If you tell someone you’re not on social media, they look at you a little strangely, like, what do you mean, why not. It’s gotten to a point where being on it is just assumed, and not being on it is the thing you have to explain yourself for. As of the start of last year, close to eight in ten people in Canada were on social media, so it’s most of the people you know and plenty you never will, and when it’s that normal, that built into how people make plans and keep up with each other, staying off it isn’t as simple as just not caring to be there. You end up feeling like you’re on the outside of something everyone else is already in. And the more of your day it fills, the more it works on something quieter, the tie between social media and self-esteem that most people feel long before they’d put a name to it.
And part of why it’s so hard to step away is that it never really stops. In a normal week you might see a few dozen people in person, and on your phone you’ll scroll past a few thousand, and all you ever get of those few thousand is the slice of themselves they decided to put up. We all do it. Nobody’s posting the photo of themselves crying in the kitchen after the worst news of the year, we post the trip and the night out and the workout we felt good about, and there’s nothing wrong with any of that, that’s just what posting is, you share the moments that feel worth sharing and you keep the rest to yourself. So what you’re scrolling through is everyone’s good bits lined up back to back, while you’re sitting in the middle of your own completely ordinary day. And when Pew surveyed teenagers in the US last, close to half said they spend too much time on social media, more than said so a few years before, and teenagers are just the clearest version of this, the rest of us are living the same thing, we’ve only gotten better at acting like we’re not.
How social media affects self-esteem
Then there’s what happens even when you think you’ve got a handle on it. You work out, you’re in the gym basically every day, more than most people you know, and then you catch a video of yourself and within a few seconds you’ve decided you’re out of shape and you should probably be doing one of those diets you keep seeing, cut this out, add that in, take some supplement. And there’s no supplement and no one trick that gets you the body you’re looking at on the screen. Getting there is a whole lifestyle, and a strict one, and for a lot of people, especially women, getting lean enough to have visible abs means being disciplined about it in a way that takes over a big part of your life. There’s nothing wrong with living like that if it’s what you want, but for most of us it was never going to be realistic to keep up, and that’s the part that never makes it into the video.
And a lot of what we’re measuring ourselves against has been edited, or shot from the right angle in the right light, and plenty of the people in those photos have had work done, and none of that is a criticism, it’s genuinely fine, people can do whatever they want with their own photos and their own bodies. It’s just worth remembering while you’re doing the comparing, because you’re looking at your regular unedited self next to a version of someone that took a fair bit of help to produce. And for a lot of these people, staying in shape is their livelihood. The working out, the eating a certain way, the filming of it, that’s the job, it’s what they’re paid for and what they have the time for. It runs the same way for men. A lot of what young men and teenage boys are looking at is professional bodybuilders and heavily edited photos, people whose whole day is built around training, and a boy measuring himself against that doesn’t always clock that he’s measuring himself against somebody’s full-time job. And it’s landing on them too, in a large 2024 survey by Dove just over half of the men and just over half of the boys said they feel a real weight to only put their best self forward online.
And it doesn’t stop at feeling bad for a night. It feeds into people thinking they have to change something to measure up, young girls getting work done, lip fillers and Botox, because it feels like that’s just what everybody’s doing. And the numbers back that up, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons injectable procedures like Botox on patients nineteen and under in the US went from around 22,000 in 2019 to more than 27,000 in 2023.
Most people don’t look like the people online
The strange part is how quickly all of that loosens its grip the second you’re out in the real world. You go to the beach, or you look around the gym at the people who are clearly there every day and clearly care about it, and almost none of them look like the people you’d just been scrolling past. Every so often there’s the one person who genuinely does, a real bodybuilder over in the corner, but most people, even the fit ones, even the ones putting in the work, just look like people. And that’s usually when it clicks that the kind of body you keep seeing online is a pretty select few, a small slice of people caught at their most polished, and that it was never what most people look like walking around. You’ll still compare yourself out there, you can’t fully switch that off, but it’s a fairer version of it, because nobody at the beach is posing or lining up the right angle, everyone’s just living their life, and online there’s always that sense of people putting a certain version of themselves forward, so seeing everyone in their own ordinary element is what reminds you that most people just look like people, and that what you were comparing yourself to online was never the normal thing to begin with.
