THE INFLUENCE OF BODY TALK AND SOCIAL COMPARISON AS VARIABLES INFLUENCING BODY IMAGE
Early experiences, internal and external elements, attitudes of our parents, our emotions, our mood and many other kinds of distortion; all subject to body image. It is basically all about mental representation you create. Mental perception or image strongly influences a person’s behavior. Eating disorder, mood swings, depression and anxiety are the common cause of mental disorders and changing body language. We can say that personality is the reflection of what a person had gone through in his life. As all traits, expressions, gestures are a mirror to the psychological and living style of a person.
Many variables affect the body image. Body talk and social comparison are the major variables.
The Role of Social Media
According to Mills, 2018,
“They felt worse about their own appearance after looking at social media pages of someone that they perceived to be more attractive than them. Even if they felt bad about themselves before they came into the study, on average, they still felt worse after completing the task.”
Social media has become one in every of the foremost fashionable sources of communication for the approaching generation. For tykes growing up in today’s society, social media retailers like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have provided footage and news that became the primary thing that their eyes see in the morning and the final thing before bed.
Such footage has provided surreal standards on what’s thought-about lovely in today’s society. As tykes sit down with these pictures as a style of comparison, it’s created harmful circumstances. These influences on the lives of tykes have forced them to require extreme measures. Also, in some cases, it has been the reason behind death. Social media in today’s society has established to possess a negative impact on the method tykes, specifically females, read their bodies. Surreal beauty standards, dangerous comparisons and disorders have all been a result of the rise in social media. Therefore, the impact on the lives of tykes.
Seeking Help
UN agencies such as UNESCO and others can create a good impact in this field. For instance, body discontentment is related to the tendency to check one’s body with other’s bodies, which has phantasm to appear sort of a bathing suit model. This in excess may lead to emotional distress, shame, shallowness, depression, social phobias, bulimia and eating disorder (Dittmar, 2009). So, these type of problems can be well attained by global level societies such as the UN.
According to Mills, 2018
“We really need to educate young people on how social media use can be a negative brainwash. And how this could even be linked to stringent dieting, eating disorders, or excessive exercise. There are people who may be triggered by social media and who are especially vulnerable,”
In short, we can say that there is strong influence of social media on our thinking pattern and living styles. These social network platforms can either refine our living style or can turn us into our worst self. But also, an effective usage of social networks in a productive manner can change our lives dynamically too.
