Is Social Media Responsible For Your Own Perception Of Your Body?

Insecurities – we all have them. Whether those are insecurities about your hair, or certain anxieties, or the most common one in our society, our bodies and the emotions that follow. We follow celebrities on popular sites such as Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat etc. and we are surrounded by not only their perfect lives, but their somehow perfect bodies as well. When I see these people post, I always find myself sitting with a lot of shame for myself and even get disgusted by my own body. After sitting with these feelings for a while, I have come to the conclusion that social media is a big part of the blame for these insecurities.

There are a lot of advantages to social media. Whether that is communication with people who don’t live near you, keeping up with news, what’s currently popular, and much more. Social media has become a fun escape from daily life where you find yourself entertained with videos such as the latest Disney movie or new trends that have been formed. With all of these advantages, a lot of disadvantages follow. 

As said in Insider, “A negative body image can cause unrealistic expectations of how your body should look and could lead to unhealthy behaviors, like disordered eating. A small 2018 study found a correlation between time spent on social media, negative body image, and disordered eating. This was especially true if participants were scrolling through appearance-related content, like the account of a fitness instructor or model on Instagram.” Further into the article, it shows more about how social media truly affects mental health and can cause more insecurity and body dysmorphia. We follow people that post pictures of their edited bodies. 

How are we supposed to learn to love ourselves and our flaws when we are always seeing these “perfect” people? The answer is simple, minimize the viewing of people posting their somewhat “perfect” bodies, and learn to love the one we already have.
Social media has become a toxic environment when it comes to body image, and we need to work on being more inclusive and positive about our bodies just the way they are as they are – that is definitely easier said than done. It’s not as simple as turning off an ‘on’ switch to stop years of insecurity or just to switch every platform to become more body conscious and provide a more positive upbringing.

  One day, I found myself scrolling through Instagram. Nothing new, just checking in on what’s new and what my friends are doing. After a couple minutes, I found myself falling into the fitness and “healthy bodies” side of my feed. I started to fill up with emotions and insecurity. Was my body not “healthy?” Why didn’t I look like all of these people with “perfect” bodies? Why don’t I like myself as much as these other people? All of these questions filled my mind and I feel myself sitting, overwhelmed. After communicating with a few of my peers about these issues, I realized that this was a more common occurrence than I had originally thought. 

I decided to create a survey with the question, “Do you think Social Media affects how you perceive your body/insecurities?” which I had sent out to many of my school peers. After getting over 70 responses, I saw we were all more similar than I had believed. 58 people had agreed that social media affected their insecurities and 14 had said that it doesn’t. Seeing how many people agreed with my opinion, made me come to grips with just how common this issue is.

The perception of perfection has been rooted through teenagers from social media and this recurrence needs to be improved in the future. We need to encourage body positivity and that everybody is a beautiful body.