407. Loving yourself, will make you more attractive

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Speaker 1: Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here. Back for another episode. Today we are talking about beauty. We're talking about attraction, not in the way you may think. Mainly, we are talking about the theory that your thoughts contribute as deeply to your appearance as objective physical features and characteristics. Is that true? Do your thoughts change your attractiveness? And how exactly does that happen? How does loving ourselves actually have a biological physical impact? Can I begin in a slightly different way this week? I want to tell you guys about this quote. My favorite quote ever, just ever, full stop. I feel like I share a lot of quotes on this podcast, this one takes the cake, and I feel like it's the reason I wanted to do this episode because I've been thinking about it so often over the years, and finally I was like, there must be some science to this. It's from Roal dah. He wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory BFG. This quote came from the Twits. A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly, because those thoughts will shine out of your face like sunbeams, and you will always look beautiful. Since I was a kid, this quote has resonated with me. I was an ugly kid. Let's be real I was an ugly kid, and as an adult I started to realize, and as a teenager, I was like, okay, cards that I was dealt. If I control my thoughts, I really can not just change my appearance to other people, but how I feel internally, and that will change how I act. There have been people that I have met who are objectively beautiful, who are stunning, who have all the structural features of a very attractive person, but they have had such nasty thoughts towards others and towards themselves and towards the world, and you can almost see it reflected in their faces, like there is a cruelty that comes with thinking mean things about other people. In contrast, some of the most beautiful people I've ever met, they will probably maybe not ever model for like Proud or Vogue you know, they may not be on the cover of magazines, but there is this kindness that shines out of them that means people are instantly attracted to them. People are drawn to them like a magnet. Why does this happen? Because I think that we've all experienced this. Somebody who is objectively beautiful, we are kind of like, we feel weird about, but somebody who is like maybe not that has that draw. Today, we are going to investigate that phenomena and the deep scientific evidence as to how our thoughts shape the reality of our physicality and why focusing on self love and kindness will make you an enigmatic person. It will pull people in in any room. So, without further ado, let's talk about how loving yourself will scientifically, physically, psychologically make you more attractive. All right, let's leave no mystery to even begin here, let's just jump straight into it. Yes, it is true the way you think will have a significant impact on your physical appearance. There is evidence of this, and I'm gonna I just have to give you guys that conclusion, the answer to the question before the explanation. It's true, physical beauty is and everything your thoughts and your mentality have a much larger slice of the pie than you may think. Aliah Crumb she is a psychology professor, director of the Stanford Mind and Body Lab. She has conducted extensive research on something that we call mind body link. The mind body link is this bidirectional intimate communication between mental states between our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and our physical health and our physical form and reality. She basically says, our minds are not passive observers. They do not simply perceive our reality as it is. Our minds change our reality, even on a biological level. There are so many instances where our mental beliefs affect our physical appearance, or not just our appearance, but our physical reality. For example, there was an NYU study published this year, like two months ago in February that talks about how women who are scared of aging, of becoming less attractive, of their physical health declining, actually age faster biologically when holding all else stable. These researchers, they basically concluded, these women their thoughts about the state of their body, we're powerful enough to influence the actual biological age of their body. This also applies to attractiveness. The more positively you feel about yourself, the more powerfully people perceive you, and of course we have heaps of evidence for this as well. How you think about your level of attractiveness. It influences, yes, firstly how you present and your confidence levels, which have an emotional impact, but there's evidence that it also impacts you on a more cellular level. Here is exactly how both our skin tissues and nervous system originate from the ectoderm, the outermost layer of cells on our body that go on to form our nervous system, our skin, our hair, our nails, our sensory organs. The skin and the brain communicate through a network known as the skin brain access. A simple, very easy way of thinking about how our thoughts can influence our bodies is to consider this access, and is to consider how chronic stress, chronic negative thoughts, chronic hatred about ourselves height now stress response, height now, nervous system response heighten now our central nervous system response, therefore disturbing all these other communications to the ectoderm, to our skin cells, to our organs. Many studies have shown that while short term stress is important for survival, chronic stress, such as the stress that comes from hating yourself, the