Excessive social media use may erode a sense of self and body image, scientists say

Too much Instagram use may affect not only how you view your body, but also how your brain recognises it as your own. A new study by researchers at the Università Cattolica in Milan suggests that excessive social media use could erode your sense of self to the point where you may no longer fully recognise yourself in your own body or feel ‘at home’ within it.

The findings of the study are published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

Self-identity in the digital age

While social media platforms have long been scrutinised for their impact on body image and mental health, the new research suggests the problem runs far deeper than surface-level insecurity. The research suggests that years of exposure to selfies, filters, and edited images can blur our ability to recognise our own faces as unique. To put it simply, in the digital age, where faces start to look alike, it might be harder to remember what makes us unique.The mental health of adolescents and young adults is a growing challenge. One in seven adolescents and one in eight adults suffer from a mental disorder, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Among the factors of greatest concern are those related to the body and self-image. In this digital age, body dissatisfaction is becoming more and more common. This is associated with poor mental health and an increased likelihood of problems such as eating disorders, depression, social anxiety, and low self-esteem.

There has been a lot of focus on the role of social media in these concerns of late. At a time when platforms such as Instagram have turned the body into a key instrument for communication and self-representation, the pressure is only mounting. On these platforms, the face and physical appearance are constantly on display, observed, compared, modified through filters, and evaluated through likes, comments, and visibility metrics.

This creates an unrealistic aesthetic standard that many struggle to meet. However, the new research suggests that the problem runs deeper. Social media has not only influenced the way we evaluate our bodies, but also the way we construct our sense of who we are.

The study

The researchers wanted to understand the relationship between Instagram use and the processes that allow the brain to recognise one's own face as belonging to oneself.

To test their hypothesis, they recruited 95 young adults, both men and women, with an average age of 26. The researchers employed virtual reality techniques that temporarily create the sensation of inhabiting someone else's body, allowing scientists to measure how fluid or rigid each person's bodily boundaries are.

The findings startled the researchers themselves. They observed a ‘dose effect’, meaning that the longer a person's history of Instagram use (and therefore the more years they had been using the platform), the greater the likelihood that participants perceived the face of the stranger shown in virtual reality as their own.

The findings are striking because they concern the face, an individual’s most personal and identifying element of the human body.“It is through our faces that we recognise ourselves in the mirror, construct our individuality, and are recognised by others. In other words, the association does not emerge in any bodily representation, but precisely in the part of the body most closely linked to the sense of who we are,” Professor Giuseppe Riva, director of the Humane Technology Lab at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, said.The researchers noted that prolonged exposure to image-focused digital environments may affect the deeper processes through which the brain constructs a sense of identity. They defined this as the “erosion of bodily identity hypothesis”. In other words, if we live in a digital world for years, where all faces tend to resemble one another, it might make it more difficult for us to remember what makes us unique.

“The participants involved in the study belong to the first generation to grow up with social media: they began using these platforms in late adolescence and have integrated them into their daily lives for almost a decade.

If associations with processes fundamental to the construction of bodily identity are already emerging in these young adults, the question that arises concerns new generations and younger adolescents, who come into contact with these technologies at an increasingly early age and for increasingly longer periods of time,” Dr Maria Sansoni, who led the study, added.This study, however, does not prove that Instagram directly causes mental health issues or that these changes are necessarily harmful, the authors said. But it opens up a conversation about the relationship between technology and identity.