The Anxiety Machine (aka: the internet)
Ah, the internet. The digital environment that increasingly consumes almost every waking moment of our lives. It’s how we keep in touch with friends, maintain our brands or work, and access a host of other life necessities. If you’re anything like me, you’re grateful to have access to so much all of the time, but recognize that’s also the problem…so much is always accessible. There’s a pressure to constantly produce or consume or participate. It’s what pushes the desire to both throw your phone in the ocean and never leave home without it.
If you struggle with anxiety in one form or another, you probably don’t need an anxiety and depression therapist to tell you that the anxiety and the internet have a relationship. You’re also aware that the internet is a necessary means of engaging with the world and isn’t going away anytime soon. So what are you to do about the tech-induced, anxiety-amplifying, bind? How do you make use of the internet without letting it consume your entire life and psyche?
I promise this is not a “spend less time on social media” and “spend more time in nature” type of post (though I support both of those changes and believe they’re useful in the mission of anxiety-management). I’m more interested in:
how we engage the digital environment
what might help us become aware of our experience at greater depth
how we might train our attention to notice ^^ more of the time.
Finding value in the negative stuff we seek to fix with digital engagement, Like boredom, fear, emptiness, Feeling less-than and not knowing
Awareness and Attention
One need not look very far to find studies, articles, and resources linking anxiety and depression with internet use.
The upshot of many articles is that heavy social media investment results in constant social comparison and avoidance of what we find uncomfortable, both leading to increased states of depression and anxiety, while minimizing our ability to make change.
Easing anxiety related to the current digital environment hardly has a simple prescriptive remedy. You can certainly find CBT homework and advice, but to call what happens on the internet simply avoidance and social comparison is a bit myopic. What happens online so heavily influences our daily lives that it’s becoming more difficult to delineate clearly the remnants of on or off-line anyway. Can we really make a distinction between the natural and the technological? At this point it may be more helpful to focus on the quality of our attention as we move through our lives (more on that later).
Let’s also consider what else the internet delivers us—information, access to knowledge, resources, and news. It’s our window to the wider world which right now includes a lot of stories inciting (appropriate) outrage, fear, panic, and grief. We often get online when we’re bored, in-between meetings, or can’t sleep only to find ourselves mainlining the sorrows of the world sandwiched with cute animal videos, pictures of friends doing life, and advertisements.
We’re inundated with maximal everything in a very specific, designed to be addictive way. Yes, many apps we use daily are intentionally designed to hook you and generate their income based on capturing and keeping your attention. Though it’s our access to the outside world, the experience is not at all similar to actually stepping outside or opening a window to our neighborhood.
Never-ending Doomscroll
Digital contact is available 24/7. In a lull, when bored, not able to sleep, avoiding a difficult task, reaching for our phone is instinctual for many of us. We typically check a platform that mixes together updates from friends (in our close and distant circles), news, ads, and entertainment outlets. We never know if we’re going to discover a reason to celebrate or rage or panic or be curious. Talk about anxiety-inducing.
Artist and author Jenny Odell writes about this in How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
“To me, one of the most troubling ways social media has been used in recent years is to foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves. Whipped into a permanent state of frenzy, people create and subject themselves to news cycles, complaining of anxiety at the same time that they check back ever more diligently.”
—Jenny Odell
The repetitive seeking of terrible news—also known as doomscrolling. I don’t think any of us are immune from the habit (certainly not me). We all know news breaks quickest online, and it feels like we need to know what’s happening because so much is happening every day (politics, climate crisis, connecting with friends, etc.) and we feel the urge to respond in kind because we want to participate in life. We feel a need to act meaningfully. Odell describes this as an “arms race of urgency” that we co-create with digital platforms.
Maybe we even get notifications interrupting whatever we’re doing anytime there’s an urgent update, but this is a perma-state now. Similar to experiencing anxiety, huh?
Something is telling you there’s a 3-alarm fire all. the. time. and the instinct is to turn up the volume on the alarm to feel more prepared to combat the danger—even if imagined—not to access another state of awareness that is always also available to you.
Whew, do you need to take a deep breath yet?
None of what I’m describing is really a conscious choice. We’re all tethered to the ever-quickening digital cycle in one way or another. It’s moving in the background, below our awareness. All we know is that we feel terrible, we feel anxious. People typically show up to therapy for anxiety when they’ve tried their best to deal with it on their own and follow the advice and tips they’ve read about, but they know there’s something deeper that remains untouched. The reason why it’s often not possible to make changes to anxiety on your own is because it’s unconscious and provoked in relationship. So it makes sense that effective change also happens most easily in relationship. When we invite another into our anxiety, we have another pair of eyes and ears noticing the process.
Through relationship, we’re able to notice in ways we can’t always on our own. Eventually, you’ll realize you’re noticing differently when you’re outside of the therapy room. The process is different for everyone and what you notice about your own anxiety will be particular to you, even though there are universals to its manifestation.