Social media and self-esteem: what the research shows
There’s a name for what your mind is doing. Psychologists call it social comparison, the ordinary habit of figuring out how you’re doing by measuring yourself against the people around you, and it isn’t new and it isn’t a flaw, it’s the thing that kept our ancestors tracking where they stood in a group of forty or so. The catch is that the group isn’t forty anymore, it’s thousands, edited and curated, and your mind runs the same old math on a set of people it was never built to be measured against. The research on social media and self-esteem keeps landing in the same place, that it’s the comparing itself, more than the hours you spend scrolling, that wears on how people feel about their bodies and themselves, and it reaches well beyond teenage girls, it turns up in grown adults and in men and boys too, people who often don’t have a word for what it’s doing to them.
Social media and low self-esteem in teenagers
If all of this can get to grown adults who can at least remember a time before any of it existed, it’s worth stopping on what it does to a thirteen-year-old who can’t. They’re still working out who they are, still sorting out what counts as normal and what they’re supposed to look like, and a lot of that is being shaped by the same edited and heavily filtered slice of people we’ve been talking about, only they’ve got far fewer other places to check it against, less life lived away from the screen to remind them it isn’t the whole picture. Pew’s most recent survey of teenagers found about a third of the girls and a fifth of the boys saying social media makes them feel worse about their own lives, which is often where social media and low self-esteem begin to feed one another. For a kid that age a feeling like that sinks in deep, it follows them into school and into how they talk to themselves, and they’ve had the least time to build up anything that pushes back on it.
Rebuilding self-esteem
Self-esteem is quieter to lose than it is to build back. It tends to go a little at a time, one comparison at a time, until feeling not-enough stops arriving as a moment you’d notice and just becomes the background you live in, and getting it back asks for more deliberate effort than losing it ever took. But the link between social media and self-esteem isn’t permanent, and it’s something you can work on. A lot of what therapy does is help you catch the comparison while it’s happening and get some distance from it, start to question the standard you’re holding yourself to instead of taking it as fact, and slowly build back a sense of yourself that doesn’t live or die by whatever the feed served up that morning. It’s slow the way real change is slow, and it tends to be worth it.
We’re here if you need help
At The Dot, we offer free consultations for anyone in Canada considering therapy. We’ll go through your questions and concerns and help you find the right therapist for what you’re dealing with. Does everybody need therapy? No. But if you’re curious about working with someone who specializes in EMDR and trauma, that curiosity is worth pursuing. Book Your Free Consultation Visit our therapist match form to let us match you with the right therapist for your needs.
Sources
American Society of Plastic Surgeons. (2024). 2023 cosmetic surgery age distribution (19 and under). https://www.plasticsurgery.org/documents/news/statistics/2023/cosmetic-procedures-ages-13-19-2023.pdf
Dove. (2024). The real state of beauty: A global report. Unilever. https://assets.unileversolutions.com/v1/125436646.pdf
Faverio, M., Anderson, M., & Park, E. (2025). Teens, social media and mental health. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/22/teens-social-media-and-mental-health/
Kemp, S. (2025). Digital 2025: Canada. DataReportal. https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-canada
Marano, G., Hasaj, S., Di Giacomi, O., Lanzetta, M., Sani, G., & Mazza, M. (2026). Bodies on display: A scoping review of appearance-focused social media, body image, self-esteem, and psychological wellbeing in adolescent girls and young women. European Journal of Investigation in Health, Psychology and Education, 16(8), 108. https://doi.org/10.3390/ejihpe16080108
Molina Ruiz, R., Alfonso-Fuertes, I., & González Vives, S. (2022). Impact of social media on self-esteem and body image among young adults. European Psychiatry, 65(S1), S585. https://doi.org/10.1192/j.eurpsy.2022.1499
