As we age, there are certain aspects of our looks that we can come to regret, especially those things like a tattoo that we’ve simply grown out of. But one of the biggest concerns for many of us as we get older is the fact that we don’t look like what we used to.
We can certainly worry about the passage of time, and this will have an effect on our perceptions of ourselves that we are getting wrinkly, old, gray, and weaker, and it can all feed into a certain sense of anxiety. We can all spend a stupid amount of time thinking about our appearance, but this preoccupation is completely understandable, however, what can we really do to stop feeling worried about our looks as we get older?
Acknowledge Your Concerns
If you feel that there’s something about your looks that you don’t like, rather than completely avoiding the issue, it’s better to acknowledge and confront the issue. There are so many people who are reluctant to admit that aging bothers them. You need to decide if your concerns are things you wish to resolve, and this means having an honest look at yourself and thinking about a time when you said to yourself, “I look old,” because this allows us to take ownership of our feelings about how we look, and only then can we make the changes.
If there’s someone in your life who is worried about graying hair or going bald and they are talking about hairline restoration as if it is the best thing to reclaim who they are, they need to first look at themselves and see if their changing looks have altered their identity. Because if you wager everything in life based on how you look, it might be worth peering beneath the surface and bringing your real self out of hiding.
Remove the Masks
Both physical and metaphorical. If you avoid behaviors that disconnect you from your true feelings about aging, you can start to embrace the key mindsets that we hear so much about but are afraid to embody: authenticity and vulnerability. These are hard because they require peeling away the layers of how we look. When we come out of hiding and do away with these behaviors and alterations that take us away from how we really feel and potentially look, naturally, we are going to learn how we genuinely feel about something.
Many people hate the fact that they’re getting older, but news flash: getting older is something that happens, like it or not. Many people think about aging as being a dirty word but look at the things that you are achieving as you get older. You become more settled in your skin, you start to not sweat the small stuff, and with every year that passes, you become wiser. Of course, it doesn’t hurt matters that actually how people look now in their 50s are totally different from people in the 1950s! We’re all living longer, we have access to amazing resources that help us to look after our health and stimulate those cells deep in our body that can, in many ways, be like the fountain of youth.
Something like fasting is an excellent example because it promotes what’s called autophagy, which is the internal cells’ spring-cleaning mechanisms. If we eat things that aren’t good for us like sugar and processed foods, we’ve got to think that it’s much like putting the wrong fuel in a car. It’s just not going to function as well, and it will die off sooner than we think! When we remove the masks associated with aging and we start to embrace our authentic selves, we end up stressing less, and this means we actually don’t age so quickly! So calm down and you will be doing yourself a world of good.
Challenge Your Internal Dialogue
We all can look in the mirror and immediately think of negative comments, but the more we do it turns it into a feedback loop. Negative self-talk is going to spiral out of control if we let it. We need to go back to the internal dialogue that is critical of our appearance and reframe these thoughts.
Because when we face down our fears, we’re going to experience a tidal wave of negative and hurtful comments that bellow from deep within our subconscious. If you look at yourself and think, “I look terrible, I look tired, get it fixed,” it’s time to stop these voices that get in the way. The reason you say these things is that they are representative of your innate fears, but we can take control and create new lines of dialogue that slowly over time replace those negative epithets.
Positive self-talk is something that we should all practice, especially when we are so worried about how old we look. The path to self-acceptance is about recognizing that you may feel a certain way now, and that there’s a number of different reasons contributing to this. What you think you believe is not what you should believe. If you are someone who doesn’t like how you look, you may not like yourself. And if you feel like this, it feeds into a lifetime of self-hatred that becomes difficult to unravel.
There are things that we can do to tackle this like counseling, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and other tactics, but if you can start with positive self-talk, it feels incredibly strange at the outset because our brains are programmed to display what we feed it if you now replace the negative things you think with positives and start small, you will see that over the months and years, your opinion of yourself will change a hell of a lot.
Reframe What You Think Beauty is
When we talk about beauty, a lot of us can think it’s just skin deep. We should surround ourselves with diverse representations of what true beauty is because this will broaden our perspective. If you are looking at a 20-year-old on Instagram, what is this teaching you? Absolutely nothing. It is far more beneficial for you to recognize that beauty is not just about one thing because we’ve now got to a time where everybody is now being judged based on their last social media post.
The biggest problem is that they’re all very similar and if you cannot see any similar qualities in yourself you start to think there is something wrong with you. Arguably one of the best things about social media is that over time the algorithm begins to reflect what you are looking for, so challenge your preconceptions of what you think is stereotypically beautiful because if you now make a concerted effort to broaden your horizons you will see that there is more to life than just what you see online.
People of a certain age know this but we’ve all become somewhat absorbed by social media and the time before the internet became ubiquitous in our lives we ended up hunting for something that reflected who we are rather than attempting to conform to what the algorithm tells us we’re supposed to be.
Work From the Inside Out
We cannot escape the fact that we are aging and while it may take time for us to come to peace with the concept of getting older, aging is a part of life’s journey, and we should embrace it gracefully with a positive mindset. Internal qualities improve with age but our physical qualities can also evolve alongside them.
Part of the reason we all fear aging is because it requires us to change certain aspects of ourselves and as humans, we don’t embrace change as much as we’d like. If you want to feel better about yourself as you get old you need to do the hard things. This could mean changing your diet because if you are consuming an abundance of ultra-processed foods you are fueling your body in the wrong ways. The same goes with things like stress which can be a major ager, if we worry about getting older and then look back on our lives 10 or 20 years from now and think that all we did was worry this wasted energy could have gone into something far more productive like embracing who we are.
We all experience brushes with mortality from time to time, and one extra gray hair or a wrinkle that wasnโt there a few weeks ago can send us into downward spirals in terms of our negative mindset. Feeling worried about our looks is ultimately a choice, but when you remember that it’s not just about how you look but about how you act, think, and feel, this total package that you present to the world could give you the right type of reinforcements.ย
We all want to look good but we also want to feel good. This is why sometimes we have to remember that worrying is not going to solve the problem. Instead, we need to take action and this could be about fixing certain aspects of how we look but it can also be as much to do with our attitudes towards ourselves.
