Cloe Shasha Brooks: Hello, welcome. You are watching a TED interview series called How to Deal with Difficult Feelings. I’m Cloe 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 coauthored 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.
Naomi Shimada: Hello, Cloe, great to see you, too. I'm honored to be here.
CSB: Oh, 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?
NS: 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 decenter 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, as humans, I think we so often just want to be loved and cared for and seen and adored or just acknowledged. So social media has also become, you know, our main mode of communication, our method of work. Some of those things, those lines can start to become very blurred.
CSB: 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.
NS: I think, like I said slightly earlier, 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 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? 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 that there's a spectrum. 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. So it's just negotiating, sometimes it's not as clear cut, you know, 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 scroll. Also, I've had 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 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 of millennials, gen-Z, like, if you didn't post it, it didn't happen. And so it's just like going back and being like, OK, is that true? Why do I feel the need to share this? And asking those questions. And that's what I do. So like I said, I'm not an expert, I too I'm working this out and every day feels totally different. But asking those questions is a great place to start.
CSB: Thank you for that. So we have a question from the audience. Let's bring that up. OK, so related to this, from Facebook, "What question should we be asking ourselves before we post on social media?"
NS: So I like to ask myself, like, why do I want to share this right now? Is this something -- as a person that has grown up on the internet, on social media, 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 feels also private to me? You know, in 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, does my family member want to be shown online, for example, like, or is this a private moment? I think navigating, like, do I feel not good about myself right now and is 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, for example, posting photos of people you want better relationships with or, you know, there's a big spectrum of experience. But for me, I just try to ask myself, why do I feel the need to make this public right now? Is this something that I am proud of? And it's no critique. This is really questions that are just a 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.
CSB: 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 was 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?
NS: 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 in Oregon, 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 racists, sizeist, sexist, etc. 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, like, 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. 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, there's moments where obviously, a lot the uprisings in June would not have happened if it wasn't for the information that was shared and that action, of course, was so important. But I think there's different phases, you know. 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, more questions to ask ourselves, like, do I just not want people to think that I do this? And often we are in 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. 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, it's not favorable to making mistakes anymore, which is my critique and sadness about social media. You know, our biggest fear is being called out for something. But this call-out culture, sometimes, not always, I understand its role and place in society, but 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.
CSB: 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. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.
NS: Thank you, Cloe and everyone. Much love.