stress that comes from putting yourself down can trigger a whole wide spectrum of just so many things that again I hate to say, like attractive, unattractive, but that maybe aren't as healthy as our body could feel like and could look like. And it just goes to show the disturbances that self hating thoughts can have on our appearance. Likewise, you know, feelings of shame as well feelings of anger towards ourselves. Feelings of anxiety can also literally cause inflammation and can compromise your immunity in ways that show up physically. I should say, there is such a focus online at the moment. I'm sure you guys have noticed this, such a focus on like inflammation being this terrible bad thing, like I'm so inflamed, I have so much inflammation. If nobody has told you this inflammation is actually some inflammation is good for you. It's a really good sign that your body is basically taking care of business. So you don't want to reduce all inflammation. But you know, prolonged stress, anger, anxiety towards your anxiety about your life, about your appearance. Environmental stress is pain, amongst so many other things, can cause acute chronic inflammation, which is brutal for so many reasons. It can affect body composition, skin, hair, you know, which is important when we're talking about attraction. It also impacts mood and personality and health, which is much more important on a day. If we work towards loving ourselves, if we work towards speaking kindly to ourselves, we give our brains and our nervous systems the best chance at keeping us healthy, and that health is converted into physical attractiveness. It's so interesting to me that these days there's like so many quick fixes for like beauty, Like everywhere you go there are like advertisements for botox slit filler's surgery, and that seems to be like the first avenue that some people target when you should be targeting this baseline first of like how do I think about myself? Do I love myself? Do I care about myself? Some people may say this is just a placebo effect. It's not your thoughts that are changing your actual appearance. It's that your thoughts are changing your behaviors. Doesn't really matter whatever the mechanism, like, the effect is obvious, especially when it comes to how others view us, which feel so shallow, but again, that's what the episode is about. There have been some really interesting theory varies recently which say confidence specifically dominates objective attractiveness when it comes to other people's assessments of beauty. Let's look into that for a second. Let's look at the evidence. Studies show that those who view themselves as attractive have higher romantic self confidence and self esteem, which therefore influences how they behave in social and dating situations. And it really doesn't matter how objectively attractive they actually are. Their subjective assessment of their attractiveness is what influences this above everything else. Having that kind of attractiveness changes everything from our body language to our ability or willingness to initiate conversation, to our openness to strangers, which can make someone appear more open and reliable and trustworthy because they are receptive, because they have this magnetic energy that says, come and talk to me, like let's come and interact with me. This is called social contagion. It is a rapid, often unconscious spread of emotions, behaviors, beliefs through a group of people through a social network because of mirror neurons, because of behavior mimicking and an emotional contagion as well on top of social contagion. It explains we've talked about this recently actually when it comes to trends. It explains how transform why panic driven behaviors happen, and it explains social perception and how your perception of yourself can travel to the people around you. This process, it's driven by automatic building cognitive mechanisms rather than by conscious thought. But we can subconsciously influence that. We can subconsciously reprogram how we feel about ourselves through the repetition of positive self affirmation, through the repetition of practices that prioritize self love that feeds into confidence. That confidence is what impacts other people's assessment of usaricularly famous study about this asked to three hundred young adult three hundred around that young adults to rate their self perceived attractiveness as well as self reported confidence in their appearance, romantic relationships, and body esteem. The study found a strong correlation between having high self perceived attractiveness, again regardless of actually attractiveness, high body esteem, high self confidence, with overall self esteem and with overall romantic attraction to those people, it's just it's this weird thing. People like confident people because it's easy to be confident around them, and it's easy to buy into what somebody is trying to sell you about themselves when they really believe it. A study from nineteen eighty one found that this may outly come down to not just that, but down to emotional expressiveness. So people who display as well who are confident, display a lot of nonverbal cues for emotion. They're really able to infect the emotions and the mood of other peoples in the room without saying anything, regardless of objective attractiveness. They're also able to appear more friendly, more likable. I think what we need to understand again, I've kind of briefly explained this mechanism, but why right, Like, why is it so infectious? Why is confidence like the superpower? I'm going to take a short break and then I'm gonna lay it all out for you guys, So stay with us. Okay, So again, how we think about ourselves impacts how people see us that much. We know why. I've given some