Most of the time, our brains are very good at blending together input from all our senses into a seamless, unified conscious experience of “my body”. When this process of integrating different sensory signals goes wrong, according to one theory, it can give a person an inaccurate and distressing sense of their body called “body image disturbance”.
There are many kinds of body image disturbance, including dissatisfaction with our bodies or inaccurate perceptions of them. We don’t know a lot about how many people experience body misperceptions, but we do know body dissatisfaction is very common. A survey of more than 1,600 Australians aged 12–18 carried out last year found almost half experienced dissatisfaction with their own appearance.
