Transcript:
Heather Young, C-IAYT, CPT, RYT 500: On the morning of August 27, 1883, on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa, an ear-shattering volcanic explosion caused two-thirds of the island to collapse and is considered one of the most violent geological events in recorded history.
That volcano's explosion is estimated to be the loudest sound ever produced on the surface of the planet, still unmatched to this day, estimated at 310 decibels.
To put that in perspective, thunder can reach 120 decibels. Jackhammers reach around 130 decibels. Fireworks can reach 140 decibels. And 150 to 160 decibels is considered loud enough to rupture your eardrums.
This 310 decibel noise happened in the 1800s. So scientists have estimated the sound based on how far away the noise was heard in historical records and journals, and by what it did to the atmospheric pressure of the Earth.
More on that in a minute. People up to 3,000 miles away heard the noise and described it as cannon fire from a nearby ship.
Captain Sampson of the British ship Nordham Castle was about 40 miles away from Krakatoa when it exploded and he recorded, so violent are the explosions that the eardrums of over half my crew have been shattered. My last thoughts are with my dear wife. I'm convinced the day of judgment has come.
The noise was so loud it changed everything in its path.
Maggie Korth wrote a column about sound for a series called Science Questions from a Toddler.
She was asked, I want to hear what the loudest thing in the world is by Kara Jo, age 5.
"No, no, you really don't, Maggie answered. "See, there's this thing about sound that even we grown-ups tend to forget. It's not some glitter rainbow floating around with no connection to the physical world. Sound is mechanical. A sound is a shove, just a little one, a tap on the lightly stretched membrane of your eardrum. The louder the sound, the heavier the knock. If a sound is loud enough, it can rip a hole in your eardrum. If a sound is loud enough, it can plow into you like a linebacker or knock you flat on your butt. When the shockwave from a bomb levels a house, that's a sound that's tearing about bricks and splintering glass. Sound can kill you."
She explained Krakatoa's sound in a way that really struck me, writing, "nobody heard Krakatoa in England or Toronto. There wasn't a boom audible in St. Petersburg. Instead, what those places recorded were spikes in atmospheric pressure, the very air tensing up and then releasing with a sigh as the waves of sound from Krakatoa passed through, circling the earth four times before it finally faded. The sound was so loud it moved the atmosphere of the earth."
There are two important lessons about sound in here Maggie summarized. "One, you don't have to be able to see the loudest thing in the world in order to hear it and feel it. Second, just because you can't hear a sound doesn't mean it isn't there. Sound is powerful and pervasive and it surrounds us all the time, whether we're aware of it or not."
Now, let's connect those dots between the power of sound and its influence on our well-being.
We use the terms sound and noise interchangeably, but while anything we hear can be a sound, from the tap of your dog's paws across the floor, to the rush of the wind through the trees, the honk of a horn, noise isn't just a sound.
It's a sound that's unpleasant, disagreeable, unwanted, or loud, and as Maggie reminded us, deadly.
From a sheer physics standpoint, there's no distinction between noise and sound because both are vibrations through a medium like air or water. But the difference arises when the brain receives and perceives the sound.
Is it good?
Is it bad?
Is it pleasant or unpleasant?
Does it benefit you or does it harm you?
So with that in mind, let's examine the noise that surrounds you today.
Do you think your day was noisy?
Now your brain might quickly scan to see if you're currently hearing lawnmowers or tree trimmers or traffic noise or barking dogs or even noisy kids running around the house.
And these are all definitely noises, and they have our own impact on our bodies, which we'll discuss in another episode on environmental noise and our health. But chances are you've barely given a second thought to how much noise is surrounding you today about your body.
Let's take a closer look at the daily noise that affects your body perception.
We're currently surrounded by the loudest, most overwhelming noise about our bodies ever. While only our closest community used to be able to comment on our bodies or share information with us about health choices, today our exposure is almost limitless. It defies calculation by the human brain. We are living in a culture where messages, information, advice, and often lies are coming at us 24-7. Noise about our bodies is never going away. It's downright riotous, and with how much of our life and our peace and our time and our money and our purpose that it can steal, it's a form of noisy torture.
Now, most likely, you've become noise deaf. You can't even hear it anymore.
Due to the overwhelming nature of this noise and its constant presence, it's very easy to become desensitized over time.
There are many messages about your body that you've internalized without even realizing it.
And to change those messages into something positive for our bodies and our health, we need to actually strengthen, reinforce, and turn up the positive messages, and then successfully recognize, challenge, and turn down the negative ones.
But it's not an easy task.
A viral clip showed just how drastically we can all interpret the same noise, the same frequencies. The clip asked, what do you hear, Yanni or Laurel?
You may remember it.
Now people in the comments were split down the middle for which word they heard, and some people even insisted they could hear both words at the same time or even picked up on the name Geary or Gary.
