Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Navigating Body Image in the Age of Social Media With Dr. Charlotte Markey
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 491 of Live Happy Now. Body image has always been a challenge for tweens and teens. In the era of influencers and social media, it’s become even more challenging. This week’s guest is here to help us through it.
I’m your host, Paula Felps. This week, I’m talking with Dr. Charlotte Markey, a best-selling author, professor of psychology, and chair of the Health Sciences Department at Rutgers University. Charlotte has devoted much of her career to helping adolescents sort out the complex issue of body image. With her new book, Adultish, she brings her empathetic sensibilities to a slightly older demographic. Targeting older teens and young adults, Adultish is a friendly and straightforward guide to sorting through some of the online noise and creating a healthy relationship with one’s mind and body. Let’s have a listen.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:57] PF: Charlotte, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now.
[00:00:59] CM: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:01:01] PF: You have a terrific new book. It is very timely. Body image has always been a big topic. But especially now, it is really something that I think a lot of us need to think more about. You have been a champion of this subject for a very long time and I wonder. I wanted to find out your origin story. What made you decide that was your area to focus on for your career?
[00:01:23] CM: I get asked this a lot. Sometimes, I think, well, I’m a woman living in the world we live in.
[00:01:30] PF: Figure it out yourself.
[00:01:31] CM: That’s it. But I think actually my origin story is a little bit perhaps more interesting than everyone else’s story just in that I grew up as a dancer. There was a lot of attention focused on body and appearance and being small and what all that meant as part of being a girl. I think it made me more thoughtful maybe about these issues from a younger age and left me with a lot of questions at a young age. I guess I’ve never answered all of them, so I have no choice. I feel like but to keep going.
[00:02:06] PF: That is a terrific way to approach it. As you did that, did you find the answers that you wish you would have had as a girl?
[00:02:14] CM: I think absolutely, and that’s such a big part of what motivates me to write these books for kids and teens and young adults is I feel like kids have access to more information for good and bad right now than we did as kids. But I feel like I had such a very discreet view of sort of what my life was supposed to look like. For that matter, what I was supposed to look like. I didn’t really ever see a lot of other people’s lives. I don’t know. I think I just didn’t appreciate that you could disagree with some of that.
[00:02:50] PF: With Adultish, you have gone with a – you’ve skewed slightly older. Your books usually target younger – like the more adolescent. First of all, I was like even though I didn’t have to deal with social media, I wish I had had this book when I was moving through my late teens into my adulthood. It’s such a powerful guide book to get us through so many different elements of it. What is it that made you decide that you were going to go with a little bit older age group?
[00:03:18] CM: I loved working on The Body Image Book for Girls and The Body Image Book for Boys. It was not a coincidence that I was working on those books when my own kids were in the tween and earlier teen years. The only issue when you write for a young audience like that is that you really do have to simplify a fair amount, right? You want to make sure the language is accessible and the content is accessible. Otherwise, you lose your audience.
There’s a lot that I felt like I had to leave out. I think as a scientist, that bothered me. I felt like I wanted to put more information out there in the world, but it really had to be written then for a different audience for that to make sense. As my own kids got older, I watched, I think, in real time how some of the issues evolve.
[00:04:05] PF: There’s so many things that I love about this book. I love the fact that you use a real person in the beginning of each section who talks about their own experience, and you really break it down in a way that, yes, I don’t care what age you are. We need to read this because there are things that I found that are relevant to myself even, and I’m definitely not adult-ish. I am past that. I thought I love that whole approach.
One of the things that you do talk about, you talk about social media. Social media and Zoom in so many ways saved us from the pandemic, but it also created this host of problems. Can we talk a little bit about the mental health crisis that emerged and the role that social media has played in that?
[00:04:49] CM: Yes. I mean, what’s interesting is that when we look at data from earlier in the 2000s, we see that there was a decline in mental health happening before the pandemic among adolescents. It seems like the pandemic just maybe further exacerbated what was already happening, and we don’t know exactly why this trend exists, right? There’s lots of hypotheses, but I think we can’t definitively say why was there a downward trend in young people’s mental health in particular.
I think the pandemic was hard on all of our mental health, right? Of course, if you had a vulnerable group and then you throw them in a really stressful situation, that’s not going to help. We do see a little bit of plateauing since the pandemic, so we’re not in this free fall when we think about young people’s mental health. Social media and the Internet and Zoom and online school and all of that was essential for young people that first year or so. But I think that they’re so saturated in this online world, and there’s definitely data now to suggest that that’s really problematic.
[00:05:58] PF: What’s happening to their brains when it is this constant barrage of information? Our brains need a break, and it feels to me like their brains don’t get a break. The fact that they’re now doing – it was brought up to me just within this past week where it’s like, well, our lives are completely digital. We learn online. We get our entertainment online. We get our information online. That digital information isn’t processed the same way as, say, through print or one-on-one information. What’s going on with their brains? On top of all this, they got stuff going on. They’re teenagers and young adults. There’s a lot going on.
