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On Silence & Anxiety

Imagine having a Fear of Missing Out on anxiety. 

I think I'm realizing this is what my relationship with social media has been like. 

If everyone else around me is hyping up their need to be in the know of what’s happening on twitter (and twitter is my vice of choice), constantly checking it and watching it, then surely I should get involved too! 

But the problem is that the feeling of constantly needing to check twitter really conditioned me to be unable to deal with silence. If something wasn’t “going on,” if my fingers weren’t scrolling just like everyone else (or how I perceived everyone else to be doing) then something was off. And that sense of “off-ness” made me anxious. 

But of course always being on twitter comes with its own anxiousness. “Respond, Chloé, you need to respond. If you don’t you’re not involved, you’re not having impact. If you don't have impact, you won’t matter. Don’t you want to matter?” 

Or so my thoughts would tell me. 

And so consumed with existential angst, I was damned either way, on or off. The solution, I learned, would be to rewire my brain, my dopamine receptors, so that I could not just handle the silence of being off social media, but actually come to love it. 

It takes about 30 days for your dopamine receptors to reset and it's been two weeks since I’ve checked my Twitter feed. Have there been withdrawals? Not really, but that’s because a) I saw this detox coming and b) I’ve been maintaining a series of practices that keep me in balance and c) I've been handling my absence from Twitter by deliberately trying to connect with people. 

Ah, to connect. Connection. You remember that word, don’t you? It’s what the social media platforms are all proxies for. It's what we as human beings are neurologically wired for, but what we've outsourced to algorithms in part because we don’t trust ourselves to be able to handle our anxiety. It’s what we’re so feverishly searching for and so impoverished of that we feel we have to film every experience we encounter instead of allowing ourselves to be present in the moment.  

And so we introduce even more anxiety into our lives as a coping mechanism and because that's what everyone else is doing. 

I was watching an interview with Erykah Badu (what a great light!) on the Breakfast Club and she was asked a question about the proliferation of talk about drugs in music. She said that she didn’t believe that people were promoting it inasmuch as they were simply expressing where they were, and she noted that

"We are in a state of mental illness. Period. That's where we are. The whole world needs some kind of coping mechanism. The whole world needs some kind of relief, some kind of numbing thing, because we are sick and we are sad.” 

This is pretty much how I feel watching the state of affairs. Not that everything is sad but that depression does seem to be a major core emotion in society today. And given that fact, to the extent that I’m affected by this, I want to do everything in my power to heal. 

So I'll continue to take long breaks from social media. I’ve also been meditating, taking cold showers (which is a WHOLE thing you guys), reading Ram Dass (such a legend) with my house mate, and talking to folks on my podcast. Ive noticed I'm more present in all of these experiences, and I’m more inclined to listen and allow space for my guests to speak; and when my thoughts wander, when thoughts come up that do not serve me, I'm more inclined to let them go, instead of clinging to them. 

I am learning that there is beauty in silence and I am grateful to be training my ear to listen, and in general, my whole Self to be with others and let that simple act of being to fill my cup. It is, I find, a satiation that cannot be filled through proxy. It requires the real thing.

This week on Youtube …

I’ll be exploring where the concept of Romance actually comes from (That’s right, folks it didn’t just fall from the heavens. Well, actually…just watch the video, hehe). Apologies, this was supposed to come out last week but sometimes you just gotta spread things out.

This post is specifically inspired by Robert A Johnson’s book, “We: The Psychology of Romantic Love” which is super engaging and highly recommended.