Ask the internet whether posting a thirst trap is good for you and you’ll encounter two contradictory schools of thought. The first argues that it’s a wholesome act of self-love: proof you can look at yourself and like what you see. A popular TikTok trend in recent months, for example, has seen people sharing videos of themselves with the caption “when someone thinks I’m posting for attention, but I really love looking at myself with music.” The second argues the reverse – that rather than being an expression of self-confidence, the thirst trap instead signals a vain, desperate pursuit of the validation of strangers. Comment sections of thirst traps often get nasty, filling up with accusations that the poster is delusional or full of themselves. 

Everyone on the internet has an opinion, but what do the experts actually say about the psychological impact of posting online thirst traps? “In-the-moment validation is validation,” says Dr Sarah Oreck, a Columbia-trained psychiatrist who treats body image and emotional eating. “It may be short-acting, yes, but it is external validation nonetheless.” What happens once the initial feeling passes is harder to pin down, however, mostly because the research hasn’t caught up with our behaviour. “You can post a picture, get lots of positive feedback and genuinely feel good about it,” says Dr Beth Bell, a body image researcher at the University of York whose work centres on selfies and self-objectification. “That doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about whether it’s changing how you evaluate yourself.”

Built into this debate is the assumption that anyone who posts a picture online is fishing for validation, but that isn‘t always true: plenty of people are just enjoying how they look and want to share that. “Posting an attractive image isn’t inherently problematic,” Dr Bell says. “In qualitative studies, where researchers talk to people about how they actually experience feedback online, the response is consistently positive. Likes feel good,” she continues. “They can make us feel attractive, valued and socially connected.” 

Even if there is a deeper “want” underneath the posting of a thirst trap, this doesn‘t make it problematic behaviour. It’s human nature to seek feeling seen or wanted. This is particularly common, Dr Oreck says, after a breakup, in the first weeks of being single again, around a milestone birthday or a new job. There is an element of dopamine involved, sure, but that‘s not as menacing as it might sound – it‘s the same reward system that fires up when you finish a good workout or fall in love, or any number of behaviours we consider ordinary or desirable. 

So where can it all go wrong? According to Dr Oreck, when you post, you start expecting a little reward (the likes, comments and other forms of engagement) before it even comes in. “If the post doesn’t get much attention, that expected reward doesn’t show up, and sometimes it actually can feel worse than if you’d never posted at all. The brain treats being ignored or rejected socially a lot like it treats physical pain, so it can genuinely sting.” She’s seen many of her patients spin one flop post into a bigger story about their worth.

What makes this even more difficult is that the engagement a particular post gets is often arbitrary and impossible to predict – it’s the same mechanism that makes a slot machine so hard to put down. Posting a thirst trap is a gamble with time, the algorithm, and whether or not your followers are online. Even if you do win, the high usually fizzles out. “External validation, especially from social media, always fades faster than validation that comes straight from yourself,” Dr Oreck says.

Dr Oreck has watched this pattern play out in her practice. Like with other addictive behaviours, people get used to the feeling, so it takes more posts and more engagement to produce the same sense of relief. Body image stops being something internal and turns into something you need other people to confirm. A lot of posting, in her experience, isn’t for the audience at all. “It’s more about an argument with our harsh inner voice,” she says. “You already believe something unkind about your body, and posting is a way of finding out whether the world will vote against that voice, at least for a minute.” Sometimes it does, but that inner critic doesn’t change overnight, no matter how kind the comments are.

“You already believe something unkind about your body, and posting is a way of finding out whether the world will vote against that voice, at least for a minute.”

Just like the online debate around posting selfies, the research around it is contradictory.  Some studies link frequent selfie-posting to lower body dissatisfaction and higher body esteem, while at least one found the reverse: feeling less physically attractive and more anxious. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem at play here too: one widely cited study on how teenagers use Instagram, from the Leuven School for Mass Communication Research in Belgium, found that depressive feelings came first, rather than the other way around. While passive browsing was more likely to come before depressive feelings, young people were more likely to actively post on the platform once they were already feeling depressed. Researchers studying social media feedback have proposed the relationship isn’t a straight line: a normal amount of usage seems harmless, even beneficial, but past a certain point, people start to develop a dependence, and a lot starts riding on whether a particular post does well. 

From what we know so far, there is a way to tell the difference. You can ask yourself: Am I expecting praise, and does my mood depend on receiving it? Or, as Dr Bell puts it, “What is this behaviour doing for this person, and what role is it playing in their wellbeing?” If you’re posting without expecting a response, that doesn‘t raise any cause for concern. Liking what you see and wanting someone else to see it too is a genuinely healthy impulse. It stops being so, however, once likes or comments become the only metric by which you judge your own desirability and value as a person.

Wanting to look at yourself and like what you see isn’t an inherently bad instinct, particularly in a time when beauty standards are more unrealistic than ever and the cost barriers to adhering to those ideals are growing exponentially. If we can build a sense of self-worth that isn’t dependent on those standards, or on maintaining an unrealistic level of perfection, that’s no bad thing. As Dr Oreck puts it: “We’re already being sold new insecurities every day, and there’s multiple industries profiting off it. Building that inner confidence rooted in what you actually value is how you opt out of paying into it.”