Here are 5 simple ways to do just that!
1. Change the way you label your relationship with your body.
Let’s say right now the word you’d use to describe how you feel about your body is something like hate, hopeless, dread, resent, discomfort, etc.
Feeling this way, you might look at the idea of loving your body and think, ‘love is a bit of a strong word’ or ‘I cannot honestly picture myself feeling that way’.
It’s possible you may even feel a sense of discomfort, resentment, or shame when you hear phrases like, “love your body”. (BTW- this is really common and understandable, so know you aren’t alone and there is nothing wrong with you if that’s how you feel.)
Changing the language around your relationship with your body can take so much of that pressure, shame or discomfort off the table and allow you to redefine your approach on your own terms.
With compassion and curiosity, consider where your relationship is at right now and where you want to get to. Not where you feel like you should get to, but where you would feel most yourself. One that feels aligned with who you are, your values and your goals.
Maybe it looks more like one of these:
· I want to like my body.
· I want to respect my body.
· I want a partnership with my body.
· I want a supportive relationship with my body.
· I want a more casual, less emotionally demanding relationship with my body.
· I want a symbiotic relationship with my body.
It's your relationship with your body and it's yours to determine where you're at right now and what makes sense for you moving forward. What would that relationship with your body look like if it felt attainable, manageable, and genuinely aligned with who you are.
We usually come at this from the point of, “What would my body need to look like for that relationship to feel better”. The truth is, though, we don’t need to change our bodies physically to feel better about them mentally and emotionally.
We need to be clearer about what currently doesn’t feel good and what “feeling better” actually means - what that feels like and the actions that nurture and create that feeling.
2. Give your body the credit it deserves.
Research suggests that our bodies do 30 billion chemical reactions every second keep us alive and functioning. And these billion+ actions need to coordinate with one another for everything to go right.
Basically, the body is the most impressive, perfectly coordinated dance crew that has ever existed.
And yet, we rarely think about any of those things until they go wrong.
So when I look in the mirror and start giving myself crap for not having a flat stomach or obsessing over my epic triple chin capacity, I take a deep breath and remember how many systems that one breath takes.
Here are some other insanely amazing things our body does in the background, to support and love us:
· Taking about 20,000 breaths a day (most of which we are not consciously aware of because we don’t have to be).
· Coordinating a crazy network of vessels that the heart uses to pump oxygen and nutrients around to the rest of the body (with about 100,000 beats daily for the average person. I like to think, “my heart does 100,000 reps a day” and give it the smile and nod of impressed respect it deserves)
· Producing 2 – 3 million red blood cells every..single..second. That’s over 200 billion created every single day!🤯
· Replaces 300+ billion cells every single day, generating between 3 and 4 billion new cells every single second.
This list could go on for days but basically the point is that our bodies have a lot on their plate and some insane jobs to do every day. Jobs that if you are able to read and comprehend this post, they are doing pretty well.
The truth is that the body’s job is not to align itself physically with your cultures ever-changing beauty standards.
It’s not to keep you content or happy with it or your life.
It’s job is to keep you stable, functioning, and alive.
Our job is to support it in doing that job with the decisions we make and the respect we show it.
3. Set a time for gratitude and value.
You can write, you can type, you can say it out loud, you can say it in your head, but every single day, take a moment to consciously focus on gratitude and value for yourself.
Challenging yourself to come up with 3 things you are grateful for about your body and then 3 things you value about who you are that have nothing to do with physical appearance.
With tip #2, you’ll start to lay the groundwork for respect (in other words, acknowledging your bodies inherent worth). Here, we move into actively appreciating that worth and practice harnessing the feeling that comes with that.
Check out this link to download a list of examples of gratitude and self-value that are specifically for improving the relationship with the body.
You have survived all of the hardest days that you've been through. That's your body being there for you. But we are conditioned to see our bodies as the enemy or as the barrier to success or belonging or any of the other deep desires we hold as humans.
This practice gives you a daily moment to gently train the area of the brain that decides what we notice and pay attention to, the things that it considers important or not. (aka Reticular Activating System if you’d like the technical term)
Sadly, we live in a world that sets us up to be aware of messages like, “you’re not enough”, “You’re in pain/scared/vulnerable/etc”, “You could be doing better”, and other such concepts that keep us buying or clicking or watching or scrolling.
The good news is that it doesn’t take much to offset this - so that feelings of hope and gratitude are part of our daily filter. Consistency and awareness are game changing here.
