Hello! Welcome! You are watching a TED interview series called How to Deal with Difficult Feelings. I'm Chloe Shasha Brooks, your host and a curator at TED. And today we'll be focusing specifically on anxiety.
So first I'll be speaking with author and model Naomi Shimada about the anxiety associated with social media. She co-authored a book called Mixed Feelings, exploring the emotional impact of our digital habits. It's all about how the internet has created a new layer of perfectionist pressure on our lives and how we can better manage our relationship with our online worlds.
Hello, Naomi. Great to see you. Hello, Chloe. Great to see you, too. I'm honored to be here.
Well, thanks for joining us. So Naomi, you have written and spoken about the relationship between social media and anxiety a whole bunch, such as the anxiety to post online or not to post. So can you tell us a little bit more about that? So I always want to start by saying, even though I have written about it, I still don't really feel like an expert because this is just, I always want to de-center my voice as an expert because I'm just feeling this out like everyone else. But in my experience.
Social media and anxiety are connected. You know, or social media exacerbates anxious feelings. It exacerbates the human condition.
And so things that we may have insecurities and anxieties around, like, you know, our relationships, our bodies, our work, the things that make up our sense of self. I think the anxiety we feel or we can feel when we use social media can sometimes act as a marker. for things that show us where we need to do work or where we feel insecure. And sometimes it's just a message being reflected back to us. And also, like I said, social media exacerbates the human condition.
You know, we as humans, I think we so often just want to be loved and cared for and seen and adored or, you know, just acknowledged. So social media has also become... you know, our main mode of communication, you know, our method of work, some of those things, those lines can start to become very blurred. Absolutely.
Yeah. And in addition to making lives look shiny and perfect, social media also seems to fuel a lot of FOMO or fear of missing out. And I'm curious what you'd suggest for people who experience a lot of anxiety from seeing videos and images of other people having a ton of fun and, you know, not knowing how to deal with that. I think, like I said slightly earlier, just the feelings of anxiety when they come up, like what is that message? You know, taking that step back and being like, why do I feel like this way?
Why is this making me feel like this? And kind of reading into it and in my personal experience, the thing that works for me is just taking a step back, taking a moment. You know, if something is making me feel bad, for example, if social media If we thought of it as a substance, for example, if something was making you feel bad, what would you do about it?
Would you stop using it? Would you, you know, I think there's levels to this because sometimes, you know, we may have work now that is so intertwined with social media and it can't just be like, oh, stop using it. And I know, so I know that there's a spectrum and And I'm also navigating this constantly myself when as a public-facing person my job is so intertwined with social media and it's something I want to do less and less.
So I'm navigating that kind of boundary for me all the time. the time so it's just it's negotiating sometimes it's not as clear-cut you know it's it may for you start as take the weekends off or you know I actually personally most of the time don't have social media on my phone and just when I have to do something for work that's when I interact with it especially this year that's been so heavy you know and where there is no off button and every new day bringing such bad news like I'm a very sensitive person so I have to do the things I know that I need to take care of myself which is not scrolling also I've had a an injury in my hand which means I can't actually scroll so I'm like this is a sign I'm just not supposed to be interacting like that right now so just listening and not and knowing that you don't have to fall under the pressure like I think so often we think that if we don't post we don't exist our existence you know we only exist when other people see us existing like that that whole line like oh, if you didn't post about it, it didn't happen. That concept, we've started to internalize, you know, especially my generation. generation of millennials, Gen Z, like if you didn't post it, it didn't happen. So just taking that time back and being like, okay, is that true?
Why do I feel the need to share this? And asking those questions. That's what I do. So like I said, I'm not an expert. I too am working this out and every day feels totally different.
But asking those questions is a great place to start. Thank you for that. Yeah, so we have a question from the audience. Let's bring that up.
Okay, so related to this from Facebook, what questions should we be asking ourselves before we post on social media? So I like to ask myself, like, why do I want to share this right now? Is this something as time as a person that has grown up on the internet on social media, you know, so often?
how I validated myself and my sense of self was posting something and people reacting to it. And I think that's just very murky territory. I think like, you know, why do I feel the need to share this?