Fantasy of the Forever Digital Detox
If we’re participating in the world, none of us can exactly opt-out of the system designed to hold our attention, which is part of the problem, we’re the ones coming back for updates because we need to engage in order to participate meaningfully in life. Climate crisis, politics, and the stories in our world impact our lives. Not to mention the pressure to be increasingly productive 24/7. All of this leads to anxiety and depression. Just as anxiety doesn’t have a way to “turn off” exactly, it seems the internet is going nowhere either. Odell continues,
“As the attention economy works to keep us trapped in a frightful present, it only becomes more important not just to recognize past versions of our predicament but to train the capacity for an imagination somehow untainted by disappointment.”
Ok what does this mean? It’s just like when anxiety or depression (regardless of the environment—digital or in-person) convinces you only of the worst possible future outcomes. There are always also available an infinite range of other possibilities, but we get stuck in only the worst of them. It’s not like we don’t try to believe the other possibilities, it’s just that the horrors are the possibilities we feel in our bones and we have many examples from our history to prove it. “good” feels like a fantasy, another planet, or someone else’s life. Then the cycle repeats. This is what I mean by quality of attention.
The anxiety/depression loop is the digital equivalent of the YouTube autoplay or Netflix “next episode” or the “new tweets” pulldown on twitter, or the feature on hulu that autoplays an entirely new series of tv after you’ve completed binging five seasons of something else. You wade into the internet with purpose and precision, typing a question in search of a specific answer, only to find yourself watching large-scale hornet removal videos on youtube three hours later. Despite the best intentions, you remain absorbed and passive. Blaming the algorithm doesn’t liberate us from the loop. For that, we need creativity and…boredom?
Necessity of Emptiness
In an environment with no gaps in breaking news (personal or collective) how are we to find the mental space apart from it all to return to meaningful participation in life? To form strong bonds and imagine bright potential futures?
Another way of saying this is: If we’re swimming in everyone else’s curated thoughts and lives all the time with pressure to respond in kind, how do we know who we are and what we want out of life? We’re inundated with cyclical horror and celebration and pithy takes, but engagement with life can be more robust, messy, and complex than all of that.
This is where we make the case for a valuable type of boredom or emptiness or uncertainty. We all need to be bored in life in order to find ourselves. Marit Ruti describes the universal experience of not being enough or feeling as if something is missing from our selves or our lives as the source of creativity and meaningful life-building.
“There is a strong link between our sense of lack (emptiness or inner dissatisfaction) and creativity. This is because lack gives rise to desire. It makes us want things, and sometimes the best way to get these things is to invent them.”
—Mari Ruti
Boredom is linked to Creativity
To dip into a sense of less-than, boredom, feeling empty inside, dissatisfied with our lives, is a catalyst for creating what we want. It’s a natural human rhythm (psychologically speaking), if you allow yourself to experience it. Our impulse to shortcut the boredom is also part of the experience, I’m not sure we could avoid not wanting to bored. But what’s new is the endless flow of always there content. If we’re gliding along without noticing, the internet robs us of the possibility of genuine desire, a desire particular to our experience and self, rich with imagination and rife with complexity. Do you know that feeling of wanting the quiet to go away so much that you’ll settle for anything in it’s place? While the distraction relieves the momentary discomfort, it doesn’t really give us what we’re desiring. Ruti continues,
“When we cannot find a way to honor this specificity—when our satisfactions do not match the uniqueness of our desire—we risk losing our vitality; we risk feeling that our lives have ceased to be meaningful.”
—Mari Ruti
I think this is the equivalent of following commonly accepted life advice, but feeling empty. Or getting excited about a new purchase only to find it only made that empty feeling go away for a moment. Maybe you know the feeling of looking for a real human connection on social media only to give up and settle for comedy. We feel a lack in each scenario and sense something missing in the long-term, even if we’re enjoying ourselves in some way.
But in order to feel empty and not just treading water of “good enough” or to find our attention seized by entertainment, we have to be willing to withstand nothing (the empty feeling) for longer than is comfortable. This is where anxiety can become a useful friend. If you can tolerate it in small enough doses, it might just light the path toward a new possibility in your life.
I might describe this as mystery or the unknown. I think of the therapy space as inviting and dwelling in the unknown. It’s a rare hour of life where you’re allowed to show up, nothing planned, no agenda, and listen to the space between (the rest of your life) with the full attention of a professional trained in this practice.
It’s an exercise in personal and collective imagination.
Claiming your Space
Some of you might take inspiration from these themes and start incorporating practices of attention into your daily life. Others will need more time and support with it. My work involves creating space for practicing honesty and noticing. If you’re wanting to work on your attention, or are seeking anxiety and depression therapy, get in touch or connect with a therapist in your area.
Many people get a lot out of therapy when they arrive in a period of high anxiety or in the middle of an unending feeling of emptiness or melancholy. These states always hold creative potential to re-invigorate your life and make a turn toward embracing your future.
Resources
Mari Ruti: The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living
Jenny Odell: How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy