5 Top Tips To Feel Great Naked

Loving you the way you are: Jess shares her top tips to building body confidence and feeling bloody good in the nude.

Want to feel great naked? Without dropping kgs, splurging on spray tans or undergoing surgery? You might be surprised to know that the key to being comfy in your birthday suit doesn’t lie in losing weight, flushing yourself with gallons of water or engaging in militant exercise regimes. Contrary to the advice of other “experts”, improving your body confidence doesn’t involve working on your body at all – it involves working on your mind. And the beauty of this? You can learn to feel good naked just as you are right now – no physical changes needed. 

Now don’t get me wrong, water is great, as is food and exercise that makes you FEEL good… but in terms of improving body image, engaging in diets and body changing rituals will only INCREASE your likelihood of experiencing a poor body image. On the flipside, when we embrace ourselves JUST as we are, that’s when true self love is realised and that’s when you can start to feel bloody good naked. 

Ready to embrace the skin you’re in and love that gloriously worthy body you have right. this. second? Then read on to find the true tricks of the trade for feeling great in the skin you’re in. 

1. Spend more time naked

{Add caption here}. 📸 by @lovisallager

Extensive research on exposure therapy posits that the more we do the things we fear, the more comfortable we become doing them. This is no different when taking the anxiety out of being naked. Get around in your birthday suit at any opportunity you get (when appropriate of course, like, er in your own home).

Walk around naked, literally walk around your home naked. Get used to the feeling of being nude and eventually you will habituate to the experience and become comfortable strolling around in not much at all. If this sounds a little too extreme to start with, perhaps kick things off in underwear, or even your swimmers and gradually build up to being naked. The idea here is that practicing being nude, will eventually make you comfortable in being nude. Eventually you will start to feel good about it too! 

2. Take a good look in the mirror

Based on the same premise as walking around naked, the more you view something, the more you habituate to it and accept it. Observing your body in the mirror, observing all the bumps and curves and lines, is an incredibly helpful practice in accepting yourself just as you are.

The first step in mirror work is to observe yourself objectively, simply pointing out what you see. Perhaps there are some bumps over here, some rolls over there, some hairs down there… just observe, without assigning any meaning or judgement to those observations. Get used to doing it, get used to looking at yourself naked, the more you do it the more you’ll love it.

Once you’ve got the objective stuff down pat you can try your hand at adding some positive reflections. For example, “my tummy is really soft, and I love it because it was my baby’s home for 9 months” or “my legs are bumpy and big and they’re also really strong - I’m so grateful to them as they carry me around all day”. Simply adding in those positive reflections can help your brain develop more positive associations with your body and the more you do it, the more you say it, the more you’ll believe it. 

3. Show yourself some solo-love

{Add caption here}. 📸 by @aishabeau

Exploring your body and learning how to give yourself sexual pleasure can be incredibly empowering and will give your body image a real good boost. In fact, research suggests that there’s a statistically significant positive relationship between women who regularily engage in masturbation and their levels of body positivity.

Additionally, when we engage in practices that make our body FEEL good, we’re more likely to have a higher opinion of our body and be more confident in how it looks. In addition to making you feel bloody amazing, sexual self-pleasure (particularly when pleasuring yourself to climax) causes the body to release the happiness hormones dopamine, endorphins, and oxytocin which help to improve your mood, promote relaxation and reduce stress. Take this self-care practice to the next level by indulging in some clitoral oil and a sex toy and you’ll be lovin’ yourself in no time.

4. Treat your body as if you already love it

Although the point of this article is learning how to feel good UNdressed, it is important to cultivate a sense of self love in a variety of situations and environments. When we treat ourselves as if we have a body we are proud of, when we dress it in clothes that we LOVE, that fit us well, when we spend some time nurturing it with physical self-care, we are more likely to be confident in the way it looks.

Consider what makes YOU feel good. Perhaps it’s wearing clothes you love, practicing new hair and make-up styles or simply slathering on a beautiful body lotion after a gorgeous essential oil filled bath. Identify the pampering practices that make your body FEEL good and go ahead and do it. Often people wait for their body to look a certain way or weigh a certain amount before they treat themselves to the clothes, makeup or hair they would love to have, however if we pamper ourselves regardless, if we love and respect our bodies just the way they are right now, we tend to feel a whole lot better in the skin we’re in, just as it is… right now. 

5. Speak to yourself with unconditional kindness

In order to feel better about ourselves, clothed or unclothed it is essential that we speak to ourselves just as we would a dear dear friend. It can be tricky because negative self-talk can be so automatic, we tend to just think things. Negative body image talk, either spoken out loud or via our thoughts, can be incredibly damaging because our brains can register our thoughts as fact. Simply thinking “I am ugly” can register in the brain as fact – which, as you can imagine, wreaks havoc on self-esteem.

While it’s pretty impossible to curb all the negative thoughts altogether, try and catch yourself when you’re having the negative thought and preface it with a sentence such as; “the thought I’m having right now is that I am ugly”, rather than simply saying “I am ugly”. In doing this, you’re identifying to your brain that this is just a THOUGHT you are having, and it certainly isn’t fact. The idea here is that the more you do this, the more automatic it becomes and eventually… those negative thoughts and the power they have over your body image, will fade away.  

So, rather than pursuing the perfect body BEFORE you start loving the skin you’re in, why not make 2021 the year you embrace yourself just as you are and find out how to love yourself ?