How could this happen? How could so many people hear something so completely different from each other? It comes down to how our brain picks up and interprets different frequencies. This changes if we think it's sound or we think it's noise.
When you start putting your health inputs and the information about your body through the frequency of a whole person lens, where you're considering your mind, your body, your heart, your soul, and your inherent value as a person, then the messages you're hearing about your body all day long start to sound like the harmful noise that they are.
You'll start to hear something they'll try to persuade you they aren't saying, it's not Yanni, it's Laurel, but they are saying it.
You'll start to hear the calls to lose weight here or hyper focus on the wrinkles there or do a little nip or make a tiny tuck as the noisy damaging messages about your body that they are.
Don't believe me on the noise? I'll show you.
The noise is deafening. It eclipses Krakatoa by a long shot.
As of 2021, the average person is estimated to encounter between 6,000 and 10,000 ads every single day.
On YouTube, 500 hours of content is uploaded every minute.
And in Instagram, about 95 million photos and videos are shared every single day.
Many Americans will absolutely tell you they think social media is a bad thing, but they don't actually give it up. According to Pew Research Center, 72% of Americans have at least one social media account. And this is despite the fact that 64% of them believe that social media is largely a negative impact.
Research points to social networking apps as contributing to rising rates of anxiety, despair, and loneliness, and frustration about our bodies.
A lot of people will actually tell me they use social media or Fitspo accounts to get motivated and inspired to work out and take care of their bodies. They'll argue this as a reason why social media is good.
But did you know that research shows that looking at images classified as fit ideal not only decreased self-esteem, but they increased negative mood and they lowered body satisfaction. More importantly though, it also lowered exercise motivation.
So, this makes it harder to take care of yourself. Now, there are exceptions to every rule, and the best marketers in the world will sell you on the exception and make you think it will be you.
You'll be the person who gets in shape and finally takes care of their body because you're looking at Fitspo images on social media.
But some brutal honesty is needed here:
How often has looking at fitness or body-focused accounts really prompted you to grab your keys and head to the gym?
How many of the hundreds of saved exercises or workouts have you actually done?
I'm not asking these questions to try to prompt judgment or shame. I want to shed light on the fact that you're using a losing strategy that's causing you a lot of grief and building a lot of frustration about your body.
I don't want you to spend another year struggling with failure because you're unaware that your daily routines and your exposure to these body messages are continuously pushing you towards failure and not success.
But social media isn't the only problem. Ready for some tough love?
You see and hear ads in your email, on your favorite radio shows or podcasts, while watching television or YouTube, as you read magazines, newspapers, or open your mail. You see them on billboards as you drive. They're in your phone apps, and this includes health apps.
And then there's that one form of advertisement that most people have become super blind to. the people you surround yourself with, including the ones you're following online or you've invited into your email that believe in commenting on bodies or tearing down bodies in conversation or telling us how we need to fix and chip and tuck and arrange our bodies is an acceptable and normal form of conversation. These can be the absolute closest people to us, who are also swimming through their own tidal wave of messages about their body. And with every image you see and comment you hear, your brain is making calculations and determining if you're satisfied or dissatisfied with your body. So whether you want to believe it or not, the fight for your mind, your body, your heart, and your soul is intense.
There's billions, maybe trillions of dollars on the line for these companies who want your money by increasing your dissatisfaction with your body.
And unless you're intentional and you break free from the lies, unless you choose what your brain hears and change the frequency like that viral Yanni or Laurel clip, you're vulnerable to constant attack that leaves you discontent, depressed, and unhappy with your one precious life and your one miraculous body.
Have you ever wondered why you just never can find peace within your body, within your mind, within your soul? How are you going to win a war if you're stumbling blindly into enemy territory hourly each day, letting it attack you with new information about the failures and imperfections of your body?
Are you paying attention to what you're seeing, hearing, and reading on a daily basis?
Because it's messing with us all.
It's taking our peace, our self-confidence, our time, our money, and our joy.
According to the American Society of Plastic Surgery, nearly 11 million Americans received surgical or minimally invasive cosmetic procedures in 2006. That was at a rate 7% higher than 2005, which was at a rate 48% higher than 2000. and about 800% higher than 1992. And then the pandemic hit, and 2020 became what is known as the heyday of plastic surgery. Americans spent over $9 billion on plastic surgery in 2020 alone, making it the highest grossing year in history, and numbers are expected to continue to rise year over year.
One of the highest requested procedures was ear pinning, which involves pinning the ears closer to the face, because wearing a face mask could make your ears stick out. and it could make people comment on your ears. This increase also included parents having it done on their children to prevent potential bullying at school while wearing a mask. The procedure was expected to stay as one of the top procedures of 2022 as well.
Worse yet, most surgeons would concede that many people simply didn't wear an appropriately fitted mask, which was the main contributor to the issue of the ears sticking out while wearing a mask and not someone's face.
