Naomi Shimada Tips for reclaiming your peace of mind online TED
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.