For people with body dysmorphic tendencies, the study suggests, that pull isn't only about appearance. It's about the brain itself treating anything labeled "me" as more important than anything else.
A team led by Maria Richards-Brown at King's College London ran an associative learning task with 87 women aged 32 to 71. They asked participants to pair three geometric shapes with three labels: "You," the first name of their best friend, and "Stranger." Those who scored higher on body dysmorphic symptoms learned the self-linked pairings faster — and the same over-prioritization showed up even with neutral shapes that had nothing to do with how they looked.
The wiring underneath the worry
In the general population, we all show a mild self-prioritization effect — we remember our own grocery list more easily than our partner's. The new findings suggest that for people with significant body dysmorphic symptoms, that everyday wiring runs on overdrive, stretching well beyond appearance. The same process that fixates on a perceived flaw can latch onto a meaningless shape and quietly insist: this one matters most, this one is mine to carry.
This is more than a curiosity about attention. Richards-Brown frames it as a chance to look upstream — past the surface distress — and ask what kind of information-processing quirk might be feeding it. That reframing matters, because if the struggle is partly about how the brain weights signals, clinical work has somewhere more precise to aim.
What we can anchor on
The bias is about weighting. So the entry point is noticing when something in our day has been quietly tagged "self" — a glance in a window, a comparison on a feed, the way a passing comment lodges where it shouldn't. We can try a brief pause before the thought runs away, and ask what would actually shift if we treated it as lightly as we treat a stranger's. It's a small rehearsal, not a fix. But rehearsing how we weight signals is a skill that travels: it sharpens how we read our own internal narratives, and it spills outward into how we weigh outside signals too, from the headlines we trust to the quieter pull of leaning on someone else's playbook when we'd rather not decide alone.
That kind of attention — deliberate, a little slower, more curious than reactive — is where we start to give ourselves back the choice.