explanations about like openness and about like people who feel good about themselves make others feel good. But part of the biggest part of the science behind why confidence is so infectious and why it makes people like us is that many of us seek out traits in a partner or in a friend that are difficult to observe directly. You know, we want somebody who is kind, who was competent, driven, liked by others and so on, and just meeting them the first time or even a second time, like we have to make guesses. But someone being very confident when we meet them, that's a quality that we can measure, Like we can quickly be like, oh, yeah, this person likes themselves, and that acts as an indication of all these other worthy traits because part of us trusts that people know themselves well, or at least they know themselves better than us. Therefore, we subconsciously assume that their confidence or their lack thereof, reflects their value as a partner or a friend based on an accurate self assessment. Whether that is true or not, it's something that we believe. To test this again, there was another study in twenty fifteen. It looked at how people like viewed and perceived potential romantic partners who were over confident in themselves and who had a bit too much to say about themselves. Were they going to be put off by that arrogance. In the study, they specifically focused on a group of people who claimed to have knowledge of information that simply didn't exist, people who were cocky. Basically, the study had the overconfident people write up dating apps, and then they had a separate group of people, all opposite sex participants read those dating profiles and rate the authors basically, do you think this person would be attractive? The overconfident group, even though they didn't have pictures of them, Even though they didn't have, you know, any visual indicators, a lot of these people were like, Yeah, I think that this person would be attractive. I think that this person would be would beautiful because of how it impacted their perceptions. Why would somebody, you know, behave this way they weren't beautiful, you know, Why would they have all this confidence if they didn't have something to back it up. That's basically the formula, or basically the mechanism that some researchers and psychologists use to explain why confidence is so alluring. Basically, because a confidence is a mental shortcut for assessing, for assessing how well somebody knows themselves. And believing that somebody knows that they are a good person and that they are an attractive person, they are a kind person, because otherwise why would they feel this way. Obviously it kind of doesn't account for arrogance, which is why sometimes you know, we'll find somebody really attractive until we realize, oh wait, you really think that you're amazing. But the first in terms of first impressions, it is very, very powerful. We can go even further with this and talk about how talk about mirror your own and talk about facial expressions and how basically as well, confidence is one thing. Having positive thoughts. Loving yourself means that you are better able to be conscious of what other people are doing around you because you are not so critical of yourself. Essentially, you're better able to reciprocate other people's behavior because you're not self conscious. The University of Wisconsin study showed that people simulate the facial expressions of people around them and in that that creates emotional responsiveness in those people. Essentially, if you are less in your head more in the present, you are more likely to reciprocate how other people are acting, and that creates a ripple effect of positive emotion in those around you, or if you're the one who originated the smile as well, it signals responsiveness. It signals that you are approachable and that you are ultimately attractive because you've opened this emotional door for other people to enter. Basically, there is a connection there that says, I'm engaged, I believe in myself, I believe in you. That makes people want to that makes people like you. Basically, to do a mini summary of all this, because I feel like I'm going, I'm going in circles. We like people who know themselves, We like people who think of themselves as worthwhile, we like those who are emotionally and socially reciprocal. All of those things we can change regardless of actual physical appearance, because it comes down to charisma, to getting out of her own head, and to emotional intelligence. That is really the power here, being present, being confident, being calm. So how does this compare to making physical changes to your appearance, Because don't get me wrong, this mental reprogramming of like I'm beautiful, I am worthy, I am hot, I look great, it takes time, Like it takes a lot of time, and some people may prefer to just fix the insecurity that's really standing in their way. Like normally they can be like I feel feel really great about everything else, but you know, I don't really like my nose, I don't really like my boobs, I don't really like my cheeks. They can get those surgeries. Do interventions like that that remove the initial insecurity work long term? I'm not saying do they make somebody more attractive, because they probably do it and like it's something that they really want. And I'm not here to tell you what you can and can't do with your body. There's enough of that in the world you really can do whenever you want, and I will support everybody's decision. But what I do think is important is like, when we are talking about the secret source to confidence and the secret source to being attractive, is it all physical? Does surgery remove the internal insecurity? There was a study and noise of like fifteen hundred