The Blindboy Podcast - The Devils Shelf

Episode Date: August 14, 2019

Instagram and the psychology of Body Image. Techniques for coping with Body image issues Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast you hot toddies. Before I continue, just some quick gig announcements that I'm under contractual obligation to include in the podcast. Australia in February. The tickets for Australia are going to be on sale this Thursday but you can get them for pre-sale. At. Troubadourmusic.com I'm doing a live podcast. In. Perth, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. At the start of February.

Very much looking forward to that. I forgot how hot it was going to be. I forgot how fucking hot it was going to be. I was thinking. Oh Jesus. I'll head off there now in February, it'll be grand, and it's like, no, that's the middle of the summer over there in Australia, so that'll be crack, I gigged in Perth before, about five or six years ago,

on the hottest day of the year, which was an experience, it was an experience. It was like having a hairdryer blown into my face all day. I visited a statue of Bon Scott from ACDC. I was in Fremantle. I went up to Fremantle in Perth. Visited a statue of Bon Scott from ACDC. And I visited Fremantle Prison on the hottest day of the year, which was awful, but I'm kind of glad I did it,

because, I don't know, a load of Irish people were sent to Fremantle Prison, loads and loads of Irish people throughout the 1840s, 1860s, and they would have had to endure that prison in that heat, which is essentially designed to be a giant oven so yeah that was horrendous and Bon Scott spent time there I believe for stealing a gallon of petrol

fair play to him let's just harsh through these other dates really quickly alright what have we got here September right electric picnic fuck that I am at electric picnic but like what have we got here September right electric picnic fuck that

I am I am at electric picnic but like no one's gonna buy an electric picnic ticket to go and see my fucking podcast nice

more theatre Friday the 6th of September God bless Drogheda looking forward to that Crescent Hall 13th of September

ooh Friday the 13th. Hot. Theatre Royal Waterford on Saturday the 14th of September. I think I'm going to be interviewing the lads from Waterford Whispers. I think.

Wednesday the 18th of September. West Cork. Is that that fucking guitar festival? I think it might be, London, two gigs in London, they're sold out, fuck that, Killarney, 28th of September, I'm in the INEC, I'm in the INEC. Offered that gig. I really want to interview a rave band from Kerry from the early 90s called The Fourth Dimension.

Right? There were these mad bastards from Kerry who used to make music like The Prodigy. They supported The Prodigy in the early 90s. And I ended up getting a tape of it when I was a young fella and loving it. And then they just kind of disappeared so if anyone knows the fourth dimension down in Kerry tell them I'd love to have a chat with them if they're around

3rd of October Pavilion Theatre Dun Laoghaire then Saturday the 12th of October Kilkenny Langtons where's that fucking gig I'm after missing a couple here Sligo Live

Sligo 22nd of October right em yeah Sligo Live that's the one I want to draw attention to

because I don't know everyone I know up in Sligo hasn't heard of the gig and apparently it's been advertised so if you're in Sligo and you want the live fucking podcast will you come along to that

I tell you I want to push that one this is one of those ones where like the promoter said to me in fucking May that he was complaining that they'd only sold 20 tickets which for me is like it's May the gig's not until October

of course they only sold 20 fucking tickets. So if a promoter is complaining about ticket sales. Like five or six months in advance. That for me usually means that I'm in for a fun ride. So if you're interested in coming to Sligo. If you could get a couple of tickets there. And make my life a bit easier. So I don't have to be dealing with promoters.

No offence. Alright, there's my contractual obligations out of the way. Let us move on. So I don't have much nose fee. People are asking continually how's my solitary wasps getting on. Or solitary bees? They're fine. They're in the bee hotel.

The larvae appear to be undisturbed. I can't see into it, obviously, because it's cocooned with the leaf, and the little bees are sleeping inside in the bamboo. So, all going well. I mean, what could happen? I suppose a bird could come down and peck the fucking

the larvae out or something. But that hasn't happened. So, that's positive. In general, there is a I'm noticing just as I go up and down the country doing gigs i am noticing more local councils not uh cutting roundabouts and not cutting hedges and leaving wildflower grow which is fantastic because we do need to save the pollinators lads we need to save bees and we

need to save butterflies and that's no joke and it's it's doable if stupid things like um if you know if meadows are allowed to exist if flowers that pollinators like are allowed to exist we can regrow uh fucking bees the other thing too i think recently i could be wrong with this i could be wrong but i i don't want to go googling it but i think i read like two weeks ago that they had a bit of a breakthrough around the main reason why all the bees are dying around the world. And they managed to pinpoint it to a type of pesticide that uses nicotinoids, which is, it's a pesticide that's, I think its root is in tobacco. that's, I think its root is in tobacco, it's a nicotine based pesticide and could be wrong, was it Monsanto, that shower of pricks? But anyway, nicotinoid insect repellents or insect killers are most likely responsible for what's called colony collapse disorder, which has been steadily killing all the bees there for the past 15 years.

So I think it's a positive that at the very least you can kind of go, all right, that's what's doing it, let's stop doing that. Most places have banned the use of these nicotinoid insect insect killers there's a better name for insect killer isn't there pesticide yeah there you go so i think that's a positive if they're able to go that's the reason it's better than not knowing isn't it so let's stop doing that see what happens um so yeah this week i'd like to touch on i do a little bit of a mental health podcast i think this week um good feedback from last week's podcast we had pat bracken on an expert in the field of psychiatry um talking his thing, people found that very interesting, the reason, I've wanted, I haven't done a mental health themed podcast in a while, couple of reasons, I prefer kind

of saving them for the winter months, I think it's much more effective. To be doing mental health stuff. When the days are getting darker. And the weather. Can make us feel. A small bit bleak. But. I don't know. I was. I was out at the weekend.

And I was. Just going around to various bars. In Limerick. Because it was my ma's birthday. And I just, I happened to meet, we'll say several people who I knew. Right? Lads who I would have grown up with or I went to school with. But lads I've known a long time.

