A few decades ago, our parents might have caught their reflection in the morning, maybe again at night, perhaps in a shop window in between, a handful of times a day at most. Today, you don't have to be a model, a dentist or a makeup artist to glance at yourself tens, if not hundreds, of times a day.
Mirrors and cameras are everywhere: shop windows, lift doors, gyms and yoga studios, decorative mirrors in cafés and restaurants, advertisements designed to lure you into taking a selfie that doubles as free marketing. Then there's your phone: the lock screen, the front-facing camera, every video call, every selfie, every video message, every story you check back on to see how it looked or how many people liked it.
Multiply that by every day, every week and every year. There really is no holiday from your own reflection.
The ancient myth of Narcissus is usually understood as a warning against vanity. But I wonder if modern life presents us with a different danger altogether. What if the real cost isn't that we become obsessed with how we look? What if constantly seeing ourselves slowly trains us to observe ourselves, looking at what we observe, instead of simply inhabiting ourselves and remaining the observer?
This is my attempt to explore that question: how repeated exposure to our own reflections may be changing our relationship with ourselves, why these constant reflections may hold far more psychological power than we tend to realise, and what we might do about it.
A day of reflections
Here's what a usual day for many people actually looks like.
You wake up, go to the bathroom, and see yourself in the mirror. You didn't sleep well, the pimple from yesterday is still there, the skin under your eyes looks darker than you'd like. Before you're even fully awake, you've already reminded yourself of every perceived physical imperfection.
Next, you put on makeup. You like the contrast between this glamorous, fresh-looking face and the dull, weary one from a minute ago, but you also know this new face isn't quite you, just a version of you that you're comfortable letting others see. You register it briefly, then move on. You've been doing this camouflage for years.
You get dressed and glance at yourself again, this time checking whether the clothes make visual sense, whether the outfit delivers the message you want it to deliver. "I am cool and carefree." "I am feminine and gentle." "I am a successful businessman and demand your respect." You are, once more, looking at yourself the way others might see you. Maybe you're satisfied and it puts a smile on your face. Maybe you're not, and the day starts with a small, quiet grumpiness about the way you look.
On your way to work, you catch your reflection in a shop window. Almost without thinking, you straighten your posture, smooth your jacket, adjust your hair. You weren't doing it because somebody else was staring. You were doing it because you were.
At work, you sit through video calls. No matter how hard you try to focus on the person speaking, your attention often drifts to your own face in the corner of the screen. Why does it look so skewed? Was that wrinkle there yesterday? Or maybe you feel fine because you've turned on the strongest filter available. It works, for a while, until you step away for a bathroom break and catch your unfiltered face in the mirror again. Why can't I just look better?
Around lunchtime, you reply to a few messages. One is easier as a video note, so you decide to send one. You watch yourself as you record it, not thinking twice that this is something we simply didn't do five, let alone ten, years ago. You replay it, don't quite like your expression, delete it and try again. What should have taken twenty seconds turns into three takes because you're no longer focused on what you're saying. You're watching yourself say it.
Between calls, you check social media. Friends and strangers alike, all at their best, smiling, travelling, drinking their matcha, looking rested and radiant. No visible defects, no bad skin days, hair that never looks as mundane as it does in real life. You know it's filters and lighting and good angles. It doesn't matter. Somewhere underneath the knowing, you're still comparing your raw, unedited self against their curated one. Whatever satisfaction (read dopamine) you expect when opening Instagram or TikTok, it never quite delivers. It just leaves you feeling a little more drained and anxious instead.
In the evening, dinner with friends. Photos of the food, selfies, group shots. You look at them immediately. The food and the friends can wait. You spend ten minutes choosing the best one, edit it, post it. Then you check your phone every so often to see how many people liked it, which is another way of asking how many people approved of you. Not just of what you do or who you're with, but of how you look.
At night, you clean your face, apply your creams and serums, and see yourself once more in your raw, unfiltered version. Ouch. Or maybe you reach for under-eye patches, a night mask or one of the other trendy inventions promising to keep you looking forever young, and even better, so that you'll never have to show your true face to anyone, including yourself.
The fragmented Self
There's a simple, well-documented difference in how we look at other people's faces versus our own. We take in other people's faces as a whole, the way we'd take in a room we know well. When it comes to our own face, however, we scrutinise it, taking it in one feature at a time, noticing every flaw, similar to rereading an important email before hitting send. We catch every typo, whereas the recipient simply skims past it.
Video calls make this even worse. Webcams sit close to our faces, distorting our features the way any close-up lens does. To make matters more confusing, the self-view is usually mirrored, the reversed version we're used to seeing in mirrors, not the version everybody else actually sees.
None of this, on its own, seems particularly significant. But modern life doesn't ask us to do it once. It asks us to do it over and over again, dozens, sometimes hundreds, of times a day. Every reflection, every selfie, every video call and every shop window is another opportunity to step outside ourselves and become both the observer and the observed.
This makes me wonder whether the real consequence isn't simply that we become more self-conscious about our appearance. What if we become more accustomed to experiencing ourselves from the outside than from within?
Richard Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems, makes an observation in Introduction to Internal Family Systems that completely changed the way I think about this. Imagine a conversation with your partner, one you want to go a certain way. Do you picture the two of you interacting from within your own body, looking out at your partner? Or do you see yourself in the scene, watching the conversation unfold almost as if you were watching a film?
