How Body-Image Affects Your Mental Health
When someone says “Why are you wearing makeup, you look beautiful without it?” you know that they are only trying to pay you a compliment. However, the simple answer to their question is because you like to wear it. Wearing makeup is more for yourself than it is for anyone else, it makes you feel confident and happy in your own body.
Unfortunately, most people have a part of themselves that they don’t like. It could be your skin, your tummy or your laugh, and when it is on show — or you think it is on show — it can really mess with your mental health. A lot of anxiety, especially in women, stems from the worry of people seeing what they consider as a flaw.
Wearing makeup might not be a necessity to some, but to others it is. And the same goes for wearing certain clothes or having a particular hairstyle. If you look good, you feel good. And those emotions can be hard to come by.
There are a few ways in which you can help yourself to feel better in your own skin.
The first is to look after yourself. Eating a balanced diet and exercising regularly will clear up bad skin and will help you to shed any excess weight you don’t want. It will also encourage endorphins and oxytocin to circulate your body, making you feel happy. Spending time outside in the sun will also help your anxiety levels. Vitamin D is so important, in fact, a lack of vitamin D can result in a type of depression known as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).
Getting the right amount of sleep, at the right time of the day will go a long way to helping you be happy. The average adult needs between eight and 10 hours of sleep every night, and forcing your body to stay awake late into the early hours will not help. A regular sleep cycle will clear your mind and energize your body.
Looking after your skin will also have a huge affect on your mental health. By using a regular skin care routine, you cleanse yourself of impurities, and you spend valuable time pampering yourself. For a lot of people, life is too hectic to spend 15 minutes just caring for yourself — you need to make the time. The ritualistic movements of this routine will help you to calm your mind and to get to know your body positively.
Sometimes the thing you hate about yourself and that makes you so self-conscious isn’t something that can be fixed through exercise or pamper sessions. This can be a range of things from scaring to significant differences in breast size. A lot of people have features on their bodies that they acquired through accidents or attacks, and they can cause painful memories to resurface, along with general insecurities and anxiety. And where every woman has one breast bigger than the other, having an A cup and a D cup would make any woman self-conscious and lop-sided. The option here would be surgery. You can always opt for a female plastic surgeon if it would make you feel more comfortable, but any cosmetic surgery you decide to undertake should be well researched and understood.
Article by Grace Coates
This article was written by the guest author listed at the end of the article.