Self-Esteem and Body Image
Self-esteem and body image cannot be separated; they are very much inter-related. Self-esteem is a perception of a person that he has about himself. Self-esteem is greatly affected when the body of a person goes through different stages, during various phases of life. A person loses his self-esteem at some stages of life due to the changes in the body that occur because of hormonal changes; especially when a person moves from one stage of life to another. The bad thing is that this change in your self esteem is very much visible from your actions.
It is a fact that people who have high self-esteem tend to raise more in life. This is because of the fact that greater self-esteem means you have high level of confidence in yourself. Confidence is the major element needed to succeed in life.
For some people, body image is very important, and any fault in it may lower their self-esteem. Body image is a perception of a person about his or her body. Therefore, the affects of the relation of self-esteem and body image are more visible in teenagers than any other age group.
The reason to this is simply that teenagers are more concerned, more than any other age group of people about how other people see them, as they develop from kids to being grown ups. What we notice mostly with teens is that these may experience drastic bodily changes, which will affect directly and heavily on their body image. What this developmental stage also characterises for the teenagers is that these changes come with an innate desire to feel that one is accepted by everyone within the sphere of life of an individual, especially by those who matter most.
The feeling of being accepted by the people around them gets at its height during the period of teenage. They idealise some of their elders or celebrities and try to look like them.
This causes so much pressure in them to do everything to fit into the body image that they idealise. This becomes quite a stressful situation as such people take the celebrities, who may be their favourite actors or models, as a standard of a body image.
The greatest disadvantage of this whole scenario is that a person starts relating his happiness to his body image rather than his intellect or inner qualities. This completely destroys the personality of the person if he fails to achieve his targeted body image, because for him the whole beauty is in the external beauty. When a person passes through the stage of puberty, the body changes greatly, making the person uncomfortable and more aware of his body image and compare themselves with others. One thing that triggers problem is that everyone has a different structure, and therefore, some of them might have more developed bodies than others.
All these things correlate body image to self-esteem. Obviously, when the person thinks that people would only judge his personality by his appearance, he puts in every effort to look the best. What he/she misses out is the fact that their worth is not in their appearance, their worth is actually what they really are from the inside.
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