The Curated Self: How Social Media Erodes Athletic Identity in the Age of Aesthetic Perfection

Scroll through any social media feed, and you'll find them: the impossibly lean gymnast mid-flip, the figure skater frozen in perfect arabesque, the dancer whose body seems to defy both physics and biology. These images aren't just documentation—they're currency in an economy of appearance where athletes in visually aesthetic sports trade their bodies for validation, one like at a time. What we're beginning to understand, though perhaps too slowly, is that this exchange comes at a steep psychological cost.

The research is increasingly unambiguous about social media's impact on self-worth and emotional well-being among athletes, particularly those in sports where aesthetic judgment is embedded in the competitive structure itself (Lin et al., 2025; Klier et al., 2022). Figure skating, gymnastics, dance, diving—these disciplines have always carried an implicit appearance component, but social media has fundamentally altered the terrain. What used to be confined to competition venues and occasional magazine spreads has metastasized into a 24/7 showcase of idealized bodies and performances, each one carefully curated, filtered, and presented as somehow achievable.

The primary mechanism seems to be appearance comparison, which sounds almost benign until you consider its relentless frequency. Athletes in these sports are constantly exposed to images of peers, competitors, and influencers whose bodies represent often unattainable standards (Lin et al., 2025; Klier et al., 2022; Czubaj et al., 2025). The comparison isn't optional—it happens automatically, almost below conscious awareness. And the psychological fallout is measurable: increased body dissatisfaction, reduced self-esteem, heightened anxiety and depression (Lin et al., 2025; Klier et al., 2022; Czubaj et al., 2025; Choukas-Bradley et al., 2021). The athlete looks at their own body, then at the screen, and the gap between the two becomes a source of continuous distress.

What makes this particularly insidious is how social media collapses the distinction between athletic performance and physical appearance. In aesthetic sports, the two have always overlapped—judges evaluate artistry alongside technical execution, and presentation matters. But social media amplifies and distorts this relationship, promoting beauty and performance ideals that are not just demanding but often physically impossible without significant digital manipulation (Klier et al., 2022; Czubaj et al., 2025). Athletes find themselves pursuing standards that don't actually exist in three-dimensional space, and the pursuit itself becomes a form of slow-motion self-harm.

The pressure operates through multiple pathways, each one reinforcing the others. There's the direct comparison—seeing another athlete's body and feeling inadequate by contrast. There's social pressure and emulation, where athletes feel compelled to chase these unrealistic ideals because that's what the algorithm rewards and what sponsors seem to prefer (Klier et al., 2022; Czubaj et al., 2025; Herrero et al., 2020). There's negative feedback and cyberbullying, which hits with particular force because it's both public and permanent (Lin et al., 2025; Klier et al., 2022; Herrero et al., 2020). And increasingly, there's self-objectification—athletes internalizing the evaluative gaze, learning to see their own bodies as objects to be judged rather than instruments of achievement (Jederström et al., 2024; Herrero et al., 2020).

That last one deserves more attention than it typically gets. Self-objectification is linked strongly to body shame, especially among young female athletes, and it represents a fundamental distortion of athletic identity (Jederström et al., 2024; Herrero et al., 2020). When an athlete starts viewing her body primarily as something to be looked at rather than something that does extraordinary things—when the Instagram post matters more than the actual performance—something essential has shifted. The body becomes enemy rather than ally, and training becomes less about building capacity and more about achieving a particular aesthetic that may have nothing to do with athletic success.

Sleep disruption emerges as an unexpected mediator in this whole mess. Athletes spending significant time on social media, particularly at night, experience worse sleep quality, which in turn predicts negative emotional outcomes (Lin et al., 2025; Fiedler et al., 2023; Fiedler et al., 2024). It's a grimly efficient cycle: scroll through appearance-focused content before bed, sleep poorly, wake up with worse emotional regulation, feel more vulnerable to the next round of comparison. The research can track these pathways statistically, but what it can't quite capture is how exhausting this becomes—the way the pressure accumulates across days and weeks and years until self-worth feels entirely contingent on metrics that shift with every algorithm update.

Gender matters here in ways that are both obvious and frustratingly persistent. Female athletes are more vulnerable to body dissatisfaction and self-objectification driven by social media pressures (Czubaj et al., 2025; Jederström et al., 2024; Herrero et al., 2020). This isn't surprising—women's bodies have always been subject to more intense scrutiny and narrower aesthetic standards—but that doesn't make it any less damaging. Young female athletes in aesthetic sports face a particularly brutal intersection of forces: sport-specific appearance demands, broader cultural beauty standards, social media's amplification of both, and developmental vulnerabilities that make adolescence an especially fragile time for body image formation (Choukas-Bradley et al., 2021).

