Welcome to The Weekend Sexperiment! Each Friday, I alternate between The Weekend Sexperiment and Reader’s Request Fridays. In TWS posts, I offer a simple sex therapy homework assignment to try out over the weekend. Some experiments are geared towards couples, but others are suitable for single folks. As always, please feel free to contact me if you have a certain topic you’d like to see covered. If you’re interested in counseling, call (415) 658-5738 or visit my Appointments page to schedule a consultation.

This week’s suggestion is a simple one, but one that can be extremely powerful when put into regular practice.

Being in the sex therapy field, I work with body image very frequently. As part of a culture obsessed with youth and beauty, it can feel almost impossible not to have some sort of hang-up about your body.

Body anxiety comes up with women all of the time, and there are a consistently increasing number of men who are reporting poor body image as well.

Obviously this is a complex problem with many contributing factors, but one of the biggest complaints that I hear is that it’s impossible not to compare one’s body to others’.

It may be friends, family members, models in magazines, actresses on TV shows, or even strangers walking down the street.

A friend of mine once joked that she used to give her partner a hard time for checking out other women, until she realized she was just as guilty of ogling. The difference was that her partner was looking appreciatively at the women, and she was staring in order to judge both herself and the other woman.

It can happen unbelievably quickly too. In a split second, walking to the bus stop turns into “her arms are way skinnier than mine”, and a flip through the channels turns into “his stomach is so much flatter than mine could ever be.”

This constant internal criticism can really take its toll. Our bodies can start to feel like our enemies rather than a part of our selves. And when we’re angry at, critical of, disconnected from, or ashamed of our bodies, it’s impossible to feel pleasure.

For the entire weekend, make an effort to be appreciative of the bodies you see around you.

Try not to focus on typical standards of beauty, like thinness or musculature. Instead, look for the little quirks that make each of our bodies so unique.

You might notice that the woman in line in front of you at the movies has the most beautiful shade of reddish-blonde hair.

Perhaps the man lifting weights beside you at the gym has an interesting spatter of beauty marks across his shoulder.

The actress on the cover of the magazine might have an irresistibly cute smile.

Practice actively identifying things that are interesting or catch your eye, and appreciating them silently to yourself. Try not to be overt about looking at others’ bodies, and make sure your intentions are kind-hearted. You don’t want to make anyone around you uncomfortable. You may find yourself jumping to your usual comparisons or judgments; if you can catch yourself, try to gently pull yourself back into an appreciative state of mind.

This exercise is a subtle one. You’re not going to change your opinion of your body in a day.

But gradually and consistently working to shift the way you look at others can have a profound affect on the way you look at yourself. Give it a try for a few days and see what it is like.