Why Your Body Image Feels So Stuck

Back in college, I remember sitting in a psychology class (the only class I would wake up for even if I had binged the night before) and learning about "schemas." 

A schema is "a mental blueprint that helps us organize, interpret, and process information based on prior experiences" (VeryWellMind).

In other words, our brain builds filing systems that help us make sense of the world quickly instead of having to think it through every time. We don’t experience every situation from scratch. We experience it through a pre-made package of what we already understand it to be.

Here's an example:

You hear the words coffee shop.

You don’t think: what is that? 

Your brain already has a “coffee shop” schema.

So without having to think about it, you already know:

• this is a place that serves warm drinks and probably pastries
• the vibe feels relaxed
• people are sitting at tables talking or working
• how people might be dressed
• how it sounds, etc.

But what makes it a schema is that you don’t go through all of those details in your head right in that in the moment. They are already there from years of experiencing "coffee shops" in movies, books, and real life.

It arrives to you as a pre-packaged concept.

And the pre-packaging is the point, it's how the brain stays efficient. It saves time by plugging in the information quickly based on what information you've already gathered (usually from your earliest experiences of it), and then hands it to you for use in the present tense.

Okay, Stef, so what's the point?

Here's the connection:

Your body image is a schema.

I think that when we look in the mirror, get dressed, feel our stomachs, think about "my body," we have already determined what that is, what it means, and whether or not it feels safe.

The original associations of what it is, what it means, and if it feels safe isn't happening NOW, though. It's imported in from years of our own relationship with it; built from comments we've heard about bodies (ours and other people's), the media, social dynamics from vulnerable periods, our mom's beliefs about it, what we've been through with it.

And most of that input is old and outdated. It's also biased. Much of it came from childhood and adolescence, when you didn’t have context for the ideas you were inheriting.

Unfortunately, your brain doesn’t automatically update schemas.  (That's why sometimes you keep reverting back to old impressions of people or places even though you logically know they've changed; it takes tons of repetition to really update the OG mental model.)

I think most of us need updates.

We need to get in there and reorganize what our brains are using as the reference point of safety. Because if we keep operating from the schema we inherited, we're going to stay stuck.

This cultural moment is no help, either.

We are going to have to be intentional about how we construct our schema. We need to assign it a new framework.

This is the goal of The Body Image Workshop -- to offer a new schema from which to operate. To give your brain new ideas to work with and apply them to your here and now body. Because even though you don't build new schemas overnight, you have to start somewhere, and you need to be intentional about how you want that to look.

Otherwise, you're going to stay stuck in a coffee shop that hasn't been cleaned up since the 90s.

Stefanie Michele is a body image coach and nervous system-informed educator who helps people heal negative body image, binge eating, and chronic food stress by addressing the underlying patterns that keep them stuck. Her work explores the connection between body image, anxiety, conditioning, self-trust, and cultural messaging, offering a more realistic and psychologically grounded approach to healing. The Body Image Workshop is designed to help people understand why body image feels so loaded and how to begin changing it.