[00:06:34] CM: Well, I love thinking about it in terms of brain development, too, because young people don’t have the same ability to organize and plan as older adults, right? We know that those brain structures and facilities are really not sorted out until almost 30 years of age. When I say adultish in this book, I’m really referencing a pretty broad swath of people potentially, right?
[00:07:01] PF: Right.
[00:07:01] CM: I think we – the publisher and I talked about like 15 to 25 approximately. But like you said, a lot of this is relevant to 30-year-olds or maybe even 40-year-olds so that they don’t have the same impulse control. Then they’re getting pinged, pinged, pinged all day long, and they don’t have impulse control. What possibly can they do? It’s really difficult in terms of just attentional control and being able to process information for any of that to happen super effectively with the amount of information coming at them. I think it was Common Sense Media recently reported that kids get 200 alerts on their phones every day.
[00:07:42] PF: Oh, my gosh.
[00:07:44] CM: Yes. Isn’t that insane? I think what really helped me understand that is my daughter who is now 17 and I, we’re riding a train into New York City this summer. We were in a tunnel for just a very short period of time, but we didn’t have any cell service. Of course, we’re sitting there on the train on our phones because that’s our entertainment in part while we’re on the train. But then we had to talk to each other for a few minutes while we were in the tunnel.
[00:08:10] PF: Uh-oh.
[00:08:11] CM: I know. I know, right? Then we got out of the tunnel, and I looked at my phone. I was like, “Oh, my God. I have eight texts. What is going on?” She was like, “Mom, we were only in the tunnel for like three minutes. What’s the big deal?” I was like, “Well, I mean, something must be going on why I have this barrage.” She’s like, “Mom, that’s what it’s like all the time for us.”
[00:08:34] PF: Wow.
[00:08:35] CM: I never really thought of it in those terms. You hear the numbers, but they sound so big that it just seems like, “Ah, 200.” They might as well say like 2,000, right?
[00:08:46] PF: Right.
[00:08:46] CM: But to think that every few minutes of your life just has that kind of influx of information, more so for younger people than for us adults who probably have better impulse control and jobs and stuff, it’s a lot to contend with.
[00:09:00] PF: So then as the adults in the room, what do we do to help them with that? That would be completely overwhelming. I can’t – I would throw my phone out the window, but they won’t.
[00:09:10] CM: No, they won’t.
[00:09:11] PF: That is kind of their life. But how do we help them navigate just that aspect of it, that overwhelm and the distraction that it’s doing? Again, if you go back to what it’s doing to your brain, your brain doesn’t get the chance to settle down and focus. I can’t even imagine what that’s doing to them.
[00:09:26] CM: Yes. I think as the adults in the room, we do have to be really careful what we’re modeling, right? We have to take breaks from our phone. We have to have some boundaries, even if they’re the bare minimum of we’re all having dinner. No one has their phone, right? We’re going to bed. No one is bringing their phone into their room or whatever it may be. I think that even those small boundaries.
Some of the policy now that we see coming into effect in schools, I think, is going to be really important because the only way to make those changes is really at a broader level, right? If we start to say, “Okay. In school, you don’t use your phone. You can use it at lunch maybe,” then everyone has to do that. There’s no risk of kids feeling left out or ostracized. I think that we are understanding, and we are starting to work with this new reality, but the landscape just changed so quickly.
[00:10:23] PF: Yes, it really did. Nobody saw that pandemic coming. We didn’t know we were going to be hostages and digital hostages. But then in addition to all that, just the whole digital space and the notifications and the connectedness, so we also have social media that’s telling us what we should look like and what we should be. It can be intimidating for every age. But, oh, my gosh, even young people now are –
I saw a story where children as young as eight years old are being treated at emergency rooms because they see things on social media, and they use products that are meant for aging skin, and their skin isn’t able to handle it. They’re looking at Botox and fillers and weight loss drugs and seeing that this is their norm. With all that messaging, how do you get through to them that they don’t have to be better? They just have to be themselves, the best version of themselves.
[00:11:20] CM: I think this is so complicated because we all want to be in some ways a little bit better than who we are. That’s what drives so much of this market, whether it be diet pills or plans or beauty products or even clothing, right? I mean, it’s all ways to sort of enhance how we present ourselves to the world. There’s nothing inherently wrong with caring about that. I mean, people have – as long as we know. Back in history, right? We’ve clothed ourselves and tried to enhance ourselves in ways.
