Pictures, the Struggle is Real

Have you ever looked at a picture of yourself and thought “Gah! Do I really look like THAT! Is that how people see me?????” 

Maybe it was even a picture from a day where you thought you looked pretty ok when you went out the door. 

It can feel distressing, and it can make you feel like you need to DO something about it and fix your body stat. 

With graduations, vacations and weddings happening and all the picture taking that comes with them, I am having a lot of conversations right now about this experience. If you have felt this way about a picture of yourself recently, you are not alone. 

And here is what I want you to understand about this experience: 

No, that is not how you look to everyone else. 

Let me explain. 

Have you ever heard a recording of your voice and thought to yourself “Gah! Is that what I really sound like? Is that what people hear when I talk?????”

If we are hearing able, we hear ourselves talk all the time, but it is a very different experience when we hear our voice recorded and played back to us. Our brain finds it strange. And it is our brain’s job to identify strange things, things that may be off, things that seem out of alignment with the way we think things should be. Our brain wants to keep us safe. So it hears that and it sends a message that it is strange and bad and off. 

Let’s apply this to seeing ourselves in a flat image. 

Sure, we see ourselves in mirrors on the regular (and I recognize that for many that is also very challenging) but we aren’t usually looking at pictures of ourselves daily. Just like we sound different to ourselves when we listen to a recording, we look different to ourselves when we see a flat, 2D image of our body. Our brain is scanning for what is strange and feels out of alignment from what we experienced and boom, our brain says - this seems off, that is not what we thought we looked like, we need to fix it!!! 

Add all the messages we get about how bodies should look and the images we regularly see of super thin bodies and we create an opportunity for our brain to pick this up as something that is off and unsafe…because unless you are part of the 1% of the population that has a body that is similar to the ones we see marketed in pictures…your body is going to look different from that in pictures.  

And it will make you feel bad, maybe even panic you. It will make you feel like you need to change your body stat. 

But here’s the thing, here is what I want you to lean into. If you felt pretty ok about the way you looked before you saw that picture, that feeling is no less true because your brain had a freak out about seeing a 2D image of yourself. Go back to that feeling and trust it, it is a worthy and good feeling that can be trusted. 

I believe that it is not your body (or my body) that needs changing but instead the perspective of what is happening when you feel that way about a picture of yourself.