Good evening, everybody. How are y'all doing? I hope you getting through the day, getting through the week, trying to help you start it off right.

We're going to open the show talking about positive affirmations. Excuse me, they don't necessarily work for everybody.

So we're going to talk about who they work for, how to make them work for you.

For those that it doesn't work for, some of it's also about really just being open and settling into this.

One of the things I've learned through my work as a sexual psychologist, relational and sex therapist, has been that some of these, what do you call them?

Not stereotypes, but kitschy, niche, sticky, pop psychology tools.

Some of them are bunk and just rooted in bad science.

Some of them, though, I think, are really valuable.

It's just they're not familiar for us or to us.

And we don't think in terms of mental health. And it's always

fascinating to me how much time and effort will put into our bodies, you know, at the gym. Because a lot of

what we're doing at the gym is true bodybuilding. It's really body modification. We're not doing it

for health anymore or we're overextending ourselves and we're doing it to really change our body. It's a form of body modification. No different than a lot of

other ways we do that. And we're always modifying our bodies. Dying our hair, changing our

hair styles, getting plastic surgery, bleaching our teeth, hair removal, things like glasses

or contact lenses, painting our nails, getting tattoos,

all sorts of different ways we modify our body.

There's nothing wrong with that.

It's a really beautiful way to take ownership.

Your body becomes a billboard for your politics, your values, your ethics, you're establishing

your authenticity.

For some, it's mental health where they're saying, I'm not going to follow conformity.

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