But if you hear something consistently days on end you start to believe it and then that's what noise does. It convinces you you have a problem without any real evidence of the truth of what the real problem is and it sells you on a painful hard solution that costs money instead of the simple options that can be right in front of you.
You can change your brain from hearing unwanted noise about your body over and over again day in and day out because you do control the noise.
But it's one of the hardest things you'll do because it's everywhere.
The best place to start is simply by becoming aware. So your challenge this next week is to just listen and tune in.
We could all benefit from becoming more aware of the body-related noise in our lives.
Because again, just like Maggie argued, "even though you can't hear a sound, it doesn't mean it isn't there. Sound is pervasive and powerful and surrounds us all the time, whether we're aware of it or not."
And this is the same with the noise about our bodies. It's there, it's pervasive, and it surrounds us all the time.
This week I want to invite you to just start looking for the noise about your body. Where does it show up? Does it show up in your email? Do you see billboards you pass on your commute for fat freezing or hair implants? Do you hear it in the conversations your friends or your co-workers are having at lunch? Are you seeing the tidal wave of it come at you when you go into social media?
We have a worksheet for this episode that will help you increase your awareness this week. Just start to keep track and ask better questions. The worksheets emphasize where are the noisiest messages about your body coming from.
You might actually be surprised when you pause and pay attention. As you keep track of where you start noticing these messages about your body, you can begin to ask better questions. Who is providing the message? Do they have a vested interest in promoting unrealistic body ideals for profit? Do they have something to gain by increasing your dissatisfaction? Are they selling a product? Or could they be benefiting from an affiliate relationship? When you start to understand the source, it can help you assess the credibility and then potential biases that exist in those messages about your body.
From there, you can start to curate your social media stream and your media streams in general.
Ask yourself this. Do you honestly feel better or worse about your body once you exit social media? Who are the accounts you follow on social media? Do these accounts promote realistic body standards? Can you turn down the noise and curate your social media feed to include accounts that promote positive messages? What about your email? Who's in there? What kind of messages are they sending you?
From there, start to broaden your self-care and shift your focus away from just the physical. You're getting plenty of reminders all day long to look at your physical body, but start to prioritize taking care of your mind, your body, your heart, and your soul. And when you do, you'll redirect your attention away from solely external appearances. This shift lets you place greater importance on your overall well-being, rather than just trying and failing to conform to external standards and staying hyper-focused there. This is also going to increase your self-appreciation and your self-respect because engaging in whole person wellness enhances your emotional, mental, and spiritual health along with your physical health and it makes you much less likely to be swayed by external body-related noise that can start to trigger negative self-perceptions.
Also, seek support.
This is a really vital strategy for turning down the noise and mitigating the harmful impact that body-related noise can have. When you discuss your body image concerns with family or friends, it provides an outlet for emotional release. But by sharing your feelings, you're also alleviating some of the emotional burden that body noise starts to create. Because they're almost always going to be able to remind you of your worth beyond external appearances. And that perspective counteracts the negative impact of body noise.
If you don't have friends or family you can trust, then absolutely reach out and seek support from a professional who can help lead that shift in perspective.
This week, ask what are the messages I'm exposed to and where are they coming from.
Analyze the impact and ask how the messages actually affect your perception of your body.
Then critically look at the authenticity and the motives for the messages.
And finally, ask yourself, where can I turn down the noise? Where can I spend less time? Or what changes can I make that will lessen my exposure to these noisy sources of information about my body?
I hope I've convinced you that we're all living in environments that are so much noisier than we think when it comes to the messages bombarding us about our bodies.
The first step to creating a healthier conversation about your body, both within yourself and with others, is to just step past being noise blind. Just as the world felt the shockwaves of Krakatoa's eruption, even though it couldn't see it, you're feeling the impact of body-related noise, even if you haven't been conscious of its source up until this point.
Today, I hope you can start to feel what ends up being a seismic shift in your awareness and that you're able to tune in this week and discover where the loudest sources of noise are in your life.
Then from there, you get to decide where you start turning down the noise and then where you can start turning up the sounds of encouraging messages about your body and your health.
Jennifer Klotz, MS, RDN, LDN: I hope you enjoyed this Heart to Heart with Heather. To help you turn this information into transformation, we have worksheets with this episode.
This will help you assess the noise around you this week and discover where it's coming from, and give you powerful steps to addressing it.
Go to www.shechangeseverything.com, click on the link to the podcast, and find this episode, and you'll be able to download the worksheets there.
Keep asking better questions and focusing on whole person wellness, your body, mind, heart, and soul, as you turn down the noise around your body this week. If you found this episode helpful, or if someone came to mind when you were listening to it, we would encourage you to hit share. They will know you were thinking of them. And if you want to support our work through this podcast, leave a five-star review or share an episode on social media. It would mean the world to us. It would also help others find the show. Until next time, be kind to yourself in any change that you're making, and continue to embrace a healthy lifestyle that nourishes both your body, mind, heart, and soul.
