What's Up With Women Who Walk Around Naked in the Locker Room
Are you one of them? (Photo: Shutterstock)
When you hit the locker room, do you whip your sweaty workout gear off with no shame? Or do you gather up your fresh clothes and scurry off to a bathroom stall, where you can change in private? Your answer reveals a surprising amount about your current mindset, as well as your past, says Matthew Goldfine, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in New York and New Jersey. Here are the different factors that play into just how comfortable you are going au naturale in front of your fellow gym members.
Your Self-Confidence
The most obvious thing getting naked in a locker room says about you is that you’re, at the very least, probably fine with how your body looks. Hopefully it goes beyond that and you’re straight-up proud of what you’ve got going on. On the flip side, if you’re shy about baring it all, you could be lacking the self-esteem that makes it so easy to do. “You might think you need to look a certain way, which could make you feel hesitant to get nude in a public setting,” says Goldfine. If that’s you, try these tips for boosting your body confidence.
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Your Family’s Attitude About Nudity
While self-confidence clearly plays a role in how willing you are to take it all off, your family’s reaction to nudity while you were growing up might matter more. “If you were brought up thinking open nudity wasn’t something done in the family, you might not feel like putting yourself out there in that way,” says Goldfine. On the other hand, if you had the kind of freewheeling family that embraced being nude, you might feel more comfortable being naked in front of others.
The funny thing here is that your upbringing could have had a paradoxical effect. “Typically speaking, how you raise your kids is how they grow up, but it could be the opposite,” says Goldfine. Maybe your family was super repressed and never got down with nudity, so you’ve flipped the script by being naked every chance you get, including in the locker room. Then there’s the other possibility: that your parents were so open with nudity you were constantly begging your mom to “OMG, please put on a shirt, you’re so embarrassing!” and as a result, you save prancing around in the nude for your bedroom.
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Your Adolescent Experiences
If you have no problem getting naked in front of others, you probably didn’t have any cringe-worthy related experiences growing up. “Developmentally speaking, infants don’t have the same worry about what people are thinking of their bodies,“ says Goldfine. "In middle childhood, you become more self-conscious and start to develop your own attitudes about nudity.”
It’s an especially vulnerable time when it comes to body-image issues, and any negative experiences can have lasting effects that follow you into the locker room. “If someone made fun of you for whatever reason while you were showering in gym class, you could have developed a self-consciousness that makes you try to avoid being embarrassed in the future,” says Goldfine. This kind of reaction can also stem from a boyfriend saying something hurtful about your body right when you’re in the stage of trying to figure out how you really feel about it, or even hearing peers ridicule someone else, says Goldfine.
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Embracing Your Birthday Suit
Interestingly enough, if you’ve got nerves about getting naked in the locker room, you should do just that to overcome them. “Based on what we know about anxiety, you should be naked even more to get rid of that fear,” says Goldfine. “For the most part, you’ll get a neutral or positive reaction, so you’ll get used to the feeling.”
If you don’t feel comfortable being nude in the locker room but wish you did, there’s hope for you yet. Just like with your kettlebell form, when it comes to getting naked without a second thought, practice makes perfect. “There’s a reason there’s a stereotype of the old man or woman who’s always naked at the gym and very comfortable with that,“ says Goldfine. "A lot of it just comes down to how often you’ve done it.” People are most likely too wrapped up in their own stuff to be judging your body. Remember that next time you’re contorting yourself behind a towel so no one gets a glimpse of you as you change. Drop the towel, and strip down with pride!
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All gifs courtesy of giphy.com
