Stop the scroll and expect more from yourself
Is the validation you get from your social media feed soothing you into inaction?
My social media feed is full of inspirational quotes. It’s an endless stream of comforting messages. No matter my mood, I can find something encouraging and validating, a couple of lines to assure me whatever I’m feeling is fine, normal, felt by millions.
If I’m feeling tired, there’s a quote to tell me society is exhausted and I should take more time for myself, for self-care.
If I’m feeling demotivated, a quick scroll will tell me that’s totally normal because I’m overloaded with information all the time.
If I’m heartbroken, I can follow legions of people who’ll tell me I’m perfect just as I am.
I used to find this reassuring. Everyone felt anxious, everyone was struggling with confidence, everyone feels demotivated. We’re all in the same boat. A depleted collective struggling to survive the modern world.
Let’s all agree things are shit and let each other off the hook!
Lately I’ve come to realise that the mass-validation of this ready made excuse book and accepting this as being ‘just the way things are’ isn’t a healthy way to approach life, but it’s exactly where Zuckerberg and friends want us.
Believing that things are terrible, that we’re all feeling lost and disengaged doesn’t personally help me. It’s gone past a feeling of solidarity with others and accelerated into an excuse to not tackle any of my issues, because hey, it’s the new normal!
When we subscribe to the narrative of having and accepting anxiety, disillusionment, low mood and disengagement as a part of life, we take away our own agency to dive deeper into why we experience these things.
The story has become so compellingly mainstream that it takes a monumental effort to pull away from the plotline and explore your own distinct reasons for feeling the way you do.
Dive Deeper
I could describe 2022 as a difficult year.
Some things didn’t work out the way I had wanted. I had goals in my mind, but I didn’t work on them or bring them to fruition. The narrative of feeling low and exhausted felt appealing and accurate. The idea of dismissing 2022 as a bad year was a seductive one. Many people had an awful year - there was a war raging, a cost of living crisis, the UK government was a clusterfuck. I would be joining the masses in bemoaning that 2022 (like 2021 and 2020 before it) was a write-off.
But I’d had two wonderful sunshine holidays in Spain and Italy. I’d spent a month living in Scotland. I’d had great days out with friends and family. It seemed crass and ungrateful to label it a bad year when I’d been lucky enough to experience some lovely times during it.
What is clear in retrospect was the general malaise I had felt, mostly due to work circumstances, was used as an excuse to hold me back from achieving in other areas of my life, and the validation I got from social media provided me with an ideal get-out clause.
Instead of diving deeper into why I felt dissatisfied and stuck, I instead just accepted this as my story of 2022. I didn’t explore how I could develop or learn or change things. I simply did my day job, went home, and scrolled mindlessly.
Social media was a bastion of justification for my inactivity:
“It’s OK,” It said, “We’re all feeling like this, keep scrolling and you’ll be fine.”
Instagram, Facebook and the rest will tell you the world has gone to shit, but what will really make you feel better is this £50 Charlotte Tilbury foundation, this £250 Spa Day or this £3,000 holiday to Mauritius.
Social media profits from us never questioning and doing the deep work on ourselves. It benefits from us being constantly dissatisfied because we will inevitably look to external ‘stuff’ to soothe our restlessness.
By keeping our attention spans short, Instagram, TikTok et al have us squarely where they want us. In a loop of discontent, our anxiety and low mood validated as normal and widespread, whilst bombarding us with adverts every thirty seconds, featuring things that will give us a hit of dopamine but won’t ever solve our problems.
There’s a reason that the phrase doom scrolling came to be.
Expect better from yourself
Expecting better from ourselves has gone out of fashion.
Now, instead of identifying areas where we can improve, we’re told that these development areas are just negative thoughts that need to be managed and blocked.
As I wrote last week, normal feelings of uncertainty when you’re learning something new are re-labelled as Imposter Syndrome and substituted for every situation where we have a healthy dose of nerves.
We’re told to walk away from those people that don’t meet our needs, without ever reflecting on if we are fulfilling or even respecting the needs of others.
Examination of own behaviour, radical honesty with ourselves and reflection on how we treat others isn’t widely encouraged on a sixty second TikTok video or a 280 character tweet.
As a result, our expectations of friendships, relationships and workplaces have soared. Perhaps not a bad thing, but only if our expectations of what we also bring to these situations increases as well.
I sometimes find it hard to get honest with myself because I’m not sure where my development needs start and my anxiety ends.