girls over and women. I guess because it was over a thirteen year period and it measured appearance, satisfaction, mental health, all that kind of thing at different points. And then also how many of these girls and then women got surgeries. So basically time one they were children, they were like how insecure you time to how insecure you? And have you gotten surgery? Five percent of them reported having cosmetic surgery at some point between those years. What's interesting is that those who reported higher levels of depression and anxiety and insecurity were more likely to get cosmetic surgery in the first place. Afterwards, though their levels of anxiety, their levels of depression, especially around how they looked, did not decrease. It did not go away. Having cosmetic surgery didn't help alleviate the emotional wounds for them that for a lot of them, they said had caused this pain being bullied, being criticized by parents. Now, not all of them did this out of insecurity. I'm not saying that. But if we are driven to surgery to fix insecurity and fix anxiety, it doesn't seem to be the fix that we think it is. Another study followed ninety eight women and two men for two years across the US, and these patients answered questions about their satisfaction like body satisfaction, body image, self esteem, symptoms of depression, as well before cosmetic surgery, and then again afterwards or between then and when they got the surgery, and then a couple of years later each subject during the time of the study had at least one five of very popular prostigures, so breast augmentations, rhinoplastis, bbls, that sort of thing. The patients reported being satisfied with the outcome of their plastic surgery. They didn't report any increase in happiness, though whatsoever. For those who did, it was very minor. It was a temporary boost. Basically, I think these studies are asking us to consider our desires for cosmetic prostigures and ask ourselves if it's confidence and attractiveness I'm after, Will this actually solve my problem if I don't work on my internal of self love, or will my mind just keep searching for what's wrong next? Again, I'm going to say this, there's no judgment in this. I've considered cosmetic procedures myself. I will probably get one at some stage. Maybe I can't say, but I probably think I will it. My friends have cosmetic surgeries. I think they look fantastic, and I think it was the right decision for them. It's just about addressing the root cause. Because, in contrast, a study that looked at over seven hundred patients with body dysmorphia who were treated with cognitive behavioral therapy found that every single one of them responded well to that treatment, and every single one of them had an improved quality of life, felt better about themselves, felt long lasting changes not just to their wellbeing, but to things like their confidence levels as well. That was the comparison surgery versus doing the deep inner work. Maybe doing both at the same time would be ridiculously powerful. What these studies are really saying is that there are a few layers to attractiveness. Just to summarize, there is an internal layer, there is an external layer. Being attractive is not just about performing for others or fitting within a very narrow idea of what beautiful looks like. It is also about self acceptance. That final ingredient. You can do everything you want to your body. That final ingredient brings a magnetism that is deeply powerful and cannot be replicated. And yes, like surgeries, make up clothes like contribute to that, But you also have to rewire the ways that society has taught you to hate yourself. That is a superpower when you realize, like hating myself has never made my life better, has never never got me out of a problem has never made me more attractive than it has never attracted the love I want to me. It is a magic spell. That's what my aunt used to always say, like put on your magic spell, like put on your self love spell. If you cast that on yourself. It's intoxicating when people see somebody that is truly in love with themselves and thinks so great that person is the most beautiful person you've ever met. Think about it, like, what's the most beautiful person you've ever seen? Sure, they were beautiful. There was something else, though, wasn't there, Like you remember the feeling of being around them. You remember the feeling of like seeing how they walked, seeing how they spoke, seeing how they acted, Like that was the ingredient that really like made the pie. With that in mind, let's get to the advice giving part of this episode. Let's talk about four ways to rewire your self perception and therefore your physical appearance, your beauty using your thoughts. First up, and this is one of the most powerful mechanisms for so many things. Develop a visualization ritual that transports you into a confident state by conjuring like an internal vision of how you want to be perceived, make it magical, make it wonderful. I'm going to give you some examples. This is going to explain this better. The best one out there is the golden or exercise. I've spoken about this before, but if you want to feel more confident, imagine a golden bright orb sitting right in your heart, emanating from your chest, and with each breath it goes a few inches wider, a few inches wider until it starts to engulf people, bring people into the fold, make them feel just pulled towards you. Some people also think about it like a force field, as like a magnet, like this is your secret armor. That mental visualization of like going I'm going to project my mind outwards to bring people inwards. That brings a glow that makes people attracted to you because of how you are thinking about yourself in the context of