Ep. 28 Stop Trying to Fix the Clouds: How to Handle Negative Body Thoughts

[gentle music] What happens when you see that, quote, unquote, "bad photo," or you see yourself in the mirror and you don't think you look good? There's a real physical sensation there, isn't it? You feel something tighten, like your stomach drop or your body clench or just this sense of disgust or, ugh.

It feels really terrible.

When you're feeling that way, doesn't everything just kinda seem darker? It's like this shadow has been cast over your life.

That's what it's like when the clouds cover up the sun.

Except the difference is when it's cloudy outside or stormy, we don't forget that the sun exists.

We just realize that it's a storm passing through.

But we don't see our thoughts and our feelings that way.

We take them seriously.

It's like we're looking at the storm and thinking, "This is just what is.

My life is dark and stormy.

My body is terrible." And it's like when we see that, you're trying to fix the weather.

If you could imagine, it's like we're trying to build this contraption to push the storm away or, you know, clear out the clouds.

We don't do that because we know that it's just weather.

But when it comes to our thoughts and our feelings about our body, we really believe them p- to be true.

It's like we believe this is the truth, there is no sun anymore, and I need to do what I can to try to fix myself, to fix these clouds in order to feel better, when really what we need to do is see that those thoughts and feelings are actually like clouds passing in the sky.

Sometimes it's just a very light gray overcast day, and other times it feels like a hurricane whipping through.

But the very first thing that we can do to start to handle these negative body thoughts is to really start to see them as thoughts.

Now, I know you might be thinking, "Yeah, I know that I have thoughts," but there's still a part of you that really believes those thoughts.

Otherwise, you would just see them as thoughts and see them as the weather and pass on by.

But here's the other thing.

When we've been looking at clouds for so long, we truly can forget that there is a sun.

It's like every time we're looking at our body, it's like we've trained ourselves to always look for the clouds.

You could have a nearly perfectly clear sky, but your eye is gonna go to the one or two clouds that are in the sky.

It's the same way when we're looking at our body.

We forget everything that's right with our body, and we only focus on what is, quote, unquote, "wrong." Now, the funny thing is, is what we're even seeing as wrong is like a cloud itself, and clouds come and go.