The reason you get startled when you see a photo of yourself

Sometimes I see a photo of myself and then I get a shock. ‘Do I look like this? Couldn't you have said something? What a nice friend you are!’ In an angry trot, I walk to the nearest mirror to find that the damage is actually not that bad, except for a panda eye here and there. How is that possible? Apparently, we don't look like we think we do at all.

So it's not strange that your friend-girlfriend-mother-sister looks at you as if you don't have everything together in your head, because they know better how you look than you do. Professor Liesbeth Woertman explains to Psychologie Magazine that we always judge and monitor ourselves when we look in the mirror. That face is how you think your head looks, and the more often you see it, the more you appreciate it. But what happens to your face when there's no mirror around, we don't know. Apparently, I have ‘the face’, I heard this week. You get that when I'm working with my headphones on and you still start talking to me. So I didn't know I had that, but my colleagues say I do. I'm done with that.

Our Lotte also always accuses me of my face going all over the place when I write a story. That could be true, because I write about what I think of something and I'm quite expressive. But I don't know those faces, I think I would walk right past myself in the shopping center. Maybe I would still think: where do I know that woman from?

You think your face is a constant, but the opposite is true. You look angry, you smile, you're tired or you radiate. But in the meantime, you also always see yourself in mirror image and there the right half of your face is on the left and vice versa. Even more factors that actually don't match. To make everything look better than it is, we also throw a little filter over the photos on Insta and you end up with selfie dysmorphia. Sel-fie-dys-mor-phi-a, yes. You suffer from this when you can no longer look at the real photos of yourself because you manipulate everything so intensely and make it look better than it is.

So take another look when you see a photo of yourself that you don't recognize, you look more like it than you think. And this way you keep that dysmorphia at bay, because that's quite unhealthy, I thought.