Dealing with Anxiety Issues triggered by Social Media

Disclaimer

I shared my thought process and experiences in this one so it might be helpful for you as a reader to handle your anxiety-related issues.

I use a lot of curse words cause I believe they are really helpful in being expressive hahaha so if you find them offensive, I would suggest you to skip to the summary at the end of the article so you don't have to go through the entire journey with me.

The questions and ideas shared below helped me make tremendous progress personally so I felt like I should share them with you even if the triggers of your anxiety do not originate from Social Media.

The ideas shared here are timeless and applicable to everyone.

Introduction: Living in a mental jail cell

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. - Murphy's Law

Whenever I open my LinkedIn, I see a crap load of people who post stuff which sometimes feels like "Bitch I landed a job at Google, What you doin' huh!?" in the most professional way possible.

Even though I'm not supposed to think this way about someone's success, I do it anyway, not sure if it's human nature, or the social media algorithms playing psychological mindfuckery games but either way, this makes me feel anxious instead of making me feel motivated that this guy/gal can do it, so can I.

Once you see yourself failing enough times, you start having these thoughts that it might not be for you, or you suck, and have a feeling of being a loser.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) now comes into the equation acting like a fucking petrol in the already burning fire of anxiety making things worse.

These thoughts limit the way we think, take actions, talk to people, take care of ourselves and bring alot of pain and agony that is mostly self inflicted and yet we don't even realise it. We get trapped in our own damn mind feeling that whatever we do will eventually go wrong.

Simplification: The key to freedom

First of all:

It might not be for me, or I just suck, I'm probably a loser.

This is all just a huge load of horsecrap that I say to myself.

After so much time feeling like crap and going through the stoicism, something clicked in me, it's just a simple idea, a takeaway from the book i.e. to monitor my thoughts and my response to the stimulus.

Let's take an example:

Something happens, and I feel this and that, I take a pause, basically following the cognitive distancing technique I shared in my previous blog post.

I realised this anxiety is because:

• I make plans bigger than I'm capable of accomplishing
• Having unrealistic expectations of myself
• To have something to show to people (external validation)
• Not having enough attention as much as a random dude's post of him implementing a random button animation with CSS

We both (you and me) can see where things went wrong, no? Whenever you enter this loop like me, do the following to apply some principles of simplification I learned along the way:

Think of The Big Picture

Ask yourself if what you are worrying about will matter in the long run to you. (Say, on your deathbed, will the stuff you are worrying about matter?)

Assigning Realistic Goals

Split your big-ass plans into doable chunks, and take a shit load of time assigned for each goal cause it's better to make slow progress and have more ticks than not accomplishing anything and not having any visible task list checked. It helps a lot in seeing yourself grow even if it's slow.

Getting Rid of The Social Validation

People don't give a fuck what you doing in your life unless they care for you or want something from you. I would say don't give a rat's ass about anyone's validation but yourself. When you learn to listen to yourself and start giving a fuck about how you feel about certain things, you do more cause the fear and the pressure of social validation is gone.

If possible, reducing or completely cutting off social media platforms helps tremendously cause we lowkey fuck out mental health by constant social media validation and landing into this thing called Willpower Fatigue that gets drained cause of our non-stop effort to not compare ourselves with a random person making progress in their life.

Our progress in real life matters more than the social media people.

Making Better Decisions

It's directly related to thinking about the end in mind, if you are about to take an action, think about the big picture, connect with your future self and see if your future self will be grateful for your current set of actions. If not, just don't do it. The more intentional and meaningful your actions are, the more you'll feel better and more focused you'll be while taking them.

Pro tip: whenever you are about to take an action, follow the 10-10-10 rule. The rule is simple, ask yourself how would you feel about it after 10 minutes, 10 hours and 10 days. It'll also help you connect with your future self. You can later change it to months or even years to see the bigger picture.

Expecting The Adversity

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. - Seneca

When we expect shit to go wrong, we shouldn't just worry about it, imagine it'll go wrong so what's the best we can do about in that situation?

We should prepare ourselves to face that particular adversity as the process of bracing youselves from the impact will not only give us mental peace that we kinda are safe, but also if it actually happens, it helps us absorbing the shock cause we already expected it to happen.

We are also applying Murphy's law as we are ensuring that if something can go wrong, we are prepared for it cause that's the only thing we have in control.

Summary

• Simplifying the way I think and do and take in on myself helps in dealing with my anxiety.
• The less I have to deal with at the moment, the better I can manage it.
• Being mindful and securing the future by preparing for adversity

Lessons taken from the following books:

• The Subtle art of not giving a fuck
• The Science of Self Discipline
• Mental Models
• Breakfast with Seneca