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Learning To Love Our Body

The balance between improving how we look and embracing our imperfections

Photo by Михаил Секацкий on Unsplash

Whether we like it or not there is a bias towards beauty in our society.

If we go on social media we are usually bombarded with pictures and videos from attractive people. Being good-looking highly increases our chances in the dating market and in general it increases the attention we get from others.

Consequently, we feel implicitly pressured to judge our physical appearance and what we see in movies and social media only increases our standards to more unattainable levels.

Dealing with it is very hard.

The most challenging part of it all is that beauty is something we can’t fully control, yet it is something that is also not fully dependent on luck and genetics.

We could completely neglect our physical appearance, or completely invest all our money and energy in fitness, clothing, plastic surgery, and other ways to improve our look, but we would feel unfulfilled in both ways.

In one case we would feel unhappy because we didn’t put the effort we should into our look, in the other case we’d feel unhappy because we would always want to reach higher beauty standards and we wouldn’t be able to deal with the aspects of our body we aren’t able to change.

Like everything in life, it is important to find the right balance, understand why our physical appearance matters to us, and based on it decide when it is necessary to put some work into it and when we should focus more on embracing how we are.

Understanding our priorities

Our physical appearance should only be a means to an end, not our main priority.

We need to understand what we truly want in life and based on it determine the necessary steps to achieve them.

It’s essential not to presume that beauty alone can fulfill all our needs and desires.

If what we are looking for is love, then our physical appearance may increase how others are physically attracted to us. However, to develop a meaningful connection and consequently find love we need to invest in other areas, like emotional intelligence. Just being good-looking won’t help.

If what we want are good friendships then being beautiful for sure helps to gain more attention and have a higher status in society. However, it is hard to know if people are staying with us because of our looks or because they genuinely care about us. If they genuinely care about us, then our physical appearance shouldn’t matter anyway.

If what we want is financial stability, then looking good may increase our chances of getting certain jobs and access certain industries, like social media or fashion. However, our beauty is temporary, so we shouldn’t only rely on it to make a living. Consequently, we should develop other employable skills anyway.

In most areas of life that matter to us our look is very helpful for the first impression but helps little in the long run.

By completely neglecting it we would miss some life opportunities, by making it become our highest priority we would lose our direction neglecting to grow in more important areas necessary to achieve our goals.

Improving our physical appearance

Some work to improve our beauty is necessary and sometimes doing so can have also other benefits for us.

Fitness for example makes us also healthier and improves our overall mood, as we can face day-to-day tasks with less effort and our body releases endorphins.

Practicing self-care like clearing our skin and maintaining our hygiene makes us feel better, as we invest some time for ourselves, prioritizing our needs and our well-being.

Investing in a nice haircut and buying clothes that fit us well brings us joy, as when we look in the mirror we see the best version of ourselves.

Overall investing time to look better increases our self-confidence and gives us more strength to step out of our comfort zone to get what we want from our lives.

However, if our appearance becomes our priority we need to be careful not to end up in a downward spiral of plastic surgery and fashion expenses seeking beauty for the sake of beauty.

Loving ourselves

We need to embrace our imperfections. We can’t change everything from our body. and even if we could, we still wouldn’t feel fulfilled.

Often what we are lacking is not beauty, but self-love.

In my opinion, the path to self-love is mutual growth. We can only love ourselves if we feel worthy of love, and we can only feel worthy of love if we work towards becoming better and helping others in the process.

Growth itself should be enough, as the destination is often dependent on things we can’t influence and per human nature unreachable. It doesn’t matter how much we accomplish, it is in our human nature to always strive for more instead of being content.

So the path to self-love is not through achievement, but by identifying what we want to achieve and taking the necessary steps to get there.

In the moment we know we are on the right path we become self-confident enough not to worry about the opinion of others and find the strength not to compare ourselves to the unattainable beauty standards that we see in movies and social media.

We embrace our body for what it is when we become proud of ourselves for doing our best with the cards life has dealt us.

It is undeniable that looking good gives us advantages in multiple areas of life.

However, to achieve the things that at least in my opinion are necessary for a meaningful life, like feeling loved, worthy, and understood, we can rely on our looks only to a limited extent.

To get there it’s more important to improve our emotional intelligence, practice self-love, and strive for growth.

The more we work towards achieving the life we want, the easier it is to develop enough self-confidence to love our body, put in the necessary effort to look good, and simultaneously embrace our imperfections.

Life
Body
Self Love
Beauty
Growth
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