them. These visualization rituals leverage something that we call embodied cognition. So when you imagine, when you visualize energy radiating from your body or protecting you like an armor, your brain treats that as the truth that filters into your consciousnes thoughts that filters into your deliberate behavior, meaning you shift your posture, meaning you shift your breathing, meaning that your attention really begins to be more finely tuned, meaning you pay attention to things about yourself that you like. It also just on a physical level, like changes muscle tension, changes heart rate. This all feeds back into the emotional experience of making you feel more powerful, therefore changing how you physically present as powerful and confident. Another thing I've done in the past is that before I've walked into a date, before I've walked into a room a meaning a party, I give myself three compliments. I am smart, I have great hair, I don't know, I have great eyes. Things like that. I force myself to give myself those compliments and then walk thin because that's grounding. Like that is a very powerful form of cognitive priming. You enter a room now looking for evidence that people are responding to you in a positive way, because you have primed your mind to be receiving of that, you have primed your mind to feel beautiful. I generally find that just reminding myself of my positive qualities also becomes quite a self fulfilling prophecy. I can go into a situation reminded of my good sense of humor, reminded of my ability to listen, and it gives me a little mental nudge to be more present, to be like, to be trusting of this unconscious or subconscious part of me that's going to take over and mean that I will be okay because in the past I've always been okay, and even if I haven't, I now have new skills. Next, it can be useful to turn your self care routine into a kind of ritual or ceremony that's less on fixating about how the world thinks you look or how you present, and more about spending time with yourself, having a quiet moment whilst you're doing a face mask, whilst you're brushing your teeth, whilst you're doing brushing your hair. Whatever. This is practices of self love. With each movement, think of that action as a token of appreciation, as a form of love. Imagine you are brushing your hair. It's the hair of your childhood self. Imagine it's little you sitting in front of you, and you are brushing your hair out of love. Imagine cooking and nourishing meal for the most gentlest parts of yourself, making your bed nice and comfy, or neat as a deep act of devotion to yourself. You are worthy of being treated nicely. You are worthy of being adored. You are a creature of softness and beauty. Treat yourself as such. Literally, act towards yourself with the most purest form of endearment and kindness and love and devotion and loyalty, so that your brain begins to internalize we are worthy of this behavior. We are worthy of being treated this way because we are a beautiful, magical, wonderful person. Okay, I have a couple final tips. We're going to take one more short break before we get into them. Stay with us. Let's talk about the role of exercise in making you more attractive, and not in the way you think, not in the excessive cardio way, in the mental way. Exercise and movement make you more attractive because of the appreciation they create for our bodies and the neutrality and the gratitude we develop towards our physical form and what it is capable of, instead of what it could do better and how it could look better and how it fails us in terms of beauty. If you cannot love your body as it is, as you want it to be, at least respect it for what it allows you to see, enjoy, witness move through movement, and exercise connects you with that deeper appreciation that translates into good habits, translates into confidence, translates into health. This doesn't have to be exercise. This could be something you do with your hands, like pottery, something you do with your legs, hiking, carrying heavy grocery bags, climbing, life drawing, being a nude model, like something more embodied, like dancing. Anything at all that challenges the idea that your body only exists to carry around your brain or to be looked at or to be critiqued is so important. And having a healthy relationship with movement is something that really fuels your soul, makes you feel alive, brings energy back into your body. Is incredibly biologically powerful as well as psychologically powerful. Even just connecting with your body on a sensory level, disconnecting from it is something that needs to be witnessed and something that needs to be experienced is just so powerful because you really yeah, it's that gratitude thing, but you stop being in this mindset of feeling constantly monitored and again, I think I've really now this a few times now this home, but I'm going to do a more time. Like when you are obsessed with your physical appearance, when you are obsessed with how you look, you are immediately less attractive because you are distracted. Right, you are distracted because you are constantly monitoring how other people are seeing you. You're not connecting with them, you're not making eye contact, you're not thinking, or you're not interested or interesting, like you are just internalized, Like you are just you're shutting down into like really rapid and harsh self assessment. In contrast like genuinely being Like, my form is just the vessel through which I live my life. It's just how I do things and how I go about experiencing things. That is what builds attractiveness because you are able to be more present and therefore more confident and more engaged with other people. Sorry to go on a rent with that, but finally, my final thing. Instead