Latest / Stacked Intent: Your Guide to Authentic, Intentional Living / 122 How to Love Yourself in a World that Profits from Your Insecurity

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122 How to Love Yourself in a World that Profits from Your Insecurity · Stacked Intent: Your Guide to Authentic, Intentional Living

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, my name is Becca Stackhouse Morrison, and I am ready for you to tune in each episode to hear ways to become you.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Looking at ways you can be your authentic and intentional self, you'll finish each episode motivated to live life more authentically.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: I learned how to be truly me through relationships, chronic disease, finances, and taking each journey along the way.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Talk about the real aspects of life?
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Relationships, finance, nutrition, hardships, exercise are all topics that we will discuss.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Pull up a seat, drive safely down the road, or get into that workout groove to be challenged, motivated, and encouraged to be you.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is the Stacked Intent podcast.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Stacked Intent.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: I am Becca Stack House Morrison, your host of Stacked Intent.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: And today we are going to talk about something that doesn't necessarily come up enough when we are talking in this self-love conversation.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: The environment that you are trying to build self-love inside.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because here's the thing: building self-love isn't just an internal job, it's also about recognizing what your external forces that are actually working against you and making internal choices about what you let into your mental but also to your emotional space.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Every time that you open your phone, you are walking into a carefully engineered environment that is designed not accidentally by designers to make you feel inadequate.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: So to make you feel like you need something you don't currently have because your inadequacy to worth billions of dollars is a lot larger and is a very large company.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not saying this to make you paranoid or to go delete every social media app on your phone.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm saying it because you cannot build something in an environment that is constantly tearing you down without at least knowing that's what's happening to you.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: So today we're gonna talk about the business of self-dealt, the psychology of comparison, and how to audit what you're consuming and how to anchor your self-love so that it holds even when the outside world is doing it its thing.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Let's be honest about what's happening here.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Advertising has always worked by creating a problem and selling you a solution.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're not beautiful enough, buy this, you're not thin enough enough, try this, you're not organized enough, successful enough enough, calm enough.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the product to fix that.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Social media can amplify this to a scale that we've really never seen before.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because now it's not just ads and magazines, it's content, it's personalized feeds of people who appear to be working what you lack the body, the relationship, the career, the home, the life.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Combine that with algorithm systems that have learned exactly what makes you stop scrolling.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer is often content that triggers a feeling of comparison or even of inadequacy.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is not a conspiracy theory.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is documented.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: This is internal research as multiple major social media companies have shown that they have that certain content that increases your body image awareness or your feeling of inadequacy, particularly in young women.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Or have seen this in being a new young mom.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Being a mom, the amount of things that start coming through your feed as soon as you look up what kind of bottle or sleep patterns or fill in X, Y, or Z, what the algorithm pulls out.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And they continue to use this because it increases what our engagement is.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not telling you this to make you angry or though it you might be, because awareness can change our behaviors.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: When you know what's happening, you can make a choice.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: When you think about your feelings bad about yourself randomly, you have no leverage.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: When you know what your environment is contributing to that feeling, you can change parts of your environment.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Social comparison is actually hardwired in us.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Psychologist of the social comparison theory, it was developed in 1954 by the way, long before Instagram.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Tells us that human beings have a fundamental drive to evaluate our own options and abilities by comparing them to those around us or others.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: So this was originally a useful insight in a small tribe of knowing where you stood with your relative to others that had survival value.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: But social media has turned this into an ancient wiring, into something that we were never really designed for, of a constant upward comparison with a global highlight reel.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Upward comparison is that of comparing yourself to someone who appears to be doing better than you.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's almost all social media offers us because people are not posting their bad days or the argument that they just had five minutes ago, or the failure, or the doubt.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of times we might get some of that here and there, but it's not the constant.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: You're not comparing your inside to everyone's outside, and that comparison is not going to make you feel like you're losing a race you didn't sign up for.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's one healthy form of comparison, and it's comparing yourself to who you were.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's the only comparison that's actually gonna serve you in having growth.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: So auditing your digital and environment is important.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: So, what do you actually do about this?
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Your audit, your environment, and you're curated it intentionally.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a simple question to ask yourself about every account that you follow.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Does engaging with this content make me feel like myself or less?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Am I inspired?
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Am I connected?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: More helpful or more inadequate, more anxious, or more behind?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then act on the answer.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Unfollow, mute, set time limit, rearrange what gets your attention.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is not about creating a bubble for yourself, though sometimes that sounds really nice, doesn't it?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's about recognizing that your mental diet matters just as much as our physical one.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't need something that makes you feel sick every single day just because it was available.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: You have the same right to protect what you consume mentally.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: I also want to talk about the timing of consumption.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Checking your phone first thing in the morning before you even established your own center for the day is like walking into other people's highlight reels before you remembered who you are.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: The comparison hits you hard when you have no yanker yet to start your day.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: So try this simple experiment.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: No social media for the first 30 minutes of your day.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Just you, whoever's in your house, your own thoughts, your own plans, your own intentions, and notice if you have a baseline shift.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: The deeper answer to building the self-love in a world that profits from insecurity is this your self-worth has to be anchored intentionally and not externally.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Externally anchored self-worth looks like I feel good about myself when I get complimented, when I'm achieving, when people approve of me, when I look a certain way.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: That kind of self-worth is conditional, fragile, and impossible for you to sustain.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because external conditions always change.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Internal anchored self-worth looks like I know what I value, I know who I am, I know what I'm building that doesn't change based on a bad day, a comment, a number on the scale, or someone else's highlight reel.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Building that internal anchor is the real work, and it comes from self-knowledge, knowing what your value is, what your strength is, your story, from that self-comparison, extending yourself kindness when you do fall short, because it is gonna happen.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And from self-trust, it's making promises to yourself and keeping your promises to yourself.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Every time you follow through on a commitment to yourself, you build evidence that you are someone who shows up for yourself.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: That evidence becomes your foundation.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that foundation, the noise from the outside, has so much less power on you.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: So your action steps from this week's episode, the digital environment audit.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Go through the account you that you follow on the most used platform.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: For each one, ask, does this make me feel more like myself or less?
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Be honest, be quick.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Your gut knows the answer faster than your brain does.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: So unfollow and mute that consistently makes you feel inadequate.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Add in at least three accounts that make you feel genuinely nourished, people who inspire you without making you feel behind.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Content that educates or uplifts you rather than creates a comparison.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Then try for 30 minutes every morning, no social media for that first 30 minutes of your day.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: See what happens, see what changes, then share with us what how that affected your day.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Self-love in the real world is an act of resistance, it requires intentional and ongoing maintenance in a culture that profits from you feeling like you're not enough.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: But it is possible and it is so worth your protecting.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Next week we're gonna talk about what self-love actually looks like and when it shows up in our real lives, in your relationships, your decisions, and your daily choices because self-love isn't just what you feel, but it is what you do.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: See you over there! That brings us to the end of this episode of Stacked Intent.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you love this episode as much as I did, head on over and rate and subscribe so you will never miss an episode.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: New episodes are gonna be dropped on Thursdays.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Until then, this is Becca, and don't forget, enrich your life by being intentional.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast was created, produced, and recorded and edited last Fed.