According to Schwartz, when we imagine ourselves from the outside, meaning we can see ourselves in our imagination, we are no longer operating from what IFS refers to as the Self. Instead, we're watching one of our parts trying to navigate the situation. It might be the part that wants to be liked, the part that wants to be respected, the part that rehearses saying no, or the part that's terrified of getting it wrong. This is where modern reflections become psychologically interesting.
Every reflection, every selfie, every video call and every shop window gives those parts another opportunity to step in. The part that worries about appearance. The part that compares. The part that wants approval. The part that wants to be attractive. The part that tries to manage how other people perceive us.
Without even noticing it, we spend much of the day practising not simply being ourselves, but watching ourselves. The more often we practise watching ourselves instead of being ourselves, the easier it becomes to relate to ourselves as an object to be managed, rather than as a person simply having an experience. Perhaps this is one more way our sense of Self becomes fragmented.
This may also help explain why some people find video calls so unexpectedly uncomfortable. The obsessive focus on facial flaws associated with constant self-view has become common enough to earn its own name: Zoom dysmorphia. In some people, repeated self-scrutiny can contribute to body dissatisfaction or, in more severe cases, resemble features of body dysmorphic disorder. I'm not suggesting reflections cause these conditions. But they may be one more way modern life repeatedly encourages us to keep looking at ourselves through the critical lenses of our fragmented parts rather than through the calmness, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, courage, creativity and connectedness of the Self.
Mirror gazing
When thinking about the impact reflections have had in my own life, I was reminded of a practice known as mirror gazing, sometimes called mirror meditation. If the reflections we encounter throughout everyday life quietly train us to become observers of ourselves, mirror gazing pushes that process to its absolute extreme. Instead of catching your reflection for a few seconds, you stay with it, well beyond the point where a normal glance would end. You keep looking. You keep observing yourself. The idea is simple: sit in front of your own reflection, often by candlelight or in dim lighting, for ten minutes or more.
Some people report accessing emotions that would otherwise remain buried. Others find themselves laughing at their own seriousness, connecting with parts of themselves they've ignored for years, or noticing expressions that feel strangely unfamiliar. Some describe something in their eyes that seems older than their usual sense of self. Others experience the mirror as a kind of portal into the unconscious, bringing forward thoughts and emotions that everyday life rarely allows space for.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
This is where the practice becomes more complex. The loosening of our ordinary, tightly maintained sense of self, which can feel expansive and deeply meaningful for some, may also resemble a mild, or in some cases more significant, dissociative state. The familiar boundary between observer and observed begins to soften. For some people that's fascinating. For others it's deeply unsettling, even frightening, especially if they're unprepared for it or already struggling with their mental health. This is one of the reasons mirror gazing isn't generally recommended for people currently experiencing significant psychological difficulties.
To illustrate this, you may already be familiar with the story of Narcissus, the beautiful young man who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water and wasted away beside it, unable to look away. At face value, it's a story about vanity, about the danger of loving your own image too much. However, another interpretation suggests Narcissus wasn't destroyed by vanity at all, but by encountering something in his own reflection that he couldn't bear, something he wasn't able to integrate into his sense of Self.
Personally, I do believe mirrors can serve as a doorway into the unconscious. They offer us a way of encountering parts of ourselves that usually remain outside our awareness. But I also think that doorway deserves respect. For someone with a weaker sense of Self, someone whose inner world is already dominated by protective parts, staring into their own reflection for an extended period may feel less like self-discovery and more like losing solid ground beneath their feet. Curiosity about the unconscious is healthy. But, like any powerful psychological practice, it requires enough Self to meet whatever emerges with a sufficient amount of calmness, curiosity, compassion and courage, in order not to be overwhelmed by it.
Returning to Self
Once we become aware of the impact that repetitive, compulsive and often unconscious exposure to our own reflections can have on us, the question becomes what to do with that awareness. This is often where parts-informed coaching can help. We can't avoid every mirror, every camera or every video call, nor should we. The goal isn't to eliminate reflections from our lives. It's to stop letting them pull us away from ourselves.
Reduce unnecessary exposure to your own reflection. If you don't need a mirror in a particular room, remove it. If your yoga or pilates studio has mirrors on every wall, stand somewhere you can't constantly see yourself. Give yourself opportunities to experience your body from the inside rather than observing it from the outside.
On video calls, pin or highlight the other person and make a conscious effort not to look at your own thumbnail. Let your attention rest on the person you're speaking to instead of continually monitoring yourself.
Limit your time spent on social media. The less you look back at what you published or compulsively check notifications, the better. The same applies to other people's profiles. Unfollow or mute accounts that consistently leave you feeling worse about yourself. Keep the ones that educate, inspire or genuinely connect you to others.
When you catch yourself reaching for your phone to take twenty versions of the same photograph, pause. Take one. Let it be imperfect. Better yet, consider not posting it at all. Ask yourself whether you'll remember the moment more vividly because you documented it, or because you truly experienced it.
During your evening skincare routine, resist the urge to look in the mirror.
What we repeatedly pay attention to becomes stronger. If our attention is constantly pulled towards our appearance, our image, our angles, our filters and other people's reactions, the parts of us that manage those things naturally become stronger too. But if we repeatedly practise returning our attention to our experience, our values, our relationships and our inner world, we create more space for the Self to lead.
Perhaps the greatest cost of modern reflections, whether in mirrors, cameras or screens, isn't that they change how we look at ourselves. It's that they gradually change where we look from. Perhaps the lesson of Narcissus was never simply, "Don't fall in love with your reflection." Perhaps it was, "Don't mistake your reflection for your Self."