7 mindset habits on how to overcome insecurities: self-esteem & body image

Insecurities. We all have them. The media perpetuates them. Businesses profit from them. Let's talk about it. Hello, sweeties potatoes. Welcome back. One of you brilliant souls recommended that I serialize my 7 Mindset Habit videos. So I've created a playlist and I'm also taking your recommendation to create 7 Mindset Habits for specific topics. Today, we're going to start with insecurities and body image. As we've said in all previous Mindset Habits videos, as important as it is for us to have healthy daily habits, making our bed, brushing our teeth, the big and the little things, it's equally important for us to have good and healthy Mindset Habits as our external world is a reflection of our internal world. So how can we develop healthier Mindset Habits in a world that is hyper-focused on the external and profiting from our insecurities? If we want to talk about insecurities, we need to first understand where insecurities truly stem from. Remember when we were children, that sense of wonder and carelessness we had? Not a care in the world. And remember how fearless we were? We legit had less fear because we have yet to be tainted by this world. We just didn't know how the world worked out. We didn't know what it meant to be a person and how to be a person. But of course, as we grow up, what we're taught, what we read, what we consume, all of that in turn starts to form our worldview, our values, and our identities. All that to say we aren't born with insecurities. None of us are born with insecurities. We are taught, we are told, and we are sold to be insecure. Just like how social media was designed to exploit human vulnerability and how news headlines are crafted to exploit our fears, modern marketing exploits our vulnerabilities for profit. Let's quickly talk about a man named Edward Bernays. He's basically the grandfather of modern advertising. He created the field of public relations. It's basically a nicer word for propaganda. So public relations is basically just propaganda. Edward Bernays learned how to tap into people's insecurities and appeal to them on an emotional and unconscious level to get them to do and buy things. For example, he talked about how cigarettes both smooth the throat and slim the waistline and that women's right to smoke is linked with liberation with the Torches of Freedom campaign. He also convinced the public that disposable Dixie cups are far more sanitary to increase sales of these disposable cups. So those were actual campaigns ran by Edward Bernays. Here's some more modern takes on it that I'm sure you guys have all seen. Use this mouthwash. If your breath doesn't smell, people will love you. Drink this beer. Drive this car. Eat this burger that a sexy lady is wearing a bikini on top of a car eating it and has nothing to do with the actual burger. But if you eat it, if you drive that car, if you drink that beer... I forgot for a second. You will be the bros of bros and people will love you. Wear this makeup. Be a size zero. Wear clothes to nothing. Then the guy who dreams you've been pinning for will absolutely fall in love with you. Okay, so Edward Bernays believed that the unconscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habit and opinion of the masses is an important element in democratic society. This is important as it is the core philosophy of the man who created public relations which is another word for propaganda. I just want to make that very, very clear. And it has influenced modern advertising as well as our collective psyche because it's just what we've been consuming whether we were conscious about it or not for our existence. Bringing this all back to insecurities, if you're able to poke at people's deepest feelings of inadequacy, they will buy or do anything you want them to do. So the formula is make you feel bad about yourself and offer a solution. If you want to sell more stuff than there are problems, you have to encourage people to believe there are problems where there are none. This is a really great article from Mark Manson that I'll link down below. I think everyone is deserving of a read for everyone. All of that may have been heavy. It may have been enlightening. It may have been eye-opening. It may have been, I don't know, you may be feeling indifferent. You may be just like, okay, just tell me what to do. Thank you for sharing history lessons, Rowena, but what can I do? So I think it's really important for us to understand that mass media, that the entertainment industry and that businesses alike have been poking and prodding our weaknesses and vulnerabilities. You might be sitting there like, no, not me. Like I'm not easily influenced. Regardless of how immune you think you are of not being easily influenced or manipulated by external forces, we're all a product of the system that Bernays helped create. And while that is very scary, do you guys like my pants? Knowing this, I think is the first step. Once you're aware of how the system works, once you're aware that businesses and that companies do this because they want something from you, just like they just want your money, you can start asking yourself, okay, so everything that I've been taught, everything that I've been sold, everything that I've been told my whole life, how much of that do I actually want to believe in and how much of that do I want to buy into continually? With social media being such an integral thing in our lives now, I feel like these days it's hard to not compare yourself with other people, even though you may know that it doesn't make sense to compare your 24 hours to someone's one second of a photo from their highlight reel of their day that's also 24 hours and you don't know what happens in those 24 hours, but you just see that one photo and you're like, oh, this person looks happy. They look like they're having so much fun. How come I'm not happy? And how come I'm not having fun? And we forget that a happy looking person does not always equal a happy person, as we talked about in last week's video, the art of being alone but not lonely. When I was younger, I looked like I was happy, I think, on the outside, but I was so far from that on the inside. When you're scrolling through Instagram and all you're seeing is happy faces and pretty things and destinations and travel photos and all these beautiful things, you can't help but wonder, why don't I have those beautiful things and how come I don't have a beautiful smile or how come I don't feel as happy as they look? So why do we do this? I think it's because it's easier to look externally than it is to look internally. It's easier to look outwards, see what other people are doing, rather than taking that time and that same energy to compare yourself to, let's say, who you were yesterday or the day before that or the