And haven't seen in a fair bit of time. And just separately. And they were like separate groups of people. Separate fucking. Separate conversations throughout the night. With several different lads that I know. And each of them just said to me that they listened to the fucking podcast

and the mental health stuff that I was talking about was having a kind of a decent impact on their life and I just fucking loved hearing that because

again it's like they wouldn't be the type of they wouldn't be the type of they wouldn't be the type of lads who would be engaging massively in mental health discourse in their circle of friends and we all went through the same education system

we were taught nothing about fucking mental health we were taught religion that was it so it was hugely refreshing for me to hear people that i know say to me that podcast on cognitive behavioral therapy that podcast you did on uh transaction analysis for them to say that really had a positive effect and i'm using this and it's changing how I think and it's helping me live my life that for me to hear is it just it made me feel very good it made me feel nice it made me feel um I don't know it's it's it's like just made me feel like I'm doing something good

that's all I can say I I felt good to hear that, and I knew as well, by the nature of the conversations, it was genuine, what they were saying was genuine, and yeah, it's nice to fucking know, because look, I'm from Limerick lads, and things are a lot better now, but 2014, 2015, Limerick had the highest rate of suicide in the country. And I've lost a lot of people that I know. A lot over the years through people taking their own lives, you know. So it's nice to get feedback from people I know. To say that something I'm doing is having a little

bit of an impact. Anyway, because I don't know, it just doesn't. And the thing is too, this is what pisses me off. When I talk about mental health stuff, when I talk about psychotherapy, when I talk about

psychology, like, I'm not even a fucking expert, I studied it for a bit, right, I didn't even finish my qualifications, studied it for a bit, and the things that I speak about, it's such easy, simple, common sense psychology. There's nothing complex about it. And yet. When. I speak about some of this stuff. Like the. Not even.

Friends of mine who are saying it. But like the DM's I get. People feel as if I've. Shown them like this. Big hidden knowledge. And that makes me. A kind of angry of angry because it's like this stuff is so simple it's so simple and it's so straightforward and it's so simple to understand and why do I have fully grown adults saying to me this is the first time in my life that I've heard about cognitive behavioral therapy

that I've heard about transaction analysis that I've heard about emotional intelligence and all this other stuff I go on about that angers me that I've got grown adults saying that to me because it means that them and I and all of us have been failed by the education system and by society at large. This is my thing the whole time. Why are, if you can teach me at three years of age in school about religion and about Christ and about haunted bread, if you can teach me that, you can teach me about cognitive behavioural therapy, you can teach me about to understand what my emotions are, what a healthy emotion is, what an unhealthy emotion is. What is anger? What is constructive

anger and what is destructive anger? What's the difference between confidence and low self-esteem? Destructive anger. What's the difference between confidence and low self-esteem? What is self-esteem? Do you know? I never learned about fucking self-esteem. If you said to me in school, what is self-esteem? I would imagine boiling myself up in a pot and turning into steam.

And I'd say, that's my self-esteem. Do you know? But for some reason it's just not, it just isn't. And like I said last week, the conspiratorial hot taker in me believes that it is not in the interest of systems of power and systems of capitalism to have a population that is very mentally healthy. I don't think it's because a population that's incredibly mentally healthy, it's very difficult to advertise to that population. It's also very difficult to coerce that population politically through the use of emotion do you know um a lot of politics is about very simple black and white emotion it's not really about policy it's about can we make people angry about this thing can we make people blame that other group of people

whether it be immigrants or poor people that once a population becomes mentally healthy once a population becomes emotionally intelligent emotionally grounded then that population has a greater ability to engage in critical thinking and a population that can engage in emotionally intelligent critical thinking is less likely to be swayed by black and white reactionary bullshit do you get me that last bit there that's hot take do you know that's borderline conspiratorial but it's just

a world view that I lean towards and that's why because it just doesn't make sense to me it doesn't make sense to me why we at a young age are not thought about psychology and mental health as part of our education. I just don't get it. But yet we can be thought about religion or we can be thought about...

I don't know, what else did I do? We didn't even get fucking sex education like i said it before i was 14 a priest came in told us not to wank told us that if we had a fucking wet dream it meant that we slept with the devil um mumbled under his breath about how to wash your cock that was it don't have sex until you're married and i can't answer that question about a condom because I'm a priest. That was the early 2000s so hopefully things are slightly better now. I'm not too sure. I'd imagine they are slightly better. But for millennials, particularly particularly later millennials like myself we were bereft of any decent mental health dialogue in our formative fucking years

simple as that so if you listen to this podcast you'll know there has been several episodes about mental health and specific techniques what i would advise you to go back and listen to the the first ones that spring to mind there's four different episodes on cognitive behavioral therapy part one two three and four they're easy enough to find there's other ones on transaction analysis, and a few more mental health podcasts,

I can't remember, see I have this fantastic habit of, naming the podcasts silly names, which I enjoy doing, but a consequence of that is, jeez I can't even remember my own episodes, but I'll tell you one thing that's handy. If you look at this podcast on Spotify,

I found that Spotify is the best for this. So you type in Blind Boy Podcast to Spotify, all the episodes are there. And if you scroll through them, it has a very quick synopsis of what each episode is about. So that's the easiest way to find the mental health podcasts. Because I can't list them out right now off the top of my head. So what I want to focus on this week is specifically applying psychology.