Is this something that that That feels also private to me, you know, my opinion on whether, and I guess, you know, I have not the biggest social media following, but a social media following that sometimes when I'm like, does that person for me, like, does my family member want to be shown online, for example, like, or is this a private moment? Or I think navigating like, do I feel... Not good about myself right now and just posting a picture of myself looking like hot or whatever the equivalent of looking really happy.
I think sometimes, so often, we post about the things that we are yearning for, whether that's attention, love, craving. And I think... there's deeper underlying messages behind posting sometimes, you know, and that it is a projection of the things that we want in our lives. Like, for example, posting photos of people you want better relationships with. There's a so big spectrum of experience.
But for me... So I just try to ask myself, like, why do I feel the need to make this public right now? Is this something that I'm proud of? And it's no critique.
This is really questions that are just to gauge where I'm at or where someone else is at with it. Like, is this something that actually I just need to pay attention to in my own life privately of like, this is something I should be working on or thinking about? Or there's just deeper questions about context, I think, that are important. Yeah.
Yeah, and I think as we're now at our final question, which is something that I think is related to what you're saying around when to post or not to post, but from a different angle, which is, you know, a lot of people have anxiety about whether or not to post their social justice activism on their accounts. And regardless of the activism they might be already doing outside of social media, right? And some people just find it performative, but at the same time, there's a fear of looking apathetic if people are not posting about social justice on social media. So how do you...
Suggest people deal with that anxiety and think about that. I mean, that's definitely an anxiety of our generation, right? Anxieties around posting about social justice. I think the big question here is asking ourselves, like, what am I doing in my own life? You know, and again, there is a spectrum because there's a lot of people who are sharing a lot of important information via social media.
So you have like organizers and then everybody else. But if you are... Once again, you know, I can't speak for everybody, but just I think it's, I read this quote by an activist, a lifetime organizer called Grace Lee Boggs, and she said that, you know, that a lot of times in our lives, we don't prioritize the importance of self-reflection and revolution. And I think, you know, we so care about optics. We don't want people to think that we are racist, sizist, sexist, etc.
But... But to not create and redo this kind of harm in the world, we need to understand and really reflect on these systems that we've all internalized to some effect. So to understand where am I on the spectrum?
How do I benefit? All of these things actually really take time and deep. you know, self-reflection and work. And that kind of questioning, I think, is something that I find it helpful to be offline because I'm like, otherwise, I'm just listening to what everybody else is saying. And you're like, are these my thoughts and my feelings, or am I just internalizing what other people are just shouting into the atmosphere and into the internet?
I think, you know, there's moments where, obviously... a lot of the uprisings in June would not have happened if it wasn't for the information that was shared. Action, of course, was so important, but I think there's different phases, you know, of like, and when it's just about shame and optics, that's not how we change the world.
For us to change the world, we need to inhabit and act on these reflections. So I think there are... again, once more questions to ask ourselves, like, do I just not want people to think that I do this?
And often we are an echo chamber of the people who follow us and people we follow, right? So a lot of the times we're just sharing and shouting into the atmosphere of people who have the same ideals as us, you know, and that energy can be used in a different way. And also sometimes inhibits, I think, real harder conversations from happening because I think social media isn't often an intimate enough of a space to be able to ask each other questions that we're afraid to ask or mistakes or it's not favorable to making mistakes anymore which is my critique and sadness about social media you know we our biggest fear is being called out through something but it doesn't this call out culture sometimes not always I understand its role and place in society but and sometimes doesn't allow for us to have more engaged conversations around these systems that we've internalized. And we all make mistakes and we all have to learn and sometimes it doesn't allow for that to happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I think that's beautifully said and we've come to the end of our time here, but I am so grateful to you for this conversation, Naomi, and thank you for sharing all this. So I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Thank you, Chloe and everyone. Much love.