It’s much easier for me to blame internal negativity than accept the fact that I could have handled a situation better.
Social media, with its unregulated self-help and two sentence wisdom, has allowed us to attribute responsibility to other forces (imposter syndrome, negative thoughts etc) when sometimes the truth is you haven’t prepared enough, you didn’t articulate yourself very well and you have got a lot to learn.
The only way to shake this off is by asking yourself the difficult questions.
· Have I really been giving this my all?
· Does this represent my best work?
· Could I have done more here?
· Why do I feel this way?
Opting to scroll your way out of a situation and seek external validation online will never be a substitute for being honest with yourself and expecting better.
In 2023, I decided to expect better from myself.
The latter part of 2022 felt like it had been sucked into a black hole. Nothing great was happening because I wasn’t generating it. I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t learning. I wasn’t really doing anything.
My misery may have been felt worldwide, but it was of my own making. And, by the end of 2022, I was tired of it.
Get intentional
Social media isn’t going anywhere. I still use Instagram daily and mostly enjoy it. But I feel more conscious of the surface level ‘wisdom’ that populates my feed and invites me to join the masses in thinking that feeling miserable about my life is a completely normal way to be.
It doesn’t help that it is easy to sleepwalk through our lives. I have a timer on my Instagram account and an hour’s usage flashes by in the blink of an eye. When I’m watching Netflix, I can easily watching three hours of a show each night.
How quickly a day can pass into a week, then a month is gone. Last year, the time raced past me and by December I realised I hadn’t achieved anything I’d wanted to throughout the year.
It wasn’t because I didn’t have goals. They were there, written neatly into a notebook at the beginning of 2022 - that novel I wanted to finish, the weight I was planning to lose. But I’d let each month pass without really doing anything towards them.
I didn’t hold myself accountable in any way.
I was always planning to start ‘next week’ or when work was less stressful. I was frequently going to create a schedule. I wrote down what I wanted to achieve often, but never got around to starting it in any meaningful or practical way.
My lack of intentionality left a gaping hole in my 2022 life.
If the first step to escaping the malaise and rejecting social media standards is expecting better from yourself, the second is getting intentional about those expectations.
It’s not enough to write down goals. You need to make them visible. You need to intentionally plan how you’ll achieve them, and schedule exactly when you’ll do it.
In the first two months of 2023, I’ve gotten tougher with myself. My expectations are higher, and as a result my actions are more intentional:
· My goals are printed and visible above my desk as well as in my daily journal.
· Every Sunday evening, I review my goals and write down a plan for the week ahead in terms of what I need to do and when I can schedule this.
· Each evening I write down what I’ve done towards my goals that day and what I’m grateful for.
· On Sunday evening I check what I’ve completed from the previous week’s list. It’s usually about 75% of what I wrote down and anything that doesn’t get done is transferred to the new list.
· If a goal seems to be falling by the wayside, I look at how I can adjust my daily habits to start smaller and make this more manageable.
My resulting activity has been double the action that I achieved in the second half of 2022.
There’s absolutely no magic here.
The question I ask myself is ‘at the end of 2023, can I live with the idea that my main activity for the year was Instagram and watching Netflix?’
The answer is a resounding no.
To be honest, it doesn’t even feel like I’m doing anything difficult. I’m just more intentional with my time and how it gets divided between the things I want to achieve.
The payoff is that I feel so much better after an hour of creative work each night than I did after an hour scrolling. If I spend a couple of hours working on my coaching accreditation or writing an article, I feel practically euphoric afterwards.
It’s not only the act of learning and creating that is so appealing, but the fact that I’m holding myself to a higher standard.
The next time that you find yourself in the routine of alternating your attention between the TV screen and your phone screen for hours, maybe it’s time for some deeper introspection on why and how this has become your life.
Are you looking to social media to validate and sooth feelings that you could be taking action to resolve?
Are you in a rut because the endless scrolling means you’ve stopped expecting more from yourself?
You don’t need to be a slave to your phone. You don’t need to believe the bullshit that the algorithm feeds you.
You can pull yourself out of the endless quagmire of ‘we all feel this way’.
Start by asking yourself the hard questions about where you need to improve and get honest - it’s completely fine to have development areas. Set a new expectation for yourself.
The joy of meeting these new standards will far exceed the validation of strangers on social media.
I certainly need to be more robust in what I want to achieve. It must give you so much satisfaction writing these blogs, though they must also be quite hard, as you are opening yourself up to others, warts and all. Once again thank you