How can I stop fixating on my appearance?

The Guardian

26-06-2025

How can I stop fixating so much on my appearance? I'm a woman in my late 30s and recently a photo taken in a professional context has sent me spiralling about how I appear to others. I find myself poring over photos for evidence that I'm either ugly or beautiful. In reality I know I'm pretty average looking and the way I look hasn't held me back from finding a loving partner or living a meaningful life – so it shouldn't matter. And yet when my confidence wobbles or my mood is low, it's my physical appearance that obsesses me. How can I de-centre the importance of looks?
Eleanor says: Lately I've been getting a lot of ads for cosmetic surgeries; I guess the algorithm ghost thinks I'd like some. But I keep having this experience where I look at the proudly presented 'before and after' photos and feel a poignant fondness for the woman on the left, now erased. Sometimes she reminds me of the women who raised me. My teachers and my relatives and my friends' mothers – good, loving, twinkly-eyed women who taught me how to read and make cakes and laugh and aspire. The 'before' women kind of recall them, at various points in their middle-to-old age. But if the women I've known had lines on their faces or 'saggy' necks – it besmirches them to even talk about them like this – it's only in slightly seeing their echos in these photos, labelled as faults, that it's ever occurred to me to notice. I'm sure it's the same for you with the women who played these roles in your life: we just do not evaluate them on grounds of appearance. It would be a stupid misunderstanding of their value to do so. And of course, because of that, we think they're just beautiful. I miss those echos in the 'after'.
The point isn't what you should or shouldn't do with your face. The actual women in these photos may be thrilled. The point is just that there's a way of looking at the people we love and respect that most of us use easily, daily. We see a whole person instead of evaluating or nitpicking parts of their appearance. Why is it hard to extend that way of seeing to ourselves? Why do we look at the women we love and admire through the macro of soul and character, but view ourselves through the unforgiving micro of a magnifying mirror?
I can't pretend to know – we're up against industries worth billions and millenia of raising girls on skincare and diets. But I think the task you face is figuring out how to see yourself the same way you see the women you love. Literally visually see; so that what comes back at you from the mirror is a person, not a series of component parts in need of tuning.
How do we do that? I think you're on to something big when you say appearance looms when confidence wobbles or mood is low. I notice that the busier I am with things I love, the less it occurs to me to wonder how I look. It's not that I answer that question positively – it just doesn't seem important to ask it. Whatever it is that makes appearance seem unimportant, that's what life needs to feel full of.
When things do feel wobbly, smaller interventions might stop the scrutiny cycle. Delete the picture. Put a smiley sticker eye-level on the mirror. Something small that shorts the urge to fixate on appearance. When obsessive re-inquiring about looks is driven by low confidence elsewhere, more visual evidence won't sate it. You don't look at yourself, reach a verdict and stop the investigation. You go back to the mirror tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as though things might have changed. It feels like a hunger but it shouldn't be fed.
I bet there are people in your life who look at you the way you look at the women you love. The task, I think, is to join them.