# How Facebook Helped Me Overcome My Anxiety



## David Baxter PhD (Aug 11, 2018)

*How Facebook Helped Me Overcome My Anxiety*
By Erica Troiani
July 6, 2018

*More than the actual anxiety was the anxiety about the anxiety. I felt tremendous shame for having negative feelings at all.*

When I finally gathered the courage to open Facebook again,  I had a torrent of messages and notifications.                                                     

It was 3pm on a Tuesday, and I was sitting at my desk with my  head on my keyboard; I was too revved up to sit still, much less  concentrate on work. I was in the midst of a resurgence of my lifelong  anxiety and couldn’t talk to anyone or even focus on anything. Months  later, I would finally be diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder  (GAD).

The diagnosis was a relief. It made sense of overwhelming  feelings I’d had my whole life that had mostly been regarded as a  character flaw. I grew up in an alcoholic home, and I’d been going to  therapy for years to face the trauma of my childhood. For the first time  I was feeling my emotions instead of mashing them down, and expressing  anger before it turned into resentment. My anxiety had decreased  throughout this process, but then I decided to get married. My fiance  did nothing wrong, mind you, but somehow the thought of marriage made me  feel trapped and put me mentally back in my childhood home. I grew  incredibly anxious — and yet completely unaware of it.

       I’d had trouble sleeping for months but I wasn’t upset or  stressed about anything — at least not anything conscious. My stomach  felt like it’d been glued shut. I couldn’t eat. Soon enough my weight  starting dropping enough for other people to comment on it. Compliments  at first that slowly morphed into expressions of concern. I felt nervous  all the time and I was hyper-vigilant, no matter who I encountered or  where I was. If I was in a car, I’d flinch at the sight of another  vehicle pulling out of a parking space as though it was about to hit me —  even if it was well outside my physical range. I was sleeping two hours  a night and not even feeling tired the next day. Sitting still felt  like torture, and I was constantly second guessing myself as if I  couldn’t trust my perceptions. I’d had episodes like this off and on for  most of my life but I’d always pushed it down. But now, after a lot of  therapy and ACOA recovery work, when the anxiety attacks returned, I had  to acknowledge them. My overwhelming anxiety was there and I couldn’t  hide it no matter how badly I wanted to.
But that was the problem: I really really wanted to.

More  than the actual anxiety was the anxiety about the anxiety. I felt  tremendous shame for having negative feelings at all. (All you ACOAs out  there know what I’m talking about, right?