Indian Journal of Clinical Anatomy and Physiology 2023;10(2):74–84 Content available at: https://www.ipinnovative.com/open-access-journals Indian Journal of Clinical Anatomy and Physiology Journal homepage: https://www.ijcap.org/ Review Article The negative impact of social media on self-esteem and body image – A narrative review Asmita Nene 1, *, Oluwapamilerin Olayemi 2 1 Dept. of Physiology, Medical University of the Americas, Nevis, West Indies 2 Medical University of the Americas, Nevis, West Indies ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 12-06-2023 Accepted 03-07-2023 Available online 08-07-2023 Keywords: Impact of social media on self-esteem Negative impact of social media Facebook and self-esteem on individuals Body image and social media Appearance-related social comparison Social media beauty standards ABSTRACT If there is frequent usage of social media then it will start to negatively impact self-esteem, mental health, self-worth and create risk factors for body dissatisfaction by causing disordered eating behaviours and affecting self-image. The database search used to obtain the research papers were from PubMed, Google Scholar, My NCBI and Science Direct. These research papers were selected from 2012 to 2022 which consisted of clinical trials and randomized controlled trial articles. After comparisons between ten different articles, it was found that social media has the potential to become addictive. Especially, for individuals with behavioural problems such as gambling, gaming, mental distress, and internet overuse. As a result, this can start to cause psychological distress from increased pressures to maintain unrealistic beauty and social standards, which leads to depression and a downgrade in self-confidence. Time spent on social media can affect an individual in a positive and/or negative way. In some negative instances, people use it as a spectrum to gauge the means of approval with their way of life, in turn, this can affect how people see themselves and lowers their self-esteem. Type or paste your abstract here as prescribed by the journal’s instructions for authors. Type or paste your abstract here as prescribed by the journal’s instructions for authors. Type or paste your abstract here as prescribed by the journal’s instructions for authors. Type or paste your abstract here. This is an Open Access (OA) journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms. For reprints contact: reprint@ipinnovative.com 1. Introduction Over the past few years, the use and influence of social networks has increased among the younger generation, with social media platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram being accessible through any electronic device. It has become a primary tool that most people rely on to get information and to communicate with friends and family. (Bergagna et al., 2018). 1 Self-esteem is defined as a person’s perception of their own personal worth, self-confidence and how much they value themselves and this observation can be placed into * Corresponding author. E-mail address: a.nene@mua.edu (A. Nene). two categories. The first type is people with high self- esteem, including people who respect themselves and consider themselves noble. The second category is people with low self-esteem who need to determine who they are and what they can do. Many theories have proposed that maintaining or raising one’s self-esteem is a basic human need (Bergagna et al., 2018). 1 A hypothetical approach that applies to the effects of social networks on self-esteem is the theory of Objective Self-Awareness, probably the earliest psychological attempt at the theory of the self (Gonzales et al., 2011). 2 This theory accepts that people experience the self as both subject and object. For instance, oneself as subject is seen in everyday encounters of life (e.g., watching TV, https://doi.org/10.18231/j.ijcap.2023.017 2394-2118/© 2023 Innovative Publication, All rights reserved. 74