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Summer:
This is eat the rules, a podcast about body image self worth, anti dieting and intersectional feminism. I am your host. Summer innan, a professionally trained coach specializing in body image self worth and confidence, and the best selling author of body image remix, if you’re ready to break free of societal standards and stop living behind the number on your scale, then you have come to the right place. Welcome to the show.

This is episode 311 and I’m talking about a counter intuitive way to manage anxiety about your body, whether that be from pictures or seeing yourself in the mirror or being in a social situation where you start to feel anxiety about whether people are judging you. You can find the links mentioned at summer innan.com, forward slash, 311, I want to give a shout out to Jenna Ray, who left this review. If it wasn’t for summer’s podcast, I would never have been introduced to intuitive eating and Health at Every Size. I’m so thankful for all the information and resources she provides in these podcasts. I always look forward to new episodes. Thank you so much. Jenna Ray, really appreciate that you can support the show via ko fi, go to K O dash, fi.com, forward slash summer in and in. And you can make a monthly contribution for as little as $5 a month. You can help to keep this show on the air for another season. And you’ll also get access to my mini course conquering negative body talk, if you haven’t already done so, you can also support the show for free, just by leaving a review via Apple podcasts or subscribing to the show via whatever platform you use. I’ve also got free resources. If you go to the body image coach.com you can find the 10 day body confidence makeover as well. You can find the body image coaching roadmap, specifically for professionals who work with people who may also have body image struggles.

I’m coming off the tail end of a really bad cold, so my voice is is starting to be better. I was going to record this last week, but there was just no way I would have been able to make it through this without hacking up along and and so we’ll see how this goes. And this is I’m recording this podcast in October, and I’m closing out the final cycle of you on fire, the enrollment for the final cycle. So I’m really excited for all the people who are joining. We’re going to do this with me for the final time. And don’t worry if you still want to work with me, there’ll be other opportunities, and you can always get in touch with me about private coaching. I’m doing some private coaching slash counseling now with people under supervision from a therapist, so just email me. We can talk about that. If you’re looking for body image support. I’m excited to do this podcast. It’s been something that I’ve wanted to do, and I just wasn’t sure how to present it, what to call it, but we’re going to be talking about a counter intuitive way to reduce body anxiety, and I’m going to be sharing a personal fear that I have been working on, and that’s what prompted me to create this episode. I’m going to talk about what I learned about working through that fear, and how we can use that to apply it to body anxiety and the counterintuitive way that we can work through body anxiety, and why this is important towards feeling more comfortable with things like the mirror or pictures, and why we often avoid doing picture work or mirror work. And what’s really helped me to overcome this fear. So when I talk about body anxiety, I mean things like, you see a picture of yourself and you start to feel, you know, your your heart race, or tightness in your chest, or you go to get dressed in the morning and you’re trying on different outfits, and you start to feel really panicked about the size of your body, or you are worried about, like, whether or not you should work out, and you start worrying because you didn’t work out today. So anything that’s kind of related to that, any of that, that fear that we have, that panic, that anxiety, that’s really what this episode is going to be centered around, I’ll share the personal fear that I have.

So I’ve been working on addressing this fear, and it’s kind of embarrassing, and I don’t really talk about it with anybody but I. I started a few years ago. I started to get panic attacks when I was driving on highways, and this is something that never happened to me before. I used to live in a big city. I used to drive on the highway all the time, and then when I moved out west, I moved to a place that’s pretty far away from a highway, so I rarely go on I really have a need to go on a highway, like, maybe, I don’t know, once every three four months, maybe not even I just rarely have a need to go on a highway. And so what I noticed is that now, when I do get faced with that, I get. Anxiety, and I have a full blown panic attack while I’m on the highway, which is really scary, because you feel like you’re gonna die, because you feel like you’re gonna pass out, and your car’s just gonna run off the road. And so it got to the point where I just couldn’t even drive on the highway anymore, which didn’t really impede my life, because I don’t really have a need to go on the highway much, but at the same time, I thought, well, what if I do have to get on a highway? You know? What if I’m with my kid and I have to take him somewhere, and the only way to get there as a highway, I’m gonna have to figure this out.