Applying it to your life. Here's the thing like you can you can listen you can you could read about self-help or psychotherapy you can read about it and it can impact you and it can make a lot of sense or you can listen to you know you're listening to my podcast or listening to someone else's podcast and i'm saying something about mental health and you're listening going wow this is resonating with me this makes sense i i understand something about myself now that's all well and good right and that's an excellent first step but it's how do you then apply what you learn to actually create real change in yourself. It's think of it like I don't know reading a book about exercise or reading a book about nutrition. You know we all like to do that if if if we i don't know want to

make an improvement in our physical health so we decide i'm going to get into weightlifting i'm going to get into running i'm going to change how i eat often what we do is we either get a book about it or we go online and the very act of reading about lifting weights the very act of doing that just reading it you can end up feeling quite good about it because it feels like you're doing work but you can read about weights all you fucking want read about bench pressing squats whatever you like but if you don't take that knowledge and go to the gym with it and not only are you going to the gym with that knowledge but you're doing it correctly and you're doing it regularly if that doesn't happen then you're not going to

actually change your physical health so mental health is no different and we do have to be cautious that we don't i don't know end up spending too much time learning about mental health thinking about mental health you know devouring information that we don't spend too much time just doing that because that's a common thing it's very easy to pick up a self-help book read it and feel temporarily good but if you're not taking that and applying it to actual lived behaviors then you won't see a change in yourself so i'm just going to give a little content warning for this week's episode what i'm going to be focusing on this week's episode is the psychology around body image specifically cognitive psychology what we can do

to cope with issues of body image but if this is something that you have a history with or that could be quite triggering for you then just a little a gentle heads up that that's what we're going to be talking about and you don't have to listen to it if you don't want to i completely understand so that's what i want to kind of informally explore this week uh 20 minutes there now so i think we'll before i get into it we'll do our little pause right last week i did a pause with this little mad drum thing that i had i I usually do the ocarina pause. But I've been given a very strange instrument called an Aztec death whistle.

And this instrument, it looks like an ocarina, but it's in the shape of a skull. And what it is, it's an ancient Aztec instrument from Mexico. And it's not very musical when you blow into it it's supposed to sound like actually this is probably the worst instrument that I could choose for a mental health episode unless, unless you take the

Buddhist approach so basically this instrument is supposed to sound like someone screaming because they're getting killed, it's supposed to sound like someone screaming because they're getting killed it's supposed to sound like a person like being impaled it's it's the sound oh it's the aztec death whistle and it's so old it's a couple of thousand years old they're not fully sure what it was they think maybe that all these aztec soldiers when they were going into battle

all the soldiers would have their death whistles so if you were fighting the aztecs all you'd hear is like hundreds of these soldiers blowing these death whistles and it sounded like hundreds of people screaming to their death and that would be frightening and intimidating so i've got an aztec death whistle and what i would suggest is that yeah let's go buddhist with it the buddhist approach to death is you understand and accept that death is inevitable death is something that's going to happen to you. And it's going to happen to everything that you care about. We'll die. Everything dies.

Every creature is going to die. The fucking sun is going to die. Everything dies. And you can save yourself a lot of unhappiness and anxiety in life. By recognizing and facing it. acknowledging it now like i said the buddhist approach like i spoke about on previous podcasts certain buddhist monks will meditate beside rotting human corpses and that's their way of confronting and acknowledging the inevitability of their own death it's accepting their mortality we're not going to go that far instead i'm going to have a aztec death whistle pause um instead of it's it's some people might

hear an advert though instead which is the opposite of confronting death isn't it because that's what decent advertising is decent advertising is anything that reminds you of the inevitability of death. So we now have kind of this vicious competition that's going to happen between the solemn mortality of the Aztec death whistle. And then whatever bullshit advert of some shit that you don't need is going to come into the podcast when I play it. Okay, let's have the Aztec death whistle pause. I'll go back a bit far now because it can be loud. On April 5th, you must be very careful

Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what?

Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real.

Who said that? The first omen. Only in theaters April 5th. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're

not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. It doesn't really sound that much like fucking... I think there might be a technique of playing it, but I'll give it another crack. It doesn't really sound that much like fucking...

I think there might be a technique of playing it, but I'll give it another crack. Oh fuck. I don't know, does it sound like someone's screaming to their death maybe not it's certainly not pleasant anyway so there you go that was the Aztec death whistle pause right support from this podcast support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the patreon page patreon.com forward slash theblindboypodcast. Would you like to be a patron of this podcast? Some of you are. What it means is, you know, if you like listening to the podcast,

you listen to it for free, you have the option of buying me a pint or a cup of coffee once a month and subscribing to the Patreon. Please do, if you can can it makes a huge difference to my life it gives me a regular source of income it is the it's amazing it is fucking amazing and thank you to every single patron of this podcast if you can't afford it then you listen for free that's fine no problem um also subscribe to the podcasts follow it, leave a review recommend it to a friend you know the crack so something I'd like to talk about this week and

it's an issue like I've given a lot of time to anxiety depression anger something I wouldn't mind looking at this week because I have mentioned it before but I haven't gone at it from a practical psychology point of view. And what has me thinking about it is Instagram.

Instagram in Ireland, if you're an Instagram user and you're in Ireland, they're doing this trial thing on Instagram where they've removed likes. So on Instagram now, if you're in Ireland, you can't see how many likes someone else's post has gotten. You can see how many likes your own post has gotten yourself, but other people can't see that. yourself but other people can't see that and for me i didn't really get it because like i don't know my instagram account is like public figure account and the other thing as well i have a fucking bag in my head the odd time i'll post a fucking bag selfie but honestly I don't really give that much of a shit um how many likes it gets obviously if I do a selfie on Instagram with my bag on and it gets a lot of likes that's good I'm happy with that because it's it's my job to try and grow my social media profile so if I get a lot of likes and I get some followers off it brilliant it's my job to try and grow my social media profile so if i get a lot of likes and i get some

followers off it brilliant that's more people who can listen to this podcast basically do you know what i mean my social media is mostly mainly an advertisement for this podcast um or whatever book I'm writing but for people who don't wear bags in their heads who post photographs of themselves I there's a thing whereby you now have you know your physical appearance a selfie essentially people will take a selfie of their face or their body or whatever and they'll put this on instagram and it can get likes and i've seen people say you know if they put up a selfie and they're not happy with the amount of likes that they get within an hour. They'll delete the selfie. Or. If they see that their friend. Has gotten far more likes for their selfie.

That that can make that person feel like shit. So one of the most. Toxic elements of Instagram. Because Instagram is very much picture based. I mean. Okay there's great photographs of food on it. I mostly. I love animals on Instagram.

I follow a fierce amount of cats. And dogs. And raccoons. And otters. But some people are just like. Here's a photograph of my face. Here's a photograph of my body. And it is. what it has done and it's a concept i explored before when i was talking about the theories of carl rogers

the psychologist rogers has a thing called the real self and the ideal self now if you want to hear more about this there is a carl rogers podcast again like i said i don't know what the fucking name of it is you'll find it on spotify if you look through the descriptions but very simply rogers had a theory about the human personality that we have our real self our real self is who we truly are. The person that we. Kind of are around our family. Or who we are by ourselves in private. Our real self.

