Tips for Social Media Anxiety

As a coach, the theme of social media anxiety is a recurrent one in my sessions.

My clients, mainly students and young adults seem to be anxious from social media but yet don’t know what to do about it. Most don’t even realise that’s the cause of their anxiety till much deeper into a coaching session.

At first, I’ll be honest, I didn’t truly understand them. As a person who wasn’t active on social media, let alone post a selfie, the whole concept of social media anxiety seem like an easy one to get over. 

How wrong I was!

As I started on this new journey of establishing a coaching business, everyone advised me to promote my work online. As I started doing it, I too developed social media anxiety.

From an intensely private person to putting my face and my thoughts out in public was a really painful battle. As my own life coach helped me dig deeper into this, I started to understand myself as well as my clients.

There seems to be 2 main groups of anxious social media users.

1. The Posters : They worry about how they’re being judged. Every post is painstakingly thought out. They wonder what anyone and everyone would say or think about their posts. Some become completely gun-shy and stop posting while other spend days tormenting themselves with the comments and number of likes they’re getting.

2. The Scrollers: They’re scrolling for hours looking at everyone’s highlights and picture perfect lives. They sink into a deep, dark place where they think they’re not as smart, as popular, as accomplished or as interesting.                     

You can be the poster or the scroller. Unfortunately, most of us are both. Yay! Double the anxiety!

When I first got on social media, it was for research. I followed other coaches, business people, mentors, etc. As much as I was inspired by them, what started out as optimism slowly degraded into a LOT of self- doubt until one day, I came across Marie Forleo’s (my favourite life coach) post:

Here are some tips:

Personal Manifesto

With my coach, I wrote a manifesto on what personal message I wanted my posts to have.

□ To continue helping my clients in between sessions.

□ To get to more students so I can help them.

Once these were checked, I post.

Post & Bounce

To keep anxiety at bay those early days, I would post and bounce (ie. leave social media) till I have another meaningful message to share.

I allowed myself an hour a day to keep up with friends, get inspired and learn something new. And so, I started creating before consuming. I stayed in my lane, created posts which ticked off my personal manifesto boxes.

That became my only benchmark. Myself.

I’ve since shared these 2 tips with many clients and I see the anxiety slowly melt away. They post what they want and limiting their scrolling meant, their posts were authentic to themselves.

Go ahead and post. You have personal messages and experiences somebody out there can benefit from. But for heaven’s sake,