So I got, I was working with a therapist around it, because I I didn’t really have anything else to talk to her about at the time. So I was like, You know what? Let’s work on this fear. I have some capacity to do it. Let’s work on this fear that I have. It doesn’t really affect my life that much, but it is something that I really want to overcome. And so that’s what we did, and I and what was happening, what happens when we go into these patterns is that we we start to feel this anxiety, and at the first sign of that anxiety, we then start to panic about the fact that we’re feeling anxiety. So we start to think, oh gosh, like something really is wrong. And then that makes the anxiety worse, and it creates this feedback loop where the anxiety just escalates. And so we can, we can relate this to body image, like, if you see you’re a picture of yourself, and you think, Oh, my God, I didn’t realize I looked like that. You start to feel anxiety. And then you start to think, oh gosh, something really is wrong. And so then the anxiety spirals, and it gets worse. And then it can turn into, I mean, in the worst case, it can turn into, like a full blown panic attack, which is what happens to me. And so that is that can be really, really scary. And I think for most people, the body anxiety doesn’t hit that point of panic attack for the majority of people, but I think it can get to a point where you just feel really anxious.

And so we can use the same way of thinking about this that I learned through my process, and we can apply it to body image. And so that’s what we’re going to do. So my therapist suggested that we do some exposure therapy to work through this. And for those of you that are not familiar with exposure therapy, it’s a really common modality. It’s often used in eating disorder recovery. It’s used when over working with fears, and it involves exposing yourself to that fear, and you can do that either in a real way. So for example, actually driving on the highway or in an imagined or guided way. So me imagining myself on the highway. In my case, I did this first in a guided session with her, where we were imagining driving on a highway, and the goal was to work towards actually, then driving on a highway, she wasn’t going to be with me in the car on the highway, although I wish she was. And so that’s why it was really important for us to to do this, for her to kind of show me, okay, here’s what you’re going to do when these feelings start to come up. And one of the things that was really important is that she was reminding me that the anxiety I felt was really normal and expected. My brain is trying to protect me from this perceived danger, and so the thing that we want to work towards is learning how to then de escalate the anxiety to prevent it from turning into panic. And I think that’s the part that’s really counterintuitive to me, is that I was thinking, what we’re working on is eliminating the anxiety, so I just never feel that again. And she was saying, No, we need to learn to de escalate it so that the message that you send to yourself isn’t oh my god, there’s something wrong with me. I’m starting to panic. Rather, the message that you send to yourself is okay. I’m starting to notice this. Now I’m going to use these tools to de escalate this anxiety.

And I think that that can be really applicable to to body image work, too, when we start to feel uncomfortable emotions, even if it’s not anxiety, just any kind of uncomfortable emotion, instead of thinking, oh God, something really bad is happening, like, there’s that shame, there’s that fear, instead, it’s like, okay, I’m noticing that. Now, what am I going to do to try and bring that down? And so my my frame of mind was like, I thought I had to overcome this fear by never feeling that anxiety again. And what I learned was that’s not what we’re doing. We’re not trying to eliminate the anxiety completely. Rather, we’re learning ways to cope when it shows up so it does not reach the level of a panic attack. And so now when I go on a highway, I anticipate that I might feel anxiety, but I prepare myself, and I have a tool that really works well for me to try and bring it down. And it’s still a work in progress, because I just don’t live near a highway. It takes me 30 minutes to get to the closest highway, and so if I live near a highway, I would go out a couple times a week and practice. This, but that would take me hours of my time, and I just, I just don’t have the capacity to do that. But I did also have this fear driving over bridges, and I live in a place where there’s a bridge that would give me panic attacks, and so I drive over that often enough that I was able to do this, and now I can drive over it, no problem. And I was so proud of myself about that. So it really does work, you can overcome these fears anyways. Coming back to the topic at hand, I think this lesson is really valuable when it comes to doing body image work too, because we want to learn how to cope with intense feelings about our body instead of letting them escalate. It’s funny, because I was aware that this is what I do when I work with clients, but for some reason, it just like went out the window when it came to my own situation.