of focusing on how to backs what needs to be tweaked, one needs to be changed, what weight needs to be gained or lost? Like, similar to what I just said, work on making yourself more interesting, more interesting to yourself, more interested in others. This is the most alluring quality you can have interesting people are fascinating, and people who show a deep desire to know others and who make eye contact, and who remember people's names and remember the trips they just went on, and remember the fun facts that they told them, who are interested in their stories. Those people have game. Like people want to be around people like that. How many times have you met someone who you didn't immediately think was attractive then you saw them talk about something they really cared about, or you saw them like make everybody laugh and you were like, oh my god, like hey, okay, like hello, like that person is that person looks and feels good. If you want to be more attractive, have something you care about, have something you can rant about, Have a cause that you dedicate time to. The most attractive thing somebody can be is interested and interesting like have the hobby. Some have a deep dive, have a Wikipedia page, you know everything about Like it's a grounding part of your identity. What it really is is that people look at you and they're like, oh, they know themselves so well they cannot be disturbed by anything I have to say, Like that person isn't even worth trying to make feel bad. They know themselves. I also think like being a great conversationalist also comes into this as well. People we've seen love people who reciprocate. They also love people who make them feel seen like it's it goes beyond confident. If you can't be confident, be intrigued, leave pauses in conversation. Remember that every great conversationalist you have met has learned that skill. It is a skill. It is a skill of non verbal communication. It is a skill of appreciating silence. It is a skill of the two to one, quite sten ratio of never forgetting a name, never forgetting a detail, concentrating on one person at a time. If you cannot be like objectively attractive, be confident. If you cannot be confident, be a great conversationalist. There is a science to having great conversations. There's a system, I should say, and you can then learn. You can learn to embody, that you can learn to engage and talk to anybody in any single room, and that immediately, I think, makes you more beautiful and more of a pure, enlightened, fabulous person to be around, because you make people feel human and feel seen, which is all we ever really want. Finally, finally, I know I said finally like six times now, but definitely finally. I just need you to remember, as much as we think that beauty is objective, there is large, like a large part of it is subjective. Just because you look different from the current beauty standard. Just because you will never have that nose, never have that physique, never have whatever that person has those muscles, does does it mean that you are not a beautiful person. I really do think the world is moving towards uniqueness rather than like straight up and down cookie cutter beauty. Like that is the biggest asset you have, that you are a little bit different, that you are somebody who is enigmatic in that they know themselves like that is one of the longest lasting gifts you can give yourself to love yourself so deeply that it becomes a feature of how people see you, and it becomes and it is represented physically in like the sun that shines out of your face. It is represented physically in how your skin feels, how your hair looks, how your nervous system is regulated. The more you tend to your inner life, the bigger the world around you becomes. And it's not just about romantic interest It's not just about whether people find you attractive. It's about the spaces that you put yourself in. It's about the opportunities and luck that come your way. Again, we can worry as much, we can worry till the cows come home about whether that person finds us hot, about whether you know wherever gonna be, that size, look that way, And at the end of the day, it's important, but it really doesn't matter all that much because are you having fun? Are you enjoying yourself? Do you feel lucky to be alive? Do you really engage? Are you interested and interesting to other people? That's gonna get you so much further than just having good looks. Honestly, if the evidence hasn't proven it enough, hopefully you can. You get evidence of experience, and you see how life changing that is, Like how life changing it is to reprogram yourself out of self hatred and into self love. So thank you for listening to this episode. I know I went on a lot of little rants. I know that I covered so many things. So if you're still here, thank you for being a loyal listener. Leave a little emoji down below. What's how emoji' going to be? Of the day. Oh, surely a golden orb. Surely your little sun emoji. Surely a little star emoji to represent our golden orb exercise. Make sure that you, if you are listening, have perhaps checked us out on Netflix. Yes, we are on Netflix now. We have so many episodes over there. If you are in the mood to catch up on a little bit of video podcasting. You can also follow us on Instagram. Make sure you are following whatever you are listening right now so you get new episodes directly to your feed. You guys know the deal. It's all in the description. There's so many links down there at the stage that you could get lost, but yeah, go and check it out. And thank you us always to our researcher Lucy Davidson for her help and contributions and research with this episode. Until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very very soon.