Giving yourself the (cyber)space to heal
A few years ago, I was healing from a lot. I had left a job on a rather low note and was wildly burnt out after years of working 80+ hour weeks. I was grappling with the fallout of a breakup that unearthed a huge truckload of insecurities. I had finally faced nearly 10 years of avoided financial reality and accumulated debt.
And at the same time this was all happening, I started working entirely from home and the interactive aspect of my career moved 100% online. I thought that working from home would provide a welcome retreat from the constant (and often unwelcome) energies, moods, triggers, and opinions of others in my space.
However, the digital landscape quickly provided me with a new kind of hyper-filtered, constantly present view of my peers and colleagues. I saw posed group pictures with heart emojis in the captions, and watched as mortal frenemies “liked” or “loved” each others content. I read endless “I’m so humbled and excited to announce” career updates. Someone was always doing something new and flashy and exciting each day.
This combined with my newfound free time did not always provide the retreat I thought it would. More often than not, it created a sort of hellish mental game - where I had constant access to a ton of carefully selected half-truths painted as perfect whole-truths…plus the space and isolation to let my imagination run wild.
Perhaps this sounds familiar to you, because maybe this is what you have been encountering throughout this period of stay-at-home self-isolation. If so, I know it’s tough. But the good news is, I have been here before, and there are tangible steps you can take to make it better.
Here are some things I have done, and you can do, to make the space in your world to heal when you are physically isolated and digitally connected.
Unfollow Unfollow Unfollow
When my career moved online, social media became more and more of a professional necessity. Partially due to the social nature of my job, and partially because connecting with humans was no longer baked into my immediate physical atmosphere, I found myself on social media apps more and more. However, with that increase in social media time came an extraordinary increase in anxiety.
My especially emotionally raw state left me particularly vulnerable to the ferocity of comparison mode and FOMO. Even when I wasn’t being set off by the posts in front of me, I was increasingly anticipating the appearance of a triggering post. Soon, the anxiety was a constant.
So, I started unfollowing people on Facebook**, my main social media outlet of choice. At first, I unfollowed a few people, and then I unfollowed everyone. And let me tell you, the silence was bliss.
Suddenly, what felt like a daily journey into pandora’s box felt clean and manageable. I could still view my friends’ content, but I had to opt in to seeing it by purposefully going to their page. And the fear that I would somehow miss out on an important post that would leave me socially in the dark just never came true.
Since then, I have added friends and clients back to my feed, but I will still happily unfollow people, pages, or threads that make me feel anything less than great.
**Instagram and Twitter have the same feature, except they call it muting
Triage your social circle
Shortly after I started curating the online content I was ingesting, I started to experience acute clarity around how people made me feel in the real world. I hadn’t realized it until that point, but my blind participation in an online world that often made me feel insecure was bleeding over into my personal interactions. In other words - I had poor social boundaries that revolved around pleasing others who wouldn’t or couldn’t respect me.
While typically I might have noticed this and established firmer boundaries and standards on the spot, I was still healing and did not have the energy or emotional capacity to do so. So instead I subscribed to this rule for six months:
Do I feel happy and safe around this person? If it’s not a hell yes it’s a hard no.
As much as was possible, and I acknowledge it wasn’t always possible, I would not interact with the hard no folks. I would not go to gatherings I knew they would be at. I would not hang out with them. I would not have phone calls with them. I would not engage in text banter with them.
“Sorry, I can’t,” became my new favorite phrase, and if a person called me out on my unavailability, I would politely but firmly state “I just don’t have a lot of capacity right now.” Which was true. I didn’t.
I thought adhering to this rule would make me lonely and miserable, but the opposite was true. I found I had just as much of a social life, yet all of my anxiety dropped. My healing process was expedited, and once I was fully okay again, I did make sure to circle back with the people closest to me and instill new boundaries.
Even when we aren’t spending our days physically around others, we still have people who have personal access to us. But remember, access is a two way street, and you are responsible for the company you keep.
Know the difference between numbing, dwelling, and processing
Ideally, when an emotional trigger presents itself, we have the space, capacity and awareness to process it so that we learn a lesson and grow. However, when we are constantly bombarded with people and messages that poke at our sore points, we typically teeter between dwelling on the issue or numbing out and escaping it all together.
For a lot of us, dwelling feels the worst, and so we go to great lengths to avoid it. Typically, this means we engage in self-soothing or numbing behavior. We watch a funny show on Netflix or get lost in a Youtube tunnel, or take infinite naps, or absorb ourselves in work.
And this is totally fine! Self-soothing is often a necessary step to avoid the initial impulse of a negative spiral.
However, in order to heal, we must eventually process. And emotionally processing in self-isolation needs to be a much more purposeful activity, since many of the everyday opportunities and interactions that help processing along have been temporarily taken away.
Processing activities are a little more active and include things like journaling, talking at yourself in a voice memo (aka audio journaling), talking to a friend, therapist, or coach, physical activity, mindfulness practices, or engaging in creative processes such as songwriting or drawing.
Processing can feel a little scarier than self-soothing because it engages with our negative feelings in a way that makes dwelling feel more possible. This is heightened in self-isolation because nobody wants to be stuck dwelling alone.
But it’s okay - if the processing becomes a little too much you can always turn the Netflix back on, take a deep breath, and try again later. Every little bit of processing helps, and healing definitely doesn’t have to look or feel perfect.
If you find your comparison mode switch stuck in the “on” position, or simply feel more anxious than you did before, I suggest looking at and cleaning up how your interact with the online space. It won’t be forever, and it may give you the space you need to heal and achieve peace during this time.