NARCISSUS had only a pool of water in which to gaze, but we see our reflections at almost every turn. In bathroom mirrors, shop windows, sliding subway doors, brass elevator banks and even in the screens of smartphones: no matter where you go, there you are. Mindful of what happened to Narcissus (it wasn’t good), some people are trying to abstain from looking at their reflections for a day, a week, a month or even a year.

These “mirror fasts” are becoming more popular, judging from the number of bloggers reflecting on not reflecting. Those who have engaged in the exercise report that not seeing themselves helped them see themselves more clearly.

“It gave me a lot of serenity,” said Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, 36, a freelance writer and copy editor in Astoria, Queens, who has gone on two monthlong mirror fasts in the last two years, avoiding her reflection even in the pots and pans of her kitchen and chronicling how this changed her view of herself in her blog, The Beheld. (She allowed herself to use a one inch-by-one inch mirror for applying makeup during her first fast because it limited her view to only one feature at a time. But on her second fast, she did it by feel.) “I was surprised at how quickly I stopped worrying about how I looked,” she said, “and if I wasn’t thinking about it, I assumed no one else was either, which is actually true.”

Freed of that concern, Ms. Whitefield-Madrano said that she began to focus on more important issues like her work and relationships. “I hadn’t realized how much I used the mirror as a life raft: to see that I at least looked ‘normal’ when things weren’t going well,” she said. “When I took it away, I had to be really honest with myself.”