Opinions of the Body - A Look at the Numbers

I want to take a moment to discuss opinions of the body. Purely physical and nothing else considered.

Your body is not beautiful to everyone. My body may not be beautiful to you. Your body may not be beautiful to me. You might not like my hair, and I might think your [whatever] is too [whatever]. That’s great.

Here is a world calculator of how many people are in the world:

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

7,236,511,228 and counting (the number keeps changing obviously).

This is the approximate number of opinions that you could potentially have to care about IF you cared about how others viewed your body.

There are 24 hours, or 1,440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds in a day.

There are 604,800 seconds per week.

Even if you think about one person’s opinion per second (which, let’s be honest – is impossible), you have only covered approximately 0.00835% of the individual opinions in the world. This does not factor in the element of changing opinions. 

Also – if you wanted to spend one second per day caring about the opinions of every person in the world, it would take you approximately 83,755.917 days. (Or, approximately 229.468 years. I doubt you’ll live that long…)

Now, I’m no math wizard here… But this seems like a poor ROI if you ask me. It's also impossible.

Let’s stop looking at the numbers now, and get to the point of this post. There is no need, and no satisfaction, that will come from considering the opinions of others when it comes to your body. When I walk down the street, I get a wide range of looks from strangers. Some people look at me and smile, some people appear to be attracted sexually, some people look at me and give me a dirty look, and some people ignore me altogether.

Let’s go back to the numbers for just a second… Or better yet, a chart: 

 

This chart shows the equal breakout of responses from strangers you may encounter when walking down the street. (I love charts!)

Now, take this breakout – and factor in your potential reaction to each of these visual opinions.

·          25% of the time, you would be content.

·          25% of the time you would be flattered (or disturbed depending on your situation).

·          25% o the time you would be offended and bothered.

·          25% of the time you would either not care, or think “why are people avoiding looking at me?”

In just one short walk down the street, you can have a wide range of emotions and moods that are motivated by the opinions of others (and these are just visually expressed opinions, not confirmed!). This will cause increases and decreases in chemicals inside of your body that I’m not even remotely educated enough to talk about here… These chemicals will alter your moods, causing you to drift between happiness and depression – which can impact other decisions you make throughout your day. It can also impact progress of things you may have goals in such as sports, fitness, academic, cooking, or anything that requires physical and mental energy.

So, from a logical standpoint - going by numbers - why would you allow the opinions of people you don’t even know (or, even those you do know) impact things you do in YOUR life? If someone looks at you and has an opinion that may be negative, and that opinion is expressed in one second of your day, why let the other seconds be ruined by that? Also, if they’re spending one second to share an opinion about you, and investing the rest of their daily seconds thinking about other things – then why would you allow YOUR remaining daily seconds to be focused on their one second of opinion sharing?

Seems like a waste of time to me. 

Life is short. We have a limited number of seconds in this life, and none of them should be wasted on thinking about the thoughts that others have about us. We can't control the thoughts of others, and even if they express those thoughts - they're only words. If you want to do something and are afraid of an "opinion", just remember that an opinion is nothing more than one second of another person's time and only has as much power as you allow it to have.