How To Challenge Your Social Media Anxiety

A tranquil picture taken on my street in the Western Harbour in Malmö, Sweden.

Have you ever felt like you were stuck in the comparison game on social media? That watching other people’s successful lives with beautiful vacation pictures, updates on new sensational career advancements, perfect flawless bodies, and happy babies made you question your own life? To question yourself? To question your happiness and purpose in a life where you more days than not are spending your evenings at home in your sweatpants in front of the TV feeling a lot of nothingness because the weather outside your window is gray, it’s a regular Tuesday, and you have no fun activities planned. And to be completely honest, you wouldn’t even have the energy to do anything fun right now. So you take another slice of that delicious cake that you consciously know will take you one step further away from your weight goal, but that you emotionally need so badly right now – just to feel a little bit happier and to numb the feeling of loneliness, and, dare I say, “normalness”. 

You are not alone. This is normal. In fact, it’s so normal that we have forgotten that this is life. But social media has slowly but surely shifted our perception of normality, which has led us to believe something different to be true. I call this “the effect of entitlement”. 

I recently read the #1 New York Times bestselling book “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life” by Mark Manson, in which the author explains the concept of entitlement and how it relates to our perception of what a good life is. 

If we have ever had problems and experienced traumatic events in life, such as a divorce, a miscarriage, a bad grade, not getting the job we have been hoping for, losing a loved one, being cheated on, an abusive relationship, etcetera, it’s easy to get the feeling that we have things in our lives that we are incapable of ever solving. This assumed inability to solve our problems causes us to feel miserable and helpless.

This is where it gets interesting. Our unconscious makes us believe that our problems are unsolvable and that we are either one of two things: uniquely special or uniquely deficient in some way. And that we are somehow different from other people so the rules must be different for us. We become entitled. As Mason describes it in his book, this entitlement plays out in one of two ways:

1.) I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment. 

2.) I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment. 

Again, entitled. But the truth is that the problem that you are facing is not that unique. There are most likely hundreds if not thousands, and perhaps even millions of other people who have had the same problems as you before. It doesn’t mean that your problems shouldn’t be taken seriously and that they don’t cause you pain, it just means that you are not that special. But why do we get entitled and think that we and our problems are so unique that we deserve special treatment?

Social media plays a huge part here. Stop for a second and think about what is in your social media feed every day. What kind of posts do you see? What kind of posts do you post? Think deeply about the amount of information you are bombarded with every day. And out of all this information, think about how much of these are posts containing extreme information, either the extremely good or the extremely bad. Because this is the only thing that stands out in this flood of information. This is what gets the most likes, and, in the long run, also the money. This is what wins the game of social media. Manson writes: “The flood of information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal”. That we have to stand out to “be someone”, to matter.

But the reality is something different. In fact, the vast majority of our lives are pretty unexceptional, unexciting, a normal gray Tuesday in front of the TV. Not good, not bad. An average life. A life in the grey middle. And that’s OK. However, this is what causes us to feel bad: while we are living most of our lives in the grey middle, and simultaneously are being bombarded with information about exceptional lives, it results in us becoming insecure and desperate, and left we are with the intangible feeling that we are not good enough. This discomfort, the feeling of unease that we can’t really touch upon keeps creating an increased tightness in our stomachs – we just feel that something is not right. For some people, it turns into jealousy of what we see other people having and doing, that we don’t, which turns into judgment and resentment. But this resentment is merely masking our own insecurities. For others, the challenge continues to do even more, even better in order to get more likes, more admirability, and more external validation in this game of social media. Just a little bit more, and then we will feel good, right? Just a little bit. Even if we intellectually know that this behavior doesn’t lead us to a life in full harmony and acceptance for what is and appreciation for what we have right in this very moment, we continue to play the game since we don’t know how to get out of it. Most importantly, we don’t know how to solve the underlying core issue. 

So what do we do with this contradictory and uncomfortable feeling? We compensate. We compensate through entitlement or through addiction. We numb this feeling, just a little bit, and for a short time, we feel better and more in control of our lives. What we don’t know if that this is extremely temporary happiness and just an unsustainable illusion of control over other people’s perception of us. But since being “average” has become the new standard for failure, we wake up the next day again trying to win in this game of extraordinary living, while simultaneously failing to understand one thing: if everybody would be extraordinary, then by definition nobody would be extraordinary. 

So how do we become less entitled and sustainably happy and content with life? It might sound difficult, contradictory, and perhaps even a bit boring, but the sooner we realize that we are not that special and accept that the vast majority of our lives will be spent in the gray middle, the sooner we will come closer to what is real, pure, and long-lasting happiness. When we don’t need the dopamine kick of sensationalism to feel good, but when we truly learn to appreciate the beauty in the small, kind, seemingly mundane actions in life, we will start to feel truly alive. The feeling of real friendship, helping someone in need, creating something from your heart, and just being able to smell the flowers when they bloom in the spring. 

The acceptance of your own mundane existence will free you from expectations and enable you to accomplish what you, deep inside, truly want to accomplish. Because everyone who has lived a life that, in social media is seen as extraordinary, knows that this was never the ticket to long-lasting internal happiness — to what, deep down, matters for real.

So you can ask yourself, before posting on social media next time: What would I be posting today if I knew that I would be the only one ever seeing it? Basically: who am I when no one is watching?