Body image is the how you perceive and accept your body where it is been focused by types of factors such as genetics, culture and personal experience. Term peer pressure means how you get affected by others’ behavior and nature and how you change yourself according to it. Peers like friends, classmates, collegeaues have influence on your thoughts, feelings and behaviour.
During the time of puberty, peer pressure has a drastic impact on body image. Puberty is a stage where there is development of self-identity, and they have high chances of getting victimized to peer pressure in comparison with adults.
Relation of Peer Pressure and Body Image
Peer pressure negatively impacts body image in various ways. For instance, peers make negative remarks about your appearance in public, criticizing you, comparing you to others, mocking you, and making you feel derogatory in any way, pressuring you to change your appearance. These all such actions can lead to the feeling of self-doubt, and increase insecurity and shame. Peer pressure can also induce unhealthy lifestyle and behaviour such as substance abuse, dieting, and excessive exercise. These behaviour led to the severe degradation for physical and mental health quality.
Signs and Symptoms of Body Image Issues
There are various signs and symptoms to observe when someone is struggling with body image issues
- Someone being preoccupied with appearance
- Someone starts commenting in a negative manner about one’s own appearance
- Keep comparing to others
- Have unhealthy dieting and reluctant to excessive exercise behaviors
- Don’t like to socialize
- Keep avoiding some specific activities or situations
- Have tremendous feelings of shame, guilt, and anxiety
- Being occupied with severe depression and having regular suicidal thoughts
Tips to Overcome Body Image Issues
It is important to seek help if someone is struggling with body issues. There are different ways one can do to improve body image ,like:
- One should try talking to a trusted friend or any family member and share with them how you are feeling.
- Try to seek out help from an expert therapist or professional counselor
- Join a group that supports people dealing with body image issues
- Try to learn about how to do body acceptance and take initiative for self-love
- Practice a healthy diet and timely eating and positive exercise habits
- Try to limit your exposure when it comes to unrealistic images of beauty and learn to differentiate between those images shown in the media without getting influenced by them.
Help in need
Someone who is unable to cope up with body-image issues, there are different ways one can do to help that individual such as :
- Offering them support and making them believe that you are understanding their situation
- Encourage them to talk regarding their feelings and emotions truthfully
- Advice them and offer assistance to them so that they can develop a positive body image
- Help them to boost their confidence to challenge and overcome the negative comments about their appearance
- Promote a healthy and balanced eating lifestyle and exercise habits.
Body image and peer pressure combining together are complex issues that needs to be addressed as it have a very strong impact on adolescents and adults both. There are numerous ways to tackle the problem, but before that one must be aware of the signs and symptoms of body image issues, and if one is not able to handle them on own then to seek out help. It is in ones best interest to improve body image and challenge the negativity of peer pressure and overcome it.
Self-Care for Confidence
Additionally firstly, one must focus on your own strength, that is, listing down all the things you feel is best in yourself, both inside and out. Progressing with this step one will ensure to be focused with own positive qualities and it will help in boosting up one confidence as well.Secondly, one must spend time with positive people, with those who would make you feel good about yourself and will root for you in any difficult situation, removing negative people or avoiding those who make negative comments about your appearance is saving yourself from getting into a bigger loss.
One as a parent plays an important role in parents life. Supporting a child’s physical and mental health, is like building a strong foundation which is nurtured with utmost love and care. This, in turn, helps the child to develop set of strong emotional and social skill that they need in leading a healthy, happy and successful life. Lastly, one must always make sure to get enough rest, have a healthy and balanced diet and having routine exercise. One must always remember that the way you are , you are beautiful, and by taking care of one self physical and mental health will make you feel energetic and boost the confidence level.
