Why Summer Can Feel Harder for Body Image
If you’re someone who struggles to accept your body, you may notice that summer can be a challenging season to navigate. Summer is often a time of traveling, swimming, and social gatherings, all experiences that can lead you to focus on your body and how it looks. If you’re accustomed to hiding the parts of your body you dislike, the heat of summer makes it harder to wear things like bulky sweaters or long pants.
For many people who struggle with body image, the struggle is less about what your body looks like, and more about the fear of social criticism and judgment. The increased social gatherings of summer can lead you to feel like you’re being examined for how you look. Travel and pool events can result in worries about how you look to other people in photos. While it may seem that your body is the problem, often it’s the fear of how you’re being perceived and whether you are accepted that truly fuels your distress.
How Body Image Can Keep You From Living Fully
As your body image concerns increase in the summer, your ability to live life fully can become especially limited in this season. For example, you may find yourself skipping events, not wanting to get in the water at the pool or lakeside, or declining to be in photos to document treasured moments with family and friends.
All of this can lead you to miss out on meaningful moments and experiences of lightness and fun. You deserve to have fun while traveling, swimming, and gathering with loved ones just as much as anyone else, but your fears about your appearance can hold you back from enjoying these moments.
The Hidden Cost of Avoidance
Not only do you miss out on fun and meaningful moments, avoiding events because of body concerns takes an internal toll as well. If you decide to skip an event because of your body image anxiety, you may be reinforcing an internal belief that avoiding meaningful experiences is an effective way to cope with shame and anxiety.
And for a moment you may find some relief – you no longer have to worry about showing up to that pool party and wondering what people think. But that relief only reinforces the idea that your anxiety is more important to be listened to than your desire for an engaged, connected life with those you care about. So by avoiding summer events to ease your anxiety, you’re actually inadvertently making your anxiety worse.
Why Comparison Increases During Summer
Not only is summer a time of pool parties, travel, and family gatherings, it’s also a time that you’ll see more images of people in bathing suits, summer outfits, and their own travel photos. As you scroll social media, you may see influencers portraying an image of life seeming “better” when you have a smaller body, as they display their travel photos, poolside pics, and summer parties.
However, social media algorithms are feeding you an unrealistic view of what bodies are like. Instead of seeing the full range of body diversity, most of us are fed a steady stream of only thin, young bodies. We can get a skewed idea that the only people allowed to have fun are young, thin, beautiful influencers.
If your social media feed is almost all thin people, consider seeking out people in larger bodies who are also sharing their fun times in the sun. Learning that there is life to be enjoyed regardless of your body size is a helpful step towards getting out of the comparison trap of social media. If your struggle is around aging, beauty, or any other dimension of self-image, find people who look like you to follow, particularly people who show themselves doing the thing you wish you had the courage to do.
Responding With Self-Compassion Instead of Self-Criticism
Taking steps towards addressing summer body image concerns involves building greater kindness towards yourself and understanding the cost of body comparison. Body kindness isn’t about blindly loving your body – that’s a tall order if you’re accustomed to criticizing it. Instead, body kindness involves taking small steps to be less judgmental and harsh towards your body, and treat your body with a sense of neutrality rather than trying to decide if it’s “good” or “bad”.
Understanding the cost of body comparison involves becoming more aware of your inner voice and the impact of its harshness when thinking about your body. Notice what happens when you’re critical of your body – do you go to less social events, force yourself to skip meals, or choose clothing based more on trying to hide your body than based on what you enjoy? These are all signs that body image distress is impacting your life, and a sign that you’re missing out on life.
When you recognize the costs, you can start to explore if those costs are worth it to you, or if you’d like to explore stepping out towards a life more fully lived instead. This idea comes from the therapeutic approach called acceptance and commitment therapy, a therapy focused on learning to make space for difficult thoughts and feelings in order to live life more fully. The goal isn’t to stop thinking the negative thoughts about your body – instead, you can learn to take those thoughts less seriously and recognize that you don’t have to listen to everything your mind tells you.
How Therapy Can Help
Therapy for body image struggles can help you learn to respond differently to critical thoughts, build confidence to pursue what matters to you, and clarify what you care about beyond what your body looks like.
Therapy in particular with a body-affirming practitioner, can help you recognize that your struggles in part come from stigmas in our society that aren’t your fault. In therapy, you can learn to validate the impact these struggles have had in your life, while choosing to move forward with more freedom to reject societal messages that limit our idea of which bodies are acceptable.
If you’re in Texas, I’m a licensed professional counselor specializing in helping you to grow kindness and acceptance towards your body so that you can live your life more fully. I offer virtual sessions for people throughout Texas, and in-person sessions in my Houston office. If you’re interested in working with me, schedule a free consultation call at the link below.