Annotations
Psychology researchers such as Sarah Grogan define ‘body dissatisfaction’ as a ‘person’s negative thoughts and feelings about his or her body’.
The National Eating Disorders Association in the United States reports that ‘69-84 per cent of women experience body dissatisfaction, desiring to be a lower weight than they currently are, and 10 to 30 per cent of men exhibit body dissatisfaction with the primary concern being a desire to become more muscular.’
But we know that people who embrace physical exercise for enjoyment’s sake develop a sense of ‘self-efficacy’ – ‘personal confidence to engage successfully in a specific behaviour or succeed in a specific situation’, as Grogan put it – that can protect them from disordered eating.
In her book Beauty Sick (2017), Renee Engeln reports that studies have found warning labels about photoshopped images may be counterproductive, since they draw our attention to our bodies and may, ironically, reinforce poor body image.
The French thinker Blaise Pascal said: ‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.’
In Wonderstruck (2024), the late philosopher Helen De Cruz describes awe as ‘the emotion we sense when we perceive or conceptualise vastness, combined with a need for cognitive accommodation.’
In Critique of Practical Reason (1788), the German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.’
Dacher Keltner, a leading researcher into the psychology of awe, found that people who experienced natural settings were more likely to behave altruistically than others.
Being captivated by natural environments guides us away from our self-absorbed tendencies to greater compassion for others.
The problem with trends like the thigh gap is that they invite the opposite. The mirror image draws our attention to a limited surface, and it deprives us of the possibility of experiencing awe. Worse yet, our narcissism is usually ‘repressive’, as the feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky put it. We punish ourselves for not living up to the images we find online.
For instance, a study from 2018 that invited participants to either view images of nature, walk in a natural environment or explore a designed green space found that we appreciate our bodies more when we venture outdoors or imagine ourselves doing so.
We can resist body dissatisfaction by seeking to improve ourselves – for example, boosting our self-confidence or becoming educated about doctored images.
Of course, these are worthy endeavours. But we overlook the power of nature when our efforts become overly self-absorbed. Why not also look beyond ourselves?