We've been solving body image wrong this whole time!
This therapist says the goal isn't self-love or even neutrality. It's "body image flexibility"....can you have a negative thought without it eating your whole afternoon?
Well here's her checklist:
💠Feel inside your body (hunger, tension) instead of staring at the outside
💠Ask whose voice is telling you to suck in your stomach
💠Track where your appearance-obsession is stealing energy from
💠Replace even 10 minutes of that with something that connects you to the world
The kicker: "Every bit of energy you put into your shiny face pulls energy from your creative force and what people actually want is you🫵🏼"
I made a dopamine menu because someone on TikTok told me to and then a neuroscientist politely explained I was misunderstanding dopamine...
Apparently it's not a "Pleasure Chemical" you can just refill. It's more like your brain's way of saying "this was worth it, remember it"
BUT the menu still helped....just not for the reason i thought. You see....when you're overwhelmed, even deciding what might help feels like another task like having a list removes that friction
So I ended up ditching the dopamine framing entirely and just wrote down what I actually need:
💠overwhelmed = warm light + fiction
💠restless = bad watercolor or a new café
💠burnt out = walk with zero headphones
And here's the expert's warning that's stuck with me: Don't optimize your rest.....Sometimes the menu item is "do nothing"
We've been measuring happiness wrong.
Turns out "who you eat dinner with" predicts life satisfaction about as well as your income or job status. Researchers looked at 150k people worldwide......And it's not just mood.....solo eaters had measurably smaller brain volume in memory regions.
The word "companion" literally means "with bread."
👉🏻"companion" = cum + panis = with bread. The romans knew this.
Italians still get this (~9 shared meals a week). The rest of us are just forgetting.
Text someone. They probably want company more than you think.
Be honest. Have you ever entered a restaurant, looked at the prices, made eye contact with the menu, and immediately decided you were no longer hungry?