I think in terms of understanding media’s role in all of this and in particular social media, as the adults, we really need to help work on media literacy for young kids. They need to approach this media really skeptically, and they need to understand that a lot of what they see is not accurate or reliable information. That’s not going to solve all the problems, but it will help. It will go a long way. I think this is really an imminent public health concern if we don’t get kids up to speed when it comes to media literacy.
[00:12:33] PF: How hard is it when they are comparing themselves to that influence or who’s using a filter or, you know. But it’s like, “This is the standard that I have to measure up to, and there’s no way I will.” What kind of self-esteem, what kind of sense of self is that giving them, and how do we then address that and help turn that? I mean, your book is a great way to do it. How do we walk through that process with them?
[00:13:01] CM: I think once we get kids to question what they’re seeing, then that opens up the doors for all other sorts of conversations that are important here, right? If they’re questioning like does that influence or even really look like that because there’s a filter being used or someone did their hair or whatever it may be, right? That initial skepticism and not assuming that this is a comparator for me is a really important first part of it, right? It’s just I don’t think our generation really has that experience with influencers as much as maybe celebrities. Once you appreciate this celebrity person is – that’s not my comparator, right? I don’t look good for my job. That is not what I do for a living.
That is essentially what Kim Kardashian or whoever you might admire does for a living. They look good, right? All of their time is invested in that, essentially. I think we want to teach young kids that there’s other things that maybe are more interesting to do that, sure, attend to your appearance to some extent. But aren’t there other things you want to do also? What else – what are you interested in? What will make you an interesting and fulfilled person, right? We need to really have philosophical questions with kids as they’re growing up, I think, so that they know to push back against some of what they’re seeing.
[00:14:26] PF: Yes. Because I wonder what it’s doing that long-term damage of them seeing their place in society? A young lady that I know, and she’s in her 20s, and she works in a aesthetician clinic. She got her lips done and got Botox. It’s like, “You are not even 25.” She said, “Well, why I think everybody should start getting these procedures by the time they’re 30.” I just wonder what kind of self-acceptance we can have if we’re going through a lot thinking that. Like, “I’ve got to keep doing these things in order to be accepted and in order to look good.”
[00:15:02] CM: What’s interesting, though, is that research suggests that people feel a strong imperative to do these things, right? What some of us might even refer to as extreme procedures. But that if people realize that what you’re presenting is not natural beauty, it is not valued as much. There’s what some people call a paradox, a cosmetic paradox, whereas we want people to care about their appearance it seems and to be doing things to themselves to appear better and yet – then we also think, “Oh, but it’s fake, so it’s not really as good.”
[00:15:41] PF: Yes. How do you – what do you do with that information? Because women in Hollywood, as they age, it’s like, “Oh, they’re letting themselves go.” But then if they get work done, they’re like, “Oh, look at her face, Jane Fonda.”
[00:15:53] CM: Right. But, I mean, I think that there’s not one answer for every person, right?
[00:15:58] PF: Right.
[00:15:58] CM: But I think what we have to do is explore the issues, and we have to have young people who can grow up thinking critically about them. Because if you just accept that this is what you have to do before you’re 30, that’s really making your world and your life and ways just much smaller, right? It’s a really narrow way that you think you have to appear and be in the world. Maybe that’s completely fine for some people. I want to be careful not to be judgmental of other’s choices that we should all be able to do what we want to ourselves, I think.
But we also want young people who will say, “Okay. Well, that’s fine for you. But I don’t really want to. It’s not going to be my thing.” Or I say this sometimes about being a professor at a university like, “No one hired me because of how I look. I mean, I’m doing all right.” I mean, do you know what the stereotype of a professor is, right? None of us do our hair. We don’t wear makeup. We’re very disheveled. We have outdated clothing. It’s very freeing to be in a context where the expectation is so low in terms of how you look.
[00:17:06] PF: That’s hilarious.
[00:17:06] CM: It’s really in some ways a gift as a woman in particular, I think, to find yourself in a context where people just like, “If you just try a little bit, it’s kind of like you’re an all-star.” I wish for everyone to find their home, their context where they can feel comfortable, where they are valued for what’s important to them.
[00:17:27] PF: How do they offset the messaging that is so continuous about what they should be and how they should look?
[00:17:34] CM: I think one of the interesting and important things about social media is, of course, these algorithms that drive it. Young people cannot follow some of it. They can create a social media world where they don’t find themselves comparing themselves. I don’t know why I always use Kim Kardashian as my example because I don’t really know who’s popular always. But she’s not in my news feed. I don’t really – aside for interviews like this, I don’t think about her very much, and I certainly don’t compare myself to her.
I think that if we have young people who are following or engaging with content that is supportive of them in some ways, whether it be interests that they like. If you’re into photography or painting, follow that kind of content. If you are engaging with friends, that can be often very positive or family members or even the news.