month before that or the year before that. Even just as a little exercise to be like, wow, Rowena today came so far from who Rowena was a year ago. But any matters of the heart and looking inward and reflecting and being honest with yourself, even if it's cheering for yourself and reminding yourself of how far you've come, I think that's still more uncomfortable than just scrolling on Instagram because it doesn't take any thought. But then there's another layer to it that we don't really understand that even though we're not thinking of anything when we're watching it, it's affecting and influencing us in ways that we're not really aware of. Just be mindful of what you're consuming. Don't be afraid to go on an unfollowing spree. Don't be afraid of doing a purge of content or a purge of accounts you follow. There's a reason why I mostly follow my friends on Instagram. I don't really follow girls in bikinis or celebrities or picture-perfect types because doing that in the past has led me down a really dark path that I'll talk about a little later. So just be very mindful of the content that you're allowing into your inner world, into your looking, into your eyeballs, into your ears because these things that we're consuming, these things that we're seeing, these things that we're listening to actually affects us a lot more than we're aware of. Trends of any type come and go. That is the very definition of a trend. As an example, think of art. If we want to take it all the way back to Renaissance, high Renaissance era, there's the birth of Venus. When you look at portraits and paintings from the past, women are curvier. This was seen as luxury before modern luxury became a thing because back then, food wasn't as available to everyone. So if you're well-fed, if you're healthy, if you're a little curvier, it was a symbol of wealth. So back then, it was a great thing. Now you fast forward to 80s, 90s fashion models. These fashion models are stick thin. So that was just to show weight fluctuates. Like the ideal weight really depends on timing, really depends on culture. Another example would be thin eyebrows and thin lips. And now it's the opposite. You want the bushy eyebrows, brows, eyebrows, brows, brows. You want the plump lips. You want to look like Kylie Jenner. And there's just so many Kylie Jenners now running around the world. A personal insecurity that I've had since I was young were my freckles. I was never so insecure about it that I wanted to do something about it or cover it because a part of me cared a lot, but a part of me was just like, whatever, this is my face. And I was more of a tomboy and I enjoyed being out in the sun and playing sports. I was like, it's fine. But I did grow up with my aunts telling me, you need to finish every single grain of rice in your rice bowl because if you leave them behind, it's going to go onto your face and turn into freckles. And as I got older, it was suggested to me from different people that, oh, maybe you should go and laser your freckles off. And I thought about it seriously once. I was like, okay, maybe I'll do it. But I just couldn't be bothered. And look at us now. People are actually putting freckles on their faces. So with everything in mind, trends come and go. Beauty standards are different depending on who you ask and where you are and what time period you live in. It's most important for us to be the anchor of our own ships. I like to believe that we're all beautiful ships and we are all floating on an ocean. And if your anchor is fully anchored into the sea bottom, the ocean floor, that might be a really far away. So maybe we're more shallow waters. But if your anchor is set, no matter how hard the wind blows, no matter how crazy the waters are, you're still shift around, but it's in this like contained circumference that you will be moving. However, if your anchor is just like halfway in the water or maybe not even in the water at all, then if the wind blows, if the ocean gets a little rocky, then your boat will just go off into the distance and you will be so far away from where you started from. So with all of that, it's taking us back to, okay, now that we know how the world works, now that we know to be mindful of what we consume and that trends come and go, what do I really care about? And who do I want to be? And what do I want to value myself on? Which brings us to the fourth point. The way you measure yourself is how you measure others and how you assume others measure you. This again is an amazing article by Mark Manson that also linked down below in the article. He starts off with a wealthy man because he measures his life based off of wealth. When he looks at other people, he measures them based off of wealth as well. So if someone is good to him, they want my money. When someone's bad to him, oh, they're jealous of my success. And he gives another example of a beautiful woman who measures her life based off of beauty and appearance. And because she's measuring herself based off of these qualities, this is how she's also measuring others and how she assumes other are measuring her as well. So if people are nice to her, it's because she's pretty. If people are mean to her, it's because they're jealous of her looks. So with all of that, how do you measure your life? Is it based off of wealth? Is it based off of status? Is it based off of fame? Is it based off of your image? Is it appearance? Is it family? Is it faith? Is it, what is it? I look too happy right now. If you guys watched my video from last week about the art of being alone and not lonely and how alone and sad and probably depressed and anxious I was all the time when I was going through my darkness reference patch, it sounds so bad when I say it now and just like to think it and to say it out loud. Back then, I would be happy if my girlfriends gained weight or I would be happy if they like didn't look as good as they may have looked before or something like that because there's this quote that I came across. Everyone wants to see the flaws of another person because we want to see glimpses of our own insecurities in them. We want to know we're not the only ones. Now within this framework, it all makes sense. What I valued and what I measured my life and my worth and my existence on was my appearance and how I looked and this image I want to uphold of Rowena being this perfect person and this perfect human being when in reality, no one is perfect and we're going to get into that in a little bit. But because that's how I measured my life, I was hyper aware and hyper focused about that and other people. Tying it back to points we've already said earlier, it's always easier to be critical of other people than it is to be critical of yourself. We're able to be kinder, more compassionate, accepting and loving towards ourselves. We'll be able to be that to other people and society at large because if that's what we measure our lives and ourselves on, then that's what we'll try to see in other people. We'll try to see the positives. We'll try to see the goodness in people and the goodness in society and humanity. There's two quotes I want to read both from Gifts of Imperfection from Brene Brown. I'm actually making a video all about perfectionism in the coming video but I want to read these two because it's just so good. Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it's often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis. So as we just talked about in the previous section, I went through all of this. Depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis. Hi! That was me. Second quote. Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought. If I look perfect and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame. Yeah. So if you guys have seen my older videos, you will know that I was a party girl. I drank a lot, cussed a lot. I had this facade of a cool girl. I mean, I think fundamentally I'm like a pretty chill and cool person but like I overplayed it or I just wanted to be like nothing fazed me cool when in reality, like a lot of things would faze me. One of the main things that perpetuated all of this, as silly as it sounds, was back then I would look at all the people my boyfriend was following at the time and most of them just happened to be Instagram girls in bikinis and influencers. This was like before influencers was really a thing. You know, in my head, even though I knew, I knew this doesn't make sense but I was like, if I look like them, if my body looked like that, if I were that skinny and that toned and that fit, he would love me more. But that was what fed into everything. That was what fed into this already existing desire for me to be perfect because I didn't want to feel shame or judgment or anything of those sorts. We're all imperfect and beautiful just the way we are and we really do want to fix something about ourselves. We can, but if you don't want to go down that path of getting an operation or a procedure or plastic surgery or anything like that done, then instead of focusing on what you can't change, try to shift your focus on what you can change. And I think the thing we can change is the inside stuff, is the internal, which brings us to our sixth point of gratitude. Something I've been wondering is I wonder how many of us spend our days comparing ourselves to other people, wishing our lives look more like theirs and how many of the same people are comparing their lives to yours and how we just kind of would go through our days like this. When you really distill everything down, comparison, like why does comparison exist? I think in me, it's some sort of like competition. Like I don't even know what the competition is, but like you want to be better than someone else. You want to feel less alone. It's like maybe the quote we said earlier, you want to see flaws in other people so that you feel better about yourself or you feel less alone. There's probably like some sort of jealousy and the wrapped up in there as well. One thing that I'm trying to work on myself these days is realizing that when you see someone happy, when you see someone succeeding, when you see someone being successful, when you see someone doing the things that you would want to do, instead of feeling any negative feelings, instead of comparing yourself to them right away, instead of feeling smaller or like making it about you, like I want to make it about them. Good job. Congratulations. Like this is amazing. This is awesome. You worked so hard for it and this is great. And I think that's when we turn it to ourselves when we see other people succeed and you make it about yourself like, oh, like I can do better or why are they better than me? Or when you have any of these thoughts, it's just not good vibes, you know? And I think it's important to try to surround ourselves with good vibes. If we fill our heads with good vibes, then we will be good vibes. And I think at the core of all of that really is just gratitude. Gratitude is things that we talk about a lot these days, but I still think it's a very underrated thing, especially in this context of if you're able to truly be grateful for your existence and for you being just the way you are and for you to be like a beautiful human being from the inside exuding outward, then when you look at other people, you will feel the same way and you won't feel as judgmental or you won't be as critical about other people because you're less critical about yourself. You're more loving and you're more accepting of yourself, which then in turn, again, makes you be more loving and accepting of other people. So I think it's a lot of in, out, in, out, but I think it's just, it's a beautiful thing. I'm pretty sure I talked about this in my first mindset habits video, but I think as it pertains to body image, physical appearance, and insecurities, when we're 70, 80, 90 years old, we're going to be a lot wrinklier. Everything's going to be sagging. We're going to look nothing like what we look like now. If that is our future, and if that's where we're going to be, what's going to matter then? When you strip away beauty, when you strip away physical appearance, when you strip away everything, what is left? And I think this is where inner beauty comes from. And what is inner beauty? I really believe inner beauty is your character, the things that you value, the way that you measure your life, the things that are important to you. I really do believe that our outer appearance is a manifestation of our inner state. When I was younger, even though I was much younger, like a decade younger, I feel like I look younger now than I did in my photos back then. And that's primarily because the state that I was in, my mind state, like everything was just not in a good place. And I think that shows, right? Like my eyes were a lot darker, not like the color of my eyes. And I don't think it's like something that like... I just look like a different person. So if we're able to be more at peace and happy and lighter now, imagine how beautiful and glowing and happy you'll look when you're 80. I just, I think that's such a beautiful thing. So think happy thoughts, guys. Think good vibes. Be good vibes. So you can help others around you be all of that. So with all of that, thank you guys so much for joining as always. I didn't give a hug last video because it was so dark by the time I finished. So here's a big hug. This is a big hug. I'm actually hugging my tripod. So let me know what other subjects or topics you'd like me to create a video like this on. Appreciate you, sweetest, sweetest, sweetest potatoes. I hope we'll all be as sweet as we are inside as we look and are outside. I don't even know what's coming out of my mouth. Okay, bye!