Performance level offers some protection, though perhaps less than you'd hope. Elite athletes may experience somewhat less negative impact from social media, possibly because higher levels of achievement provide a buffer of self-confidence (Fiedler et al., 2024). But non-elite athletes—those who are serious and dedicated but not at the very top—seem particularly vulnerable. They're investing tremendous effort without the external validation that elite status provides, and social media becomes yet another arena where they feel they're falling short.

The type of social media use matters, which offers at least a small window of intervention. Passive consumption—endlessly scrolling, comparing, absorbing idealized images without meaningful interaction—appears more harmful than active, supportive engagement (Lin et al., 2025; Klier et al., 2022; Yang et al., 2023). Athletes who use social media primarily to connect with supportive communities, share authentic experiences, or engage in reciprocal communication seem to fare better than those who treat it as a one-way feed of unattainable perfection. Though it's worth noting that distinguishing between these use patterns in practice is harder than it sounds. Even supportive spaces can inadvertently promote comparison, and the algorithm doesn't much care about your intentions when it serves up content designed to maximize engagement rather than well-being.

What strikes me about this research is how it documents a problem that feels simultaneously urgent and intractable. We know social media pressure undermines self-worth and emotional well-being in athletes, particularly in aesthetic sports. We can identify the mechanisms, measure the effects, note the moderating factors. But knowing doesn't automatically translate into solutions, partly because the problem is structural—embedded in how these platforms function, how aesthetic sports are judged, how we collectively consume and produce images of athletic bodies.

The suggested interventions—media literacy, body positivity campaigns, mental health support—are reasonable and probably helpful at the margins (Lin et al., 2025; Czubaj et al., 2025). Teaching athletes to critically evaluate social media content might reduce some harmful comparison. Promoting body positivity could counter some unrealistic standards. Better mental health resources could help athletes cope with the pressure. But none of these quite addresses the underlying dynamic: that social media has fundamentally changed how athletes in aesthetic sports experience their own bodies, and that change might not be reversible through individual-level interventions alone.

There's something deeply troubling about a system that takes athletes' extraordinary physical achievements—the years of training, the discipline, the artistry—and reduces them to a scrollable feed of appearance-based content, monetized through engagement metrics that reward whatever generates the strongest emotional reaction. The athletes themselves become complicit, not through malice but through necessity, because refusing to participate means invisibility in an attention economy. And their self-worth, which should ideally be grounded in competence and effort and growth, becomes instead hostage to variables entirely outside their control: lighting, angles, timing, algorithmic favor, the mood of whoever happens to be scrolling past.

The research makes clear that targeted interventions are essential. What it can't quite articulate is the deeper question of whether we're willing to fundamentally rethink how we consume, evaluate, and celebrate athletic achievement or whether we'll just keep optimizing around the edges while the underlying problem metastasizes.

References

Choukas-Bradley, S., Roberts, S. R., Maheux, A. J., & Nesi, J. (2022). The perfect storm: A developmental–sociocultural framework for the role of social media in adolescent girls' body image concerns and mental health. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 25(4), 681–701. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-022-00404-5

Czubaj, N., Szymańska, M., Nowak, B., & Grajek, M. (2025). The impact of social media on body image perception in young people. Nutrients, 17(9), Article 1455. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu17091455

Fiedler, R., Geber, J., Reichert, M., & Kellmann, M. (2024). Young athletes' mental well-being is associated with smartphone social networking application usage and moderated by performance level and app type. Scientific Reports, 14, Article 77418. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-77418-2

Fiedler, R., Heidari, J., Birnkraut, T., & Kellmann, M. (2023). Digital media and mental health in adolescent athletes. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 67, Article 102421. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2023.102421

Herrero, C. P., Jejurikar, N., & Carter, C. W. (2020). The psychology of the female athlete: How mental health and wellness mediate sports performance, injury and recovery. Annals of Joint, 5, Article 53. https://doi.org/10.21037/aoj-20-53

Jederström, M., Sandell, H., Dahlström, Ö., Fagher, K., Korhonen, L., Lundqvist, C., & Timpka, T. (2024). 864 BO48 – Towards prevention of self-objectification in young female athletes on social media: Instagram posting patterns of female elite athletes in aesthetic and non-aesthetic individual sports. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 58(Suppl 4), A351. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2024-ioc.121

Klier, K., Rommerskirchen, T., & Brixius, K. (2022). #fitspiration: A comparison of the sport-related social media usage and its impact on body image in young adults. BMC Psychology, 10(1), Article 285. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-022-01027-9

Lin, W., Cen, Z., & Chen, Y. (2025). The impact of social media addiction on the negative emotions of adolescent athletes: The mediating role of physical appearance comparisons and sleep. Frontiers in Public Health, 12, Article 1452769. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1452769

Yang, K., Kwon, S., & Jang, D. (2024). Adolescent athletes' self-presentations on social media and their self-esteem as moderated by their perceptions of responsiveness by others. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 131(1), 17–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/00315125231216020