Then you have your ideal self. Your ideal self is how you would like others to see you. Now Rogers posited that. People who spend a lot of their lives. As lives aspiring to live in their ideal self. Which is the person who you would like other people to think you are. Roger says that people who spend a lot of their lives that way. That these people tend to have a higher likelihood of experiencing mental health issues. Whereas people who live in their real self, who they really are,

these people are mentally healthier. Okay? And it's quite simplistic. But Instagram has essentially digitally quantified that. If, like, the concept of having, you know putting a a selfie up of your fucking face and then getting a shit ton of likes based on your face or your body and then seeing someone else get more likes or seeing someone else get less likes they have managed to. Fit into a nice little package. With numbers.

They've gamified. That's what they've done. They have gamified. Kyle Rogers' ideal self. Which is quite fucking toxic. And. I don't need the hot take on how toxic that is. All you have to do is speak to.

Anyone in their fucking early 20s. Who uses Instagram. That's all you have to do is speak to anyone in their fucking early 20s who uses instagram that's all you gotta do straight up how do you feel when your selfie gets less likes than the last one how does that make you feel about your worth as a human being how does it make you feel as a human being when you can see that someone who one of your friends gets more likes than you do based on their body or their face this is happening all over the gaff you ask people and they go it makes me feel like fucking shit and it makes me feel scared and it makes me feel frightened and it makes me feel worried And when I walk away from Instagram, having not gotten enough likes, it makes me feel less worthy as a human being. And the weird thing there is to freely admit that is actually quite taboo.

We tend to shame people who admit to caring about likes. We're expected to pretend we don't care but the like there's we should definitely destigmify destigmify that's a word destigmify

destigmatize we should definitely destigmatize make it okay for someone to say De-stigmatize. We should definitely de-stigmatize. Make it okay for someone to say, yes, I do care about how many fucking likes I get on a photograph of my face. I really do care. And to make that okay to say, because sometimes you'll see,

I don't know, it's almost a meme at this point it's usually there's kind of a sexist tone to it as well because it's often women who get the biggest slagging over it but i don't know you'd find an influencer or someone they have their account deleted and all of a sudden they release a video where they're bawling crying begging instagram to give their account back and culturally we tend to take the piss out of that behavior we go look at that silly lunatic look at that fucking egypt crying because their instagram got deleted it's it's a common thing with female influencers who might post a photograph that's a little bit too racy because instagram have strict rules on like showing nipples and hair and all this

kind of gender discrimination but it is a common thing where you'll have a young influencer bawling their eyes out in a video big red face saying instagram please you deleted my account and we shame that and we laugh at it and we pretend you go what a silly silly fucker look how much they care about their likes but that's us projecting that person is in a real fucking, a real, real sense of crisis. A real sense of crisis. And it's crisis because it's evidence that that person has placed their entire sense of self-worth into a piece of software, into likes. And when that's suddenly taken away,

they don't have the coping mechanisms to behave as an adult because instagram hasn't enabled their self-worth to be defined by likes and that's fucking frightening it's frightening to see so we shy away from it we ridicule it and it's frightening for us to see. But we should destigmatize that and make it okay to say, I really care loads about how many likes I get. I actually really do. It affects my emotions. And it's not okay to... We should be striving to move away from that because it's unhealthy. But there should be no shame in admitting

that that's unhealthy. None whatsoever. It's... Lads, we're fucking human beings. Instagram have set up a system whereby they can measure your worth using numbers. Of course we care about it. Of course we do. This is why it it works this is why we go back so let's destigmatize that i think so back to what i'm saying about the

the toxic structure of what instagram enables basically the the gamification business so what you have right there is digital gamification of the ideal self which perpetuates the very toxic concept of the external locus of evaluation which is another thing i mentioned quite a bit if you want low self-esteem and self-esteem being your sense of internal worth that you have your self-esteem is the value that you put on yourself as a human being. If you want low self-esteem. Right. Which is no crack. A good recipe for low self-esteem. Is to place your worth.

In external things. Place your worth in your behaviour. Place your worth in your appearance. Place your worth in your job. If your worth is. I must, this, I'm going to put out a selfie today now, and this selfie is going to get a thousand likes, and I'm going to be gorgeous in it, and I'm going to put that out, if you end up getting a thousand likes on that selfie, okay, and you feel great for the rest of the day you feel thrilled that you got a thousand likes

and then the next day you get 200 likes and you feel like shit right there what that is is that's known as an external locus of evaluation there's nothing wrong with putting up a selfie getting a thousand likes and feeling comfortable and happy and to healthily like it's okay to healthily think that other people find you physically attractive that's okay but when your happiness depends on it that's when it can get incredibly stressful and unhealthy and can set us up for mental health issues that's what's known as an external locus of evaluation the opposite of the external locus of evaluation is the internal locus of evaluation. The internal locus of evaluation basically means I am no better than anyone else. Nobody else is better than me because I'm a human being and I'm too complex to rate or evaluate off another human being. No aspect of my behavior defines my worth. The amount of likes that I get on my selfie does not define my personal worth.

The job that I have does not define my personal worth. Do you get me? So what Instagram has done is it's after removing likes. And I'm guessing, I don't know the psychology of it but I'm guessing Instagram or Facebook who run Instagram have got a team of psychologists trying to take some degree of accountability and saying that

this huge platform that we have is most likely a significant contributing factor to poor mental health in young people's lives and i can see why it would be so instagram have gotten rid of likes so what i'd like to take a little bit of a look at from a psychological perspective and a practical psychology perspective is a body image okay before but actually before i get straight into that. Just back to the Instagram thing.

To kind of clarify where I'm going with this. Because. I want to be cautious. Am I saying. To people. That are trying to espouse that like. Fuck Instagram. You know fuck social media.