I’m always shocked how much young kids know about the news these days and even a lot of my college students. They don’t always get it right because they get too much of it from TikTok. But some of it is I think we are slow to appreciate that this access to information does have an upside.
[00:18:49] PF: Yes. I think the power of being able to curate your feed is something that is really undervalued because my feeds are a lot of comedy, a lot of positivity, and my friends. So it’s not – I don’t get a lot –
[00:19:03] CM: Exactly.
[00:19:04] PF: Yes. It’s just kind of how it rolls.
[00:19:06] CM: Yes. I know. I mean, it’s like I have other psychologists, other people who do body image stuff, mental health stuff in general, and like you said, and then my friends and/or aging stuff, aging women, dark comedy stuff.
[00:19:21] PF: Which really go hand in hand.
[00:19:24] CM: Which I really need. I mean, it doesn’t feel to me like a negative in my life. Sometimes, I think I should spend less time on some of this. Fortunately, my brain’s, I guess, mature enough that I can restore control.
[00:19:37] PF: Restore to that. There you go.
[00:19:39] CM: Yes. I can make myself stop.
[00:19:42] PF: You cover so much ground in this. It is about body image, but you talk about mental health. You talk about self-care. You talk about physical health, relationships, and so much more. Can you talk about how all those components tie in and affect body image?
[00:19:57] CM: In some ways, I think this book is like a mental and physical health book for young people, and body image is really just this thread that weaves these topics together. But the way I conceptualize body image is just so broad in that it’s really a core piece of our identity, right? If you’re going to feel comfortable in your own skin, if you are going to feel good about yourself, what does that look like? It means having healthy and fulfilling relationships. It means taking good care of yourself, so not abusing substances. It means nurturing yourself in terms of just even what you eat or the activities that you participate in.
It may not seem immediately obvious, and people may wonder, “How do you get a body image book that’s this long?” But I think when you see how I frame it, it makes more sense, right? How do you care and respect for yourself, especially in the case of young adults and late teens who are tasked with doing that on their own more and more and want to do that on their own more and more?
[00:20:59] PF: Yes. It does give such great wisdom into doing that. I love how each chapter you deal with a different aspect of it. You don’t have to sit down and read this book all the way through. It’s like what appeals to you, what influences you and affects you, and that is what you can absolutely focus on and almost turn it into a workbook for yourself. I think that is so crucial because two people could pick up this book and get a completely different experience out of it based on what their needs are. I absolutely love that about it.
[00:21:33] CM: Well, thank you for saying that. Yes.
[00:21:34] PF: It’s really well done. It seems like you might have done this before, few books along. As you mentioned, at its heart, this book is about being comfortable in your own skin. What is the one piece of advice that you would give to a young person about becoming comfortable in their skin?
[00:21:53] CM: I think this is actually one of the Q&As in this book, which is like, “If I need to start today, what do I do that’s quick? What do I do that’s important?” Some of the advice I give is actually go through your social media and unfollow people and really be a more thoughtful user of social media. Because if you’re going to spend as a teen or 20-something four hours a day in your social media land, which is one of the stats I’ve read recently, you better believe that’s going to impact how you feel about yourself. Spend a half hour today. You can drop people, especially you don’t even know them. You’re not going to hurt their feelings, right? Just create a safer nurturing space for yourself in that world.
[00:22:40] PF: I like that. So then what advice would you give to their parents to help their children find that comfort in their own skin and be able to move through this world with less anxiety and more ease?
[00:22:52] CM: Well, obviously, buy them this book. That would be great. Start there.
[00:22:55] PF: Coincidentally, we’re going to have a link to it on our link.
[00:22:58] CM: Yes. That would be great for me. Thank you. Then I think as parents of this generation, we can learn a lot from them, too. I think there’s a lot of good discussion we can have about what the world looks like and what we want it to look like. I see in my interviews with young people all the time. They’re more open-minded than a lot of us. I think that we have to ask a lot of questions, right? So when we see the teens and young adults in our lives who are concerned, upset, distraught, go in with questions. What’s going on? How can I help? I’m here for you. Try to learn from them, too.
[00:23:37] PF: That’s great advice. Charlotte, I love the work you’re doing. This is a fantastic addition to the body of work that you’ve already created. I’m excited to see –
[00:23:44] CM: Oh, thank you.
[00:23:45] PF: Where you take this next. Thank you for sitting down with us because this is an important topic. I’m really delighted that you are able to take the time to share it with our listeners.
[00:23:55] CM: Oh, thank you so much for having me. Thanks for those compliments. It means so much.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:24:03] PF: That was Dr. Charlotte Markey talking about body image for young adults. If you’d like to learn more about Charlotte, discover her book, Adultish: The Body Image Book for Life, follow her on social media, or check out some of her other books on body image for adolescence, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode.
That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.