Fun bonus: gratitude has a positive impact on our body on a physiological level with suggested benefits like improved sleep, improved immune system function, reduced inflammation, and boosts of dopamine and serotonin.
4. Hone how you speak to your body
Like any other relationship in life, the way we speak to the body lays the foundation for how we will feel about it. Whether in your head and out loud, speak to your body as if it is a separate entity that needs love and understanding, deserves respect, and that is supporting you.
I know sometimes that can be hard to accept that it is on your side.
It’s easy to see the body as the enemy when we are struggling with things like weight, body image, or appearance, things like illness or injury or disability, things like the aftermath of trauma and the body keeping score.
When we struggle, we ask our bodies things like, “Why are you doing this to me?” “Why can't you just be on my side?”, “Why do you hate me?”, “Why am I so emotional?”, “Why can’t I just get over it?”.
And if it were able to, the body’s answer would always be, “Because I am trying to protect you”.
Even with emotions! Did you know that emotions are physical, biochemical reactions to stimulus (inside or outside the body) that prepare us for the movement that evolution has taught our species will most likely improve our likelihood of survival?
That blew my mind. Most of us see emotions as an inconvenient weakness we need to control and get rid of. But they are a protection mechanism. They aren’t even a choice.
The choice comes with feelings, which are the follow up to emotion - the judgments, labeling, and observations about the emotion.
Your body really is trying to have your back. If we can talk to them a little bit differently. we will start to notice that the relationship with the body changes quite significantly.
So speaking to it like a separate being that needs loving kindness. Maybe picture your younger self or a pet or a best friend and engage with your body in this way.
Here are some examples of how that might sound:
· "Hey pal, I noticed something's not going right today, are you okay?"
· "Thank you so much for everything that you did for me today, I really appreciate that. Even if it didn't go the way that I planned, you put in lot of work for me and I'm grateful for that."
· "Good boy!”, “Good girl!”, “Good bod!”
· "Hey, you look great. I love the effort that you put in”.
· “Hey bod, how are you?
· “Good morning, I love you.
· “Sorry for being so hard on you the other day. Well done getting through that”.
· “I know you don't hurt me on purpose but I am struggling with X and I do need some support there”. Things like that right? We tend to treat our bodies often like they are an enemy but they're not. Now the fifth and the last one is going to be kind of a harder one but it is to
5. Acknowledge your body.
Now, this is best done in two parts. If one or both parts feel difficult, know that’s totally normal, so give yourself patience here.
Part one is by looking at yourself in the mirror every day.
Maybe give yourself a high five, maybe just make a couple of seconds of eye contact, maybe just give yourself a neutral scan. In some way, shape, or form, trying to reassess and readjust your relationship with your body by visually acknowledging its presence.
I know this is a big ask. It took me a while to get to a point where I could look myself in the mirror without having a visceral reaction and having my face and thoughts follow suit with unkindness.
But imagine if you knew someone that avoided looking at you when you were around one another. Someone who didn’t even want to acknowledge your presence, didn’t care if you were struggling, got upset with you when you were.
Let’s put it politely and say that’s not a person you’re going to like very much, right?
We don't want to be like that to our bodies. We don't want to be like that to ourselves.
So practicing gentle adjustments to how you engage with yourself when it comes to the mirror can be enormous.
Part two is acknowledging when things are hard without the blame, resentment, or struggle that makes it anybody's fault.
Because here's the truth.
Anything that you are struggling with, your body is struggling with it too.
Personally, I struggle with the fact that one of my vital organs stopped working when I was 10 years old. For a long time, I blamed my body for that – with hatred and anger toward it most of the time.
Now, I realize, my body is struggling with that too. It’s one job is to keep us alive and now it is having a hard time doing that as a result of this one organ not pulling its weight. Not to mention the additional struggles it brings mentally, emotionally, socially, financially, etc.
Our bodies don’t do these things to us.
They endure these struggles with us.
Acknowledging when you are struggling is important because when you are, every part of you deserves a little bit of validation, understanding, and support. And that can start with you.
Finding a voice in these moments to bring to yourself the same support you’d want someone to bring to you or that you would bring to a loved one – human or otherwise, like, “Hey, I want to help you. I want to support you. How can I do that?”
The more we practice all of this, the more natural it becomes. It will lay the groundwork for our brain to see and support the feelings we want more of.
We may not get to choose which body we spend our lives with, but we do get to choose how we spend our lives with our given body.