Overcoming Photo Session Anxiety

About nine years ago I took a fear of flying workshop because I was so scared of flying I couldn’t step onto a plane without crying NOPE NEVERMIND and walking right back through the jet bridge and asking the desk to refund my ticket. Now I fly everywhere, but more on that later. Let me start from the beginning.

Like the rest of the 31.1% of American adults here, I experienced an anxiety disorder which I managed through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), lifestyle changes, and eventually medication. But the one thing that still made me so anxious that it interfered with my enjoyment of life was getting on an airplane. I just couldn’t do it. Which sucked because I really wanted to go to cool places and do cool things.

So, I took Dr. David Carbonell’s fear of flying workshop in 2017 where he gathered fellow anxious flyers for two days of group learning followed by a short flight together from Chicago to St. Louis and back so we could practice the new skills we learned. And DAMN did I learn some great skills for managing anxiety in tough situations like flying. 

I wanted to share the biggest takeaway I got from it because after years of therapy and reading countless articles and books on the subject of anxiety, this was the point that stuck with me the most.

Why we get nervous before a photoshoot

Anxiety and fear, as you may already know, comes from the amygdala in the brain, which controls the fight or flight response. Anxiety in modern society is basically a DEFCON 1 level reaction in the body (heart racing, feeling faint, racing thoughts, nausea, etc.) to a DEFCON 5 level event like going to the grocery store or chatting with someone at a party. Anxiety disorder is when this over-reaction of the nervous system leads to a diminished quality of life and causes the sufferer to avoid things they want to or need to do in order to avoid those feelings of anxiety, such as only using Instacart for their shopping or not going to parties.

During times of extreme stress, the amygdala shuts down communication with the prefrontal cortex, which handles thought and reasoning. That is why trying to talk yourself out of an anxiety attack or panic attack doesn’t work: the pathway is literally closed for business and the amygdala continues to spew cortisol into your system to keep the stress response moving. The prefrontal cortex cannot connect with it to tell it to stop. 

So when your brain attaches danger to something like getting on an airplane, you can’t just have your prefrontal cortex reason with the amygdala to kick it in the pants and get it back in line. You have to retrain your amygdala to understand that a situation it labeled as “dangerous” is actually just “uncomfortable but safe” so that it learns to stop sounding the alarm bells throughout your system. And you can only do this by exposing yourself to the thing that makes you anxious, getting through it, and repeating the process until your mind and body start to connect the situation with safety instead of danger. 

So what does this have to do with photography? I swear I’m not just telling stories because I like to hear myself talk– I have a point.

Everyone who comes into our studio for headshots is nervous as hell. We actually have a nervous-meter in their pre-shoot questionnaire where we ask people how nervous they are on a scale of 1 (totally chill this is no biggie) to 9 (I hate this) and a good portion of people select numbers between 5 to 9. And everyone who leaves says the same thing afterward: “that wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.” This is because most anxiety around something we fear is anticipatory anxiety. For the fear of flying workshop, we graphed our anxiety levels throughout the experience and nearly all of the graphs had the peak of our anxiety at the highest leading up to the flight and as the door to the plane closed, but then it came down as our minds and bodies adjusted.

Similarly, our minds fill with “what if” thoughts leading up to a photo session. What if I’m late? What if my hair looks like crap? What if I wake up with a blemish or cut myself shaving that morning? What if I look old in the photos or fat or angry or frumpy or stupid or the photographer gets me from that ridiculous angle where I look like Pinocchio?

But once you get started in a session, connect on a human level with your photographer, see the photos as they’re being taken and provide input for changes, your amygdala is able to stop labeling a photo shoot as “dangerous” and start labeling it as “weird and uncomfortable because I’m not used to this, but safe.”

Tips to calm down for a photoshoot

If you find yourself feeling nervous for a photo session, try using these skills for easing headshot session anxiety:

• Start by acknowledging that you’re feeling anxious. Don’t push it away, because that’s what makes it worse. We tend to want to think that whatever we’re doing shouldn’t feel like as big of a deal as it does and we feel defeated that our mind and body are treating a simple photo session as a DEFCON level 1 event. Be gentle with yourself and acknowledge that it’s totally normal to feel nervous for your headshots. You are not a wuss for this. Once you accept this, then you can use science-backed tools for calming your nervous system and making the experience less stressful.

• Breathe. As simple as it sounds, there are many types of deep breathing that are chemically designed to calm an overactive nervous system. For example, slowly breathing out for twice as long as breathing in. Try breathing in for a count of four and out for a count of eight. Or box breathing: in for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four, repeat.

• Move your body. Cortisol and adrenaline gets trapped in our muscles and needs a physical release to tell your body that the stress response is over. Do some jumping jacks, run in place, or go for a brisk walk.

• Watch your thoughts. Challenge thoughts that don’t serve you and re-think them in more realistic terms. If you hear your brain say, “damnit to hell my hair looks like crap this morning, of course a bad hair day is going to happen on picture day,” change it to, “ok, so I’m not having that perfect hair day I was hoping for. I’ll style it as best I can and ask the photographer to help me watch for it looking too frizzy or too flat in the photo. If I have the photo taken and it’s a total lost cause I can just retake the photo on another day.”

Do I still get nervous when I fly? Yes. But not nearly as much as I used to and it doesn’t stop me from galavanting around the globe when I get the chance. I accept the fear and am able to do it anyway. You can be nervous on a plane but still get where you need to go. You can be anxious to have your photo taken but still get a great photo of yourself. The biggest hurdle for anticipatory anxiety is acknowledging it’s there and leaning into it. Then you can find ways to make yourself more comfortable during the process and slowly retrain your brain to love it. Or let’s be realistic: at least not hate it as much.