Why photos change how we see ourselves

Shahroo Izadi is a psychologist and behavioural change specialist. Her book, The Kindness Method, adapts tools from addiction recovery to help anyone build lasting change through self-knowledge and self-compassion rather than willpower and shame.

Most of us have hundreds, maybe thousands, of photos sitting on our phones. Birthdays, holidays, ordinary Tuesdays that felt worth capturing for reasons we can’t quite remember now. And yet alongside all of that visual evidence of a life being lived, many of us also carry an internal narrative that’s surprisingly thin on proof. We underestimate what we’ve managed. We forget what we’ve survived. We minimise our own capability at exactly the moments we most need to remember it.

This isn’t a character flaw – it’s a feature of the brain we all share. Our minds are wired to prioritise threat over reassurance, which served us well for thousands of years and is considerably less useful now, when the threat in question is a hard week at work, a habit we're trying to break, or the quiet creeping feeling that we’re not making enough progress. In moments of stress or self-doubt, we don’t automatically reach for our proudest memories, we reach for our worst fears. And we are often more convinced by those fears than by the considerable evidence to the contrary.

I’ve spent over a decade working as a behavioural change specialist, first in NHS addiction and recovery settings, then with individuals and organisations who want to understand why change is hard and what actually makes it stick. The framework I developed, The Kindness Method, adapts tools from addiction and recovery work for anyone trying to make a lasting change in their behaviour, whether that’s a habit, a pattern of thinking or simply the way they speak to themselves. The core of the approach is this: sustainable change isn’t built on self-criticism or shame. It‘s built on self-knowledge and self-compassion, and on having clear, accessible evidence of who you are when you’re at your best.

One of the most common and underestimated barriers I see isn’t willpower, and it isn’t motivation – it’s memory. Specifically, the way people lose access to their own history of capability at exactly the moments they most need it.

In addiction recovery, there’s a well-documented phenomenon called euphoric recall: the tendency to romanticise a habit you’re trying to leave behind, forgetting the damage it caused and holding on only to the relief it once provided. But there’s a mirror version of this that gets talked about far less. The way we can forget the difficult things we’ve already navigated. The way a single bad day can feel, in the moment, like evidence that we’ve never had a good one. The way months of steady progress can seem to vanish the instant something goes wrong.

The antidote isn’t positive thinking. Telling yourself you’re doing well when you feel like you’re not rarely works. And for people who tend towards all-or-nothing thinking, it can feel actively insulting. What works better is evidence. Concrete, specific, visible evidence of who you already are and what you’ve already done.

This is why, at the heart of The Kindness Method, I use written maps. These are handwritten pages where you record, in your own words, things like: what you’re genuinely proud of, the conditions under which you do your best work, the strengths you’d acknowledge in yourself if you were being really honest, the reasons change matters to you. The act of writing them is useful. But the act of looking at them, of seeing a whole page covered in your own handwriting and thinking, “that’s a lot”, is when something shifts. In that moment it becomes much harder to dismiss yourself.

Some of my clients photograph their maps and keep the images on their phones; others have printed small versions to carry in their wallets. They’re not doing this because they have poor memories – they’re doing it because they understand something I’ve come to think of as one of the most practical insights in behavioural change: the moment you most need reminding of your own capability is also the moment you’re least able to summon it from scratch. Stress, boredom, exhaustion, a difficult conversation, none of these are ideal conditions for clear-headed self-reflection –but a photo is three taps away.

And photographs can do something written notes sometimes can’t. They take you back. There’s something about seeing a moment, rather than just reading about it, that makes it feel real again in your body, not just your head. A picture from a time when you felt proud, capable, genuinely like yourself doesn’t just inform you that you’ve been that person, it briefly returns you to the experience of being them. That’s a more powerful resource than most of us realise we’re sitting on.

The test for me, both professionally and personally, is whether an image serves kindness or shame, because photographs can go either way. There’s a version of keeping visual motivation that is really just a more sophisticated form of self-criticism, a before photo, an image of someone else’s achievements designed to make you feel inadequate by comparison. Anything that operates through shame might get you moving in the short term, but shame doesn’t sustain change – it exhausts it.

What does sustain change is a growing body of evidence that you are someone who is capable of it. Photos of people who love and support you. Images from moments when you felt most like yourself. Screenshots of a message someone sent you on a day your presence mattered. These aren’t self-indulgent, they’re practical tools for the inevitable moments when your inner critic is loudest and your access to perspective is lowest.

I have a folder on my phone that most people would never think to create. It contains screenshots of kind messages, images from moments that weren’t particularly photogenic but meant something to me, photos that document small victories no algorithm would ever amplify. I look at it on days when a difficult email arrives and I feel myself starting to spiral. I've looked at it before important meetings, not to perform confidence, but to locate it. The evidence was already there. I just needed somewhere to store it.

This is particularly true for people whose brains don’t retain a stable sense of their own history. For those of us with ADHD, for example, object permanence, the felt sense that something continues to exist even when it’s not in front of you, doesn’t always extend to emotional memory. Achievements from even a few weeks ago can feel, in a hard moment, as though they belong to someone else entirely. Keeping a curated visual record isn’t nostalgia, it's maintenance.

Our phones are already full of captured moments. The question is which ones we’re choosing to hold onto, and whether the story those images collectively tell about us is working for us or against us. The habit of noticing something worth keeping, and then actually keeping it, is a small practice with a disproportionately large return. Not because it makes you feel good in an abstract way, but because on the days when the critical voice is loudest, it gives you something concrete to look at instead.

The Kindness Method is published by Macmillan.