And so we want to learn ways to cope in the moment so that these experiences are not impeding our life. I often hear from people and they’ll say that they have a situation that triggers them. So for example, seeing a photo trying on clothes at a store, having a really bad experience with in like a social situation, and it sends them into a spiral where they feel panicked and they feel terrible for weeks afterwards. And that’s really common. And so you know, what I want for people is to learn ways to tend to themselves in those kind of moments so that they can build up a tolerance or resiliency to the things that trigger them. So if you avoid photos like I avoid highways, that makes sense, right? It’s like, why would I put myself in this situation with this thing that’s going to like, really make me feel bad. But do we really want to live the rest of our lives like that? You know, do you really want to not be in photos, because then you have no proof of living, right? And so for me, it was like, do I really want to live with this just this little fear in the back of my head of like, what if I have to go on a highway? And so I encourage anyone who’s listening to consider if there’s things that’s that they’re if there’s areas where they’re maybe holding themselves back. So if you’re holding yourself back from doing something that you want to do, maybe it’s like wearing a bikini to the beach, or being in photos or being in social situations, that it is possible to really work through those fears. You don’t have to let that that that impede your life. And so in order to do this, we have to expose ourselves to the thing that we’re afraid of. So let’s use photos as an example. We would need to expose ourselves to photos. And when I’m working with people, that doesn’t mean, okay, go take a full body nude like that’s gonna that’s that’s way too far outside of your comfort zone, but let’s just break this down into baby steps, and then I remind them that the goal isn’t to eliminate that fear, anxiety or shame that might show up. Rather, it’s like, let’s learn to de escalate it. Let’s learn to cope with it in the moment so it’s not overtaking us. And the more that we repeat that process, the greater likelihood, the greater the likelihood, that our reaction is going to become more neutral over time, just like I can drive over that really scary bridge now, no problem.

And so you can think about like, is there something that you’ve been holding yourself back from doing? And maybe that’s something that you want to work on, and I do recommend getting support around it. I think that it’s a hard thing to do on our own, especially when you’re learning ways to to regulate yourself. When these emotions come up, different things are going to work for for different people, but when we can learn ways, and when we’re feeling supported and we’re being guided through it. It’s amazing how much of a difference this makes. This is what I do with people all the time, with mirror work with photo work with self consciousness about public situations and things like that. And so the benefits of doing this are we learn how to prepare for and move through these, these moments of discomfort. We learn how to de escalate our feelings of anxiety or shame so that they don’t spiral, and we get more comfortable in situations that used to trigger us, like clothes shopping or being at the beach in a bikini. And like I said, you know, most people don’t want to do this, because it means we have to confront some of that discomfort, and it’s so much easier to just avoid it. Like I know your plate is probably full. Why would you want to add emotional turmoil to your life? But at some point, you might want to be able to do these things like you might want to have photos of yourself. You might want to be able to go out to the beach or whatever it is. So learning how to work through these fears can be super liberating, and it actually is like a very good confidence builder. I feel like, when I was able to drive over that bridge, now that I can drive over it, I am constantly like, Yes, you did that. That is good for you. And there’s a lot of tools.

When I talk about working through those emotions, there’s a lot of tools that work for people, mindfulness. Those grounding somatic exercises. The thing that benefited me the most was tapping the emotional freedom technique, which I’ve since become, taken a training on to do with clients and so and it actually is based research based, even though it seems a bit Woo, woo, but I and whatever, it’s just whatever it’s just whatever works for you. If it doesn’t work for you, that’s fine. Don’t do it, but it does work for me, and so I do a lot of work with people around this because I find that we often get to a point where we might feel more comfortable in our body, but we’re still avoiding things like maybe we’re avoiding sex with the lights on, or looking at ourselves when we get out of the shower or group fitness classes or whatever it is that we want to do, and so we kind of create this comfort zone for ourselves, but we’re not fully liberated, and then we end up in a situation where we maybe have to confront the thing we’re afraid of, like seeing a photo, and then it sets us way back. So I would never pressure anyone into doing this work, but I have seen that we often can easily overcome the discomfort when we intentionally do some work around it.

And so ultimately, what I want you to take away from this episode is that in moments where you’re having any kind of, you know, significant emotional response to something that has occurred related to your body or otherwise, try to avoid thinking, oh my god, something really wrong is happening. And rather, think, what can I do right now, to help bring myself down, to help bring myself back to the present moment, to de escalate this. What can I do? And so if you’re looking for support around that, let me know. I’d be happy to do a session with you. And I hope you found something beneficial from this, or at least if you have a weird fear like me, you feel less alone.

So I hope you enjoyed that you can find all the links mentioned at summer Inn and in.com forward, slash, 311, don’t forget to contribute to the show to keep it on the air. I’ve got a few more episodes left for this year, but I would love to keep it going with your support. So if you’ve benefited from it, you can check out the information just for this podcast. So if you’re listening to it via Spotify, just click the like more, and it gives you the description of the episode, and the ko fi link is in there. You can also find it on my website or in all my social media links.

All right, thanks for listening today. Talk to you next time. Rock on.

I’m Summer Innanen and I want to thank you for listening today. You can follow me on Instagram and Facebook at summer Innanen. And if you haven’t yet, go to Apple podcasts, search, eat the rules and subscribe, rate and review this show. I would be so grateful until next time, rock on you.