No absolutely not, because let's not ignore the fact as well, that Instagram is also a big load of fun, it's enjoyable, Instagram does give people a sense of meaning in their lives, so I don't want to be, you know, such a reductive take as to say social media is bad what i would suggest is like because here's the thing right first of all like i said earlier we're human beings the human being is a social animal human beings thrive on a certain degree of approval from other human beings that's normal that's healthy it's okay to want other people to like you it's okay it's healthy to want other people to find you desirable to think that you're attractive that's completely normal okay and instagram And Instagram offers a nice conduit for that to happen. But, here's the thing, and this is where this almost intersects a little bit with addiction psychology.

Let's just say Instagram is a substance. Well, what is your relationship with the substance? Do you get me? Like, it's okay to... I don't know, what if you fucking, you know, you've been in the gym for six months and you're genuinely quite happy with how you look, so you want to share that with people.

You want to show people, I feel that I look good at the moment, I'd like to share that with you, and I like getting a little bit of approval for that that's okay what if you fucking spend hours getting ready and you've got class clothes on you know you like fashion you think you look really nice and you want to share that with people these are all really healthy things it's fine it's fun it's can provide an awful lot of meaning and it does but what what i would ask you is what is your relationship with it does doing that provide you you know genuine happiness and meaning and if it does carry on fair fucks but if instead this thing this substance

this instagram that you're using you're going there because you think it wants happy it will It's creating anxiety, sadness, depression, anger, jealousy, envy. If it's bringing this plethora of negative destructive emotions and you think you're going there for positive emotions but the reality is posting selfies, you know, fucking photographs of yourself before you're going out on the night out photographs from the gym if you're engaging with it and ultimately it's resulting in these destructive negative emotions then you have to evaluate your relationship with instagram so that's where it intersects a bit

with addiction psychology. So that's what I'd say. It's not Instagram. It's what is your relationship with it and what is the emotional result of your interactions with this thing. I mean, another thing that can be unhealthy but isn't necessarily

a lot of people use like face tuning and filters so and this this I can see how this could be quite destructive to a person's self-esteem for you to have someone doing selfies or photographs of their body putting it on instagram but software has been used to enhance the physical appearance whether that means making your fucking body smaller or bigger skin clearer doing editing photographs of yourself so that it fits a more traditional view of it fits the beauty standards of what's going to get likes like that that's the ultimate ideal self there's people who do that and they will absolutely edit an image of themselves it will get a fuck ton of likes and then that person has to feel the short-term buzz of getting all those likes and then walk away from the phone and say to themselves i don't look like that really though i i know that i don't look like that so i feel dishonest i feel not good enough

i'm scared to go outside in case people see that i'm not as amazing as i look on instagram that that's a filter that's happening lads that's really happening and that is that's I can see how that would be incredibly toxic to a person's mental health their and their sense of self and their self-esteem so off the back of that I want to talk a little bit about about you know body image and how it intersects with mental health. First off, what is body image? Body image is your own internalized sense of what you look like. That's what body image is.

Your personal inner barometer for what your appearance is um when you know is is that good or is it bad how does your opinion of how you look, how does that intersect then with your worth as a human being? If you have a body image that is negative and then on top of that you are of the belief that your worth as a person is related to how you look then right there there's a recipe for not being a particularly happy person to put it simply again nothing wrong with wanting to feel attractive wanting to be happy with how you look that's all fine but is is is it going is it moving towards excesses does it make you excessively unhappy do you know what i mean but having said that a healthy body image really isn't about attractiveness it's healthy body image is much more about self-acceptance

people with very unhealthy body image they tend to like tend to focus and obsess quite a lot on wanting to look different and crucially to genuinely believe that they will truly be happier if they look differently or if they look more attractive to other people and i want to be cautious this episode that i don't want to go into body dysmorphic disorders or anorexia bulimia things like that because it's not an area where i have kind of lived experience or know an awful lot about but i would have lived experience of lived experience of poor body image we'll say um i do and i've always struggled with trying to be as thin as i would like to be okay now here's the other thing as well like i i'm i'm entitled to hold that view and opinion of myself some people would look at me and go what are you talking about

you are thin then other people would look at me and go oh yeah i could see you could lose a half a stone so i don't want to offend anyone who would go what the fuck are you talking about shut up you're not fat it it doesn't really matter. Everyone has their own body image. It's something that's very personal to each individual person and we have to be cautious that we don't police other people's own self-image. We have to be cautious of that. so yeah a huge battle I always have is moving towards a place of acceptance okay and if you've heard me mention exercise and food on this podcast I mean one thing I always focus on when I like I exercise regularly I lift weights and I run and I also keep an eye on what I eat I do all of these things my motivation and focus for all of these things is always health-based and feeling good I run to feel good I lift weights to feel good these things make me feel amazing i eat well to feel good if if the end result is i'm happier looking in the mirror great but i my focus and my goal is i do these things

for emotional reasons i get great meaning and purpose out of running and going to the gym. I really do. It gives me great distraction, stress relief, endorphins. I can't knock it. I fucking love it. But I know, because I've been going to the gym since I was 14, and when I was a teenager, my body image would have been fucking terrible.

I was going to the gym exclusively to change how I looked because I wanted to feel happier. And what I've realized is, just from my experience, doing that is also a recipe for failure. When I was a teenager, early 20s, going to the gym, when I was a teenager or early 20s going to the gym in my teenage years it was to try and lose lose fat then when I got to 1920 I had a growth spurt so all of a sudden I thought I was skinny so I needed to grow a lot of muscle I believed I was going to the gym only to change what I saw in the mirror looking back at me. And what it did is, the gym wasn't enjoyable.

