The way you see yourself when you have a look in the mirror can play a major role in how you feel. You may either get a positive or negative feeling, which directly affects your mental health to some extent. This explains why people spend money on trying to improve the way they look and boost their body image. It’s important to understand how body image affects mental health so that you can make improvements where necessary. When you do this, you’ll have a better chance of going about your life in a way that’s more fulfilling for you.
Poor Body Image Increases Risk for Mental Health Issues
When you have a negative body image of yourself, you’re likely to experience a number of mental health issues. These include depression and anxiety. They may arise or be worsened by constant feelings of shame and dissatisfaction with your appearance. When you think about your flaws all the time, it’s easy for them to soon consume you and make your life considerably harder.
From skin to weight and hair, which grows in cycles of around 4 to 6 weeks, there are many things of which you can be critical. When you feel dissatisfied with one aspect or another of your appearance, you may have a harder time seeing any positivity. As such, it’s important to get to the root of the issue and work towards improving your body image. Remember that no one is perfect and so you don’t have to feel ashamed about not being perfect yourself.
Social Media Can Affect Body Image
Social media has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years. Over this time, it’s become clear that people are obsessed with beauty and other trends such as having a lot of money to show off. People who pay a lot of attention to social media may lose the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t. This leaves them prone to negative issues as a result of viewing their physical appearance in a negative light.
As mentioned above, no one is truly perfect, at least not without any surgical or chemical intervention. Social media helps blur the line between what’s real and what isn’t, because most influential people on the different platforms always present their best foot first. This means that they play up their positive features and try to hide their negative ones. This could leave people with the wrong impression that there are people who never have to struggle with their physical appearance. This may worsen issues such as those for about 25% of 15,000 adults who responded to an online session of questioning done by the Harris Poll. This group responded by saying that the appearance of their teeth makes them avoid smiling.
It’s Possible to Improve Body Image
While it may take a considerable effort to do this, it’s actually possible to improve your body image. Once you acknowledge that you have an issue and identify it clearly, you could seek help in remedying it. If your issues are topical ones that can be solved by modern medicine, then you should take advantage of the solutions. Hyaluronic acids, for example, is a long-acting skin treatment that was developed in the early 2000s, according to Men’s Medical. Their effects can last anywhere from 15 to 24 months, offering effective benefits to the skin, joints, and even an issue like dry eyes.
It’s clear that body image affects mental health in more ways than one. If you want to have a chance of improving your mental health, it’s a good idea to find ways of getting comfortable in your own skin. This will save you a lot of time and money and help you get more satisfaction out of your life.
