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When you first look at the pictures you just took, you immediately want to delete them. Or you carefully consider them, looking for your shortcomings, until you are completely upset and come to the conclusion that everything is hopeless. Familiar? Blogger Jan Hand talks about how to get over your self-image disgust.
Jenn Hand is a holistic eating blogger and founder of jennhand.com, a site for women who want to change their relationship with food.
I, too, fell into hysterics when looking at each of my pictures. I immediately noticed that my hair did not lie like that, my nose was crooked, one tooth was sticking out, my skin was terrible, and my stomach seemed huge in this perspective. And so on and so forth.
After years of working on myself, I still look at photos and put them in a certain category: “Oh, this photo was taken when I practiced a raw food diet and was skinny as a sleeper,” “And this is when I ate every night and didn’t know how to stop”, “And in this photo I gained almost 10 kg and I look swollen and full.”
Now I love my body, I’m comfortable in my skin, I don’t hate my belly like I used to. But still, I still scrutinize each of my photographs and dissect them just as ruthlessly.
Recently I looked at my photos from the celebration of Christmas. And my first thoughts were about how badly I was dressed. Everything else, of course, was also wrong: the pose, the stupid smile, the hair standing on end from the humidity …
No one will analyze your appearance, everyone looks first of all at themselves
It’s amazing how much negativity is born in me when I look at my own pictures.. Oh yes, let’s not forget about the commandments of good photography: I must be shot from a good angle; hair should look perfectly styled; you need to take such a pose so that the hand does not turn out, God forbid, thick; gotta get the feet right…
Oh my god, it’s just a photo! Who would have thought that ordinary photos could cause such a stream of self-criticism to the point of self-hatred…
I think many people should seriously think about how we perceive ourselves in the photo. Try to remember these three points the next time you start your photo trial.
1. See yourself as a whole
When you dissect, analyze and disassemble every aspect of your own appearance in a photograph, you see only part of the whole. You focus on something so specific and insignificant (especially if you specifically enlarge the photo and look for flaws) that you miss the whole picture. Try to look at yourself differently. Imagine that you are a not too uninterested viewer who glides over beautiful pictures. Forbid yourself to plunge into your own imperfections. When you learn to perceive yourself as a whole, you will see your photos in a new light.
2. Remember that others do not look at you in the photo as closely as you do.
Do you pay attention to other people in the photo? As a rule, you are so carried away by thoughts about your own fullness, terribly chosen clothes and terrible acne, that you don’t care at all how someone turned out. The same can be said about all of us. No one will analyze how you turned out in the photo. No one will notice even half of what you didn’t like. Everyone looks at themselves first.
3. Try to relive the impressions of that day
What happened on the day and at the moment the picture was taken? Why are you laughing? Maybe someone made you laugh? Have you experienced any special, unforgettable emotions that you wanted to capture? Dive into memories. When I look at my old photographs, I consciously recall what happened to me then. I close my eyes and my trip to the Great Wall of China, the laughter of friends playing board games on the ship, the happiness that came from children in a Vietnamese school come to life in front of me … We all need the joy of memories and the feeling of that moment. For this we take a camera with us.
More on The Huffington Post.