And it would mean that I would reach my physical goal and then I'd all of a sudden quit. And then be back where I started and be miserable and unhappy. and then be back where I started and be miserable and unhappy and I only started to enjoy exercise when it's when I had to put the effort in on a daily basis to not make it about changing my appearance and instead to make it about feeling better mentally feeling better having more flexibility and that's why i exercise if there's beneficial physical appearance results i can healthily say that's grand like i approach it in a healthy fashion if i find myself unhealthily dealing with it then i check in unhealthy being looking in the mirror feeling desperately unhappy and foolishly trying to convince myself that i will achieve happiness by changing the reflection in the mirror that's not how it works happiness does not come from external sources lads comes

from inside happiness comes from having a sense of from having a sense of meaning, having a sense of purpose. That's where happiness comes from. Not having an inch or two off my belly. The process of running and lifting weights and eating properly, that process that would take me towards losing an inch off my belly that process can bring happiness but the belief that the end result no that won't do it how do you know if your relationship with your body image is healthy or something you should be kind of concerned about i mean basic kind of checklist stuff within within cognitive psychology the basic kind of checklists around it

would be i don't know has someone close to you said that the concerns that you're that you're saying about your body i don't know whether it be your weight or your fucking nose or your hair whatever the fuck has someone else consistently said i don't see what you're seeing that's you know that that's one thing to kind of to be mindful of. Is your distress about your appearance, is it like a continual preoccupation? Despite being reassured from other people, is it something that's continually bothering you? If you were to think about I don't know

okay in a 24 hour period how much of your day is spent feeling stressed or uncomfortable about whatever aspect of your appearance in 24 hours would it add up to more than one hour spent unhappy with an aspect of your appearance in 24 hours but would it add up to more than one hour spent unhappy with an aspect of your appearance and then a big one do the worries that you have about your self-image about your body image, does that prevent you from socialising and making friends?

Does it stop you from wanting to go to that thing that you want to go to? I suppose in the digital sense, um i suppose in the digital sense you know do you feel pressure to be like i haven't posted a fucking selfie in ages because i just don't feel like it or like i said earlier the real dodgy one you've been face tuning yourself so much that you don't feel that the person you look like online is the person you look like in real life and as a result you'd rather just not fucking interact with people in real life and prefer that people simply just see your highly controlled edited digital physical avatar of yourself those are all red flags that would suggest that

your relationship with your body image is isn't healthy another one to watch out for is physically comparing yourself to other people and I remember I might say I was 21 22 I was I would have just gotten over my anxiety agoraphobia period where I wasn't leaving the gaff and I would have been scared to go to pubs or nightclubs or anything like that I was recovering from that and had started to live a more normal life and feel okay to go to nightclubs and whatever and feeling a bit more confident and shit like that dealing with the my anxiety and my depression so I was out in a nightclub one night and I was just chatting to a girl, she was a friend of mine, and I fancied her,

and she was talking about a lad that she fancied, and I don't think she even knew I fancied her, I was just, we were just talking away, and I said to her, oh what do you like about him, and then she said, oh he's just got these lovely big shoulders, and that was it, right, she lovely big shoulders and that was it right she just said that that was it i then went off and obsessed about my fucking shoulders now she didn't intend anything by that she didn't even think i'd be fucking listening but me i heard, that fella she fancies has nice big shoulders, according to her. That must mean my shoulders are tiny. Up to that point, I hadn't really thought about my shoulders.

So then I started to think, oh, fuck, how am I going to get bigger shoulders? So I'm in the gym now doing every single shoulder exercise under the planet to try and give myself big massive shoulders because I felt this is what would make me attractive then it would get to the point where every other lad that I'm talking to I'm now looking at their shoulders I'm now sometimes not even listening to what they're saying because I'm visually measuring their shoulders against mine and it was highly highly unhealthy and it caused it interrupted my social life obviously because if you're trying to talk to someone they're trying to fucking talk about the new Grand Theft Auto and you're looking at their shoulders

and then I'm now adjusting my behavior to try and improve my shoulders and it's it was just nuts it was so looking back it was just so fucking silly and foolish to be spending time what i said to myself was jesus christ you really want to be dedicating parts of your day thinking about another man's shoulders. I thought about it like that and it kind of helped resolve it, you know. But that's a red flag behaviour. Comparing yourself or the aspect of your body, of your body image that you're not happy with,

to consistently be comparing that and contrasting it of someone else's that's a big healthy recipe there or unhealthy recipe for low self-esteem right there that will weaken your resilience towards mental health issues other different things that are kind of red flags i'm going to try and keep i think a lot of this will be male focused because again it's two reasons i i don't have lived experience of of what it's like to be a girl and this isn't spoken about with lads at all i mean the conversation with poor body images is it's much more of an open conversation regarding girls and women but with lads i mean jesus you want to talk fucking mental health stigma we're only getting to the point

where it's okay for lads to maybe say to their friends that they have anxiety or depression. We're a long way off from a lad coming out to his friends and saying that he thinks his shoulders are small. We're a long way off from that. Do you know what I mean? And again, with anything,

destigmatization, did I say that right? Destigmatization. I'm that right? destigmatization I'm going to have to find a fucking different word, what was it earlier? destigmatizing destigmatization of for men to feel comfortable speaking

about bodily insecurities a poor body image with their peers that's somewhere where we need to move towards I don't even see that conversation happening much it's a bit more open an issue with

gay lads you'll see gay lads talking about it a lot a lot more straight lads not really okay a red flag straight lads not really em ok

a red flag over preparing before you go out in public how much do you prepare em again nothing wrong with fucking preparing people go out in public

go to the nightclub go to the pub it is healthy and it is ok to want to look good this is where it's tricky like i said we're social animals we do like approval from other people but we don't need it when you start needing it then you're asking for trouble liking is okay needing not so great so how much how much preparing are you preparing excessively to the point that it's making you unhappy i remember five or six years

ago and it was i didn't know the lad that well but he was a friend of a friend but i remember hearing this and it broke my fucking heart so this particular lad lovely lovely fella but quite shy and insecure and you could tell a few issues around his body image he had a fear of being sweaty okay terribly fearful because that's the thing, some people sweat more than others, you know, and some people can be prone to getting, you know, sweat patches and things like that, and for some people, that's very embarrassing and they're very self-conscious around it, so this lad was, sweat was his thing, and I'd been out with him a couple of nights and throughout the night he'd fucking he'd disappear for like an hour right and then his buddy said to me he's after running back to

