How to Mitigate Intellectual Body Dysmorphia

Compare the capabilities of your present self to your past self. That should make the growth obvious.

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On a recent podcast, DeGatchi mentioned the feeling of “intellectual body dysmorphia” when learning math, which I’m sure most learners will find relatable to some degree.

What’s the solution? What I’ve used to take the edge off for myself and for students of mine is looking back at what kinds of things you struggled with a couple months ago, a year ago, multiple years ago…

Compare the capabilities of your present self to your past self. That should make the growth obvious.

There should be things you used to be really confused about (or maybe even confidently wrong about) that are way more clear now.

Or things that used to take a lot of effort to accomplish, that would be way easier now. (That coding project took me a full week back then? I could do that in an hour now.)

Also – maybe this is less wholesome – but once you reach a high enough level of skill you can periodically compare yourself to other people who are clearly less skilled. Not saying things to make them feel bad, or even thinking poorly of them, just noticing evidence that your percentile has changed on the bell curve.

But of course you can’t spend too long in this state, you just dip in to get your confidence up again and then snap out of it and get back to lifting those metaphorical weights that are heavy enough to make you feel weak again.

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