the apartment there to have a shower so this lad's fear of sweating or looking sweaty was so great that he was leaving the nightclub with pints in him to go back to his apartment and shower and come back out. And it broke my fucking heart because I was just thinking the stress of that and not only the stress of it, but it wasn't something he was going to freely fucking admit either if you get me because that's something that would bring ridicule from other lads they go what the fuck do you mean you're going home having a shower it would bring shame so that for me i'd see that as an example of you know that that's an excessive level of preparing it it contradicts kind of you look how he's supposed to have a good fucking night if you're going home having a fucking shower at 11 o'clock and coming back and out maybe having another one at two do you know because you're worried about a sweat patch another one what's your relationship with diet and exercise

like I said earlier diet and exercise huge important part of my life always have been but I do try and focus it towards doing it to feel good to get a sense of purpose

to get a sense of meaning, to get a sense of meaning because these are good things exercising is brilliant free fucking drugs for your head, exercising is amazing I would encourage everybody to exercise it is just an incredible tool to help you along

with your mental health for a number of reasons, longevity flexibility, the whole shebang but you can also have an incredibly unhealthy fucking relationship with exercise where you're pushing yourself you're hurting yourself you're injuring yourself you're not even enjoying it you're beating the living fuck out of yourself if you miss a day in the gym you're killing yourself if you fucking, I don't know, you're on a strict diet, and then all of a sudden, like, nobody sticks to a diet 100%, everyone loves a chalky bicky or a few extra cans or a bag of taters. Everyone likes confectionery. They're good things. They contain chemicals that make our brains reward us.

So if you're on a diet, chances are every so often you're going to fall off the fucking wagon and have a Mars bar. Do you say to yourself. Ah fuck it I had a Mars bar. Or do you self flagellate. Do you actually fucking punish yourself. Because I know lads who punish themselves. Seriously. I know lads who. Very dedicated to their.

Health regime and their food. And. If they even think about. Having a Mars bar. or going to the chinese they will punish themselves by either doing a lot of exercise or eating some very bland food as an act of punishment for even thinking about it so that's not great are you consistently seeking reassurance from your boyfriend or your girlfriend or your friends you know do you bother them a lot about your nose or your waist or your wrists or your ankles or your shoulders or your tummy do you consistently ask them do i look fat how's my nose looking

whatever can you notice my ears do my ears look less big when my hair is like this and you know from measuring the reactions of the your friends or your lover or whatever are you becoming a bit of a dose? There's a red flag. Another one. This is. You know if you're in a relationship with someone. Is it affecting your sex life?

Because that's a hugely important thing. There's couples. Who have shit sex lives. Who aren't doing an awful lot of riding, and it can get really toxic and destructive, especially with lads, because if a lad is going, you know, a period of time where they're not having sex with their girlfriend,

the girlfriend, the lad, lad like how do I say this first of all lads are supposed to be horny bastards who write anything all the time and then you usually what happens usually what happens is the lad won't have sex right the girl will then internalize that thinking what's wrong with me because the reality is is that the lad is unhappy with some aspect of his body and as a result of that isn't comfortable either getting naked or feeling sexual enough to enjoy riding the thing is is that i might be generalizing here but the lad is much less likely to come out to their girlfriend and say it has nothing to do with you but i just feel that my belly is fat and I don't feel sexy and I don't want to have sex

lads don't say that that is like in terms of what we view masculinity to be that is something a lad would have great difficulty saying out loud not only out loud but to himself if

a lad is actually much more likely to get angry to get angry with themselves or to get angry with their girlfriend if they want sex than even say to themselves i can't ride my girlfriend because i don't feel sexy that's something that lads don't say and it's a thing it is a fucking thing again obviously it works both ways if you're a woman and you don't want to have sex with your partner because you just are not happy with how you look your body image is poor therefore you don't feel sexual image is poor therefore you don't feel sexual that's the thing but it's also a kind of a little warning sign to look out for that your relationship with your body image is now teetering into territory that's unhealthy because it's affecting your capacity to live a normal happy life and of course that's the biggest red flag of all are you linking your body image towards your

self-worth do you link either your attractiveness to other people or how attractive you feel about yourself how does that make your sense of self-worth feel do you feel like less of a person do you feel bad is your self-esteem lowered because you're not happy with how you look all right that's the big red flag that means right there that's external locus of evaluation you're evaluating your worth as a human being based on an aspect of your behaviour or appearance. Which, as we know, is something that we all have to work against. Something we have to acknowledge, tackle, confront and actively on a daily basis try to change. I am better than nobody else.

Nobody else is better than me because I'm a complex human being and I can't be evaluated against others. So what are some of the things we can do to improve this situation? Do you know what I mean? Well. Again. It goes back to classic fucking CBT lads. And I'm not talking about cock and ball torture. Cognitive behavioral therapy. With each of those. Red flags that I mentioned. There.

If you examine. Your language. Your internal language. Around. Something like. I don't know. language your internal language around uh something like i don't know let's just let's just say let's take it back to the shoulders right let's let's say let's focus on you know something about yourself that you that you don't like that you're unhappy with that's causing you anxiety an aspect of your

body image if you observe the language your internal language that you use around this stuff i guarantee you that that language is rigid and black and white so if it was me when i was 21 22 and i thought i had small shoulders i wanted my shoulders to be bigger my internal language would have been look at the fucking steady or stupid scrawny shoulders all the other lads have big massive wide shoulders and girls fancy

them and they don't fancy you because you've got small fucking shoulders and you're disgusting that would have been the real aggressive self-hatred language that I would have used without even being aware of it these are the things that would have been in my head very extreme very rigid not rational or evidence-based whatsoever very all or nothing

if you don't have big shoulders you are not attractive if you don't have big shoulders, you are not attractive. If you don't have a small tummy, you are not attractive. If only you had a smaller nose, other people would want to be with you and you'd be so happy. All these far-reaching, wide, extreme statements continually mulling around as internal self-talk in your head which reinforced then the negative emotions abc activating event you look in the mirror you see your shoulders or your tummy or your nose b what are your beliefs about your shoulders, your tummy, or your nose, they're rigid,

and they're excessively negative, C, what are the consequences, you feel like shit, you try and change this feeling by engaging in irrational, unhelpful behaviors, such as avoiding going outside, or injuring yourself in the gym do you know what i mean so a kind of a way to cope because again that's with with cognitive therapy it's it's about rather than solution focused it's coping you you try and change your language you move towards a place of acceptance and if needs be and this is where you might have to go back to the fucking the cognitive behavioral therapy podcasts that i have if you haven't heard them already you take out your abc form you write three columns abc and when you

you know engage in one of these red flag behaviours these negative behaviours that I mentioned previously you sit down with your ABC form and you go A. What was the activating event? I felt very insecure

about my shoulders or I saw a photograph that's a classic one as well you see a photograph of yourself and it's not one you took yourself it's one someone else took that's a real strong activating event for anyone who has body image issues.

So A, I saw a photograph of myself. All right, that was the activating event. B, what was your belief? My belief was when I saw that photograph of myself, I was hugely disappointed with how I looked. I felt really unattractive right c what were the consequences of b the consequences were i i felt like shit and i withdrew or i went to the gym or i spent two hours looking in the mirror that about that specific thing and then you once you have that written

down again here's the beauty of cbt the internal negative dialogue these rigid beliefs the black and white thinking the the demands when they exist in your mind as self-talk as as something that happens in your in. As self talk. You tend not to see how utterly absurd they are. But once you take them out of your head. And write them down on a piece of paper. Then you start to look at them. And go.

Jeez this is a bit. This is a bit silly is it. It's like I always say. When your friend comes to you. and they're saying to you my nose is fucking massive and i couldn't go out last night and then when your friend is saying it you're thinking jesus christ i didn't even notice your nose are you serious like when you when someone else comes to you with their shit and you can see how absurd that is you can do that for yourself when you write down and you have to be so fucking honest there's no censorship here you've got to be as honest as possible with how toxic your own internal thoughts

were write them down on the paper look at them and then challenge them with alternatives and like what's an alternative for I saw a photograph of myself and I felt disgusting and unattractive well the alternative is the fact of the matter is it's like listening to your own voice now I'm grand I'm listening to my own voice for fucking years

but you know when you hear a recording your own voice and you go jesus christ do i sound like that i think that's the most natural reaction in the world of course you think it's different you're listening to your own voice outside of your own head it's the same thing when you see a photograph of yourself from an angle that you're not familiar with of course it's strange and different and whatever you want to fucking call it it's a rational normal thing but yeah that's to move towards a place of acceptance you find the rigid language that you're using to describe your own appearance and challenge it with much more flexible things and flexible and accepting language is it's truthful it's it's like saying i i don't like my belly i think my belly's too fat

um and i would like to have a thinner belly but right now I can't really change it. I could look at the solutions and ways to improve this. But you're certainly not saying to yourself. My big fat belly is disgusting. And I'm a piece of shit. And everyone hates me. And I'm unlovable. And I can't get naked in front of a girl.

That's what you try and challenge you don't allow those thoughts to influence your behavior and then your emotions you catch them in the moment and you go hold on a second what's a more rational thing here what's what's a more a irrational flexible realistic alternative to the horribly negative and rigid thing i just said about myself and that's how you move to that place of acceptance another big part of acceptance too when it comes to body image specifically is you're a whole human being your body is just one part of that how you how you look to other people is just one part of that it's just one factor there's many other factors to your personhood and your physical appearance is just one you know so why then are you placing so much stress and value on this one external part of yourself?

When there's so much other aspects to who you are. I mean, one thing that I try and do is, imagine being able to foster towards yourself the type of self-compassion that you afford an animal do you know imagine imagine having a dog and that i don't know the dog is silly looking because lots of dogs can be silly looking an unconventional dog a dog that isn't particularly attractive or a dog that might be missing an eye you know something that makes the dog not what people would consider a good looking dog can you imagine for one second not completely and utterly loving that dog because of some aspect of their physical appearance that is what society would consider to be flawed

not a fucking hope it's so easy to do that with animals like i said when i'm on instagram half the fucking animals i follow on instagram they're cats who have been abused and who are missing eyes or injured in some way or have a disability and i just love these little fucking cats and how they get on with their lives despite whatever thing they have that whatever injury they've had or thing that's holding them back and how they persevere and i love these cats do you you know? And. You know. Like fucking my cats out the back garden. I think one of them is deaf.

Do you know? Neither of them to be honest are particularly physically attractive cats. They're both kind of wild. The fella is all cut from fights he's had. I don't give a fuck. I love him to bits. I couldn't give a shit in fact i love him more because of these things about them that are endearing imagine being able

to have that level of self-compassion for yourself i have a song called uh spastic hawk if you want to listen to it from 2011 which is explores these themes themes of self-acceptance things like that you know but regarding you know how easy it is to have this compassion towards a little animal what I'm doing naturally there and what we all do naturally is we're able to view animals as a whole and we it's it's so much more difficult to do it with ourselves. If you have a boyfriend or girlfriend and you truly, truly love them, you really love them

and they have this, let's just say, I don't know, you've got a girlfriend and she thinks she has a big nose. If you really, really love her, you're mad about her you love her nose that she thinks is big and you know if she wanted to get it fucking changed and you truly love her and you believe that she wants obviously you go with what that person wants but most people who are truly in love with someone

if you were to list out what their partner sees as flaws in themselves and you they said to you would you change that about that person if this person thinks they have big feet if your if your boyfriend thinks he has small shoulders or if your girlfriend thinks she has big ears and you love them and i asked you would you change that you'd probably say no i wouldn't because it's theirs and that's part of the reason why i love them most people will say that so why can't we be that way about ourselves it's it's much more difficult it's much harder but if we can do this for people that we love and for dogs and cats so easily naturally then we can do that for ourselves with enough kind of work do you know what i mean with enough acceptance acceptance challenging our negative rigid thoughts and moving instead towards a place of flexible

acceptance 85 minutes that's all i've got time for i could have done more of that i'd say but look i hope you enjoyed that um it's been a while since I did a mental health one and I hope you found it helpful I hope it resonated with you and I really enjoyed doing it so I'll talk to you next week go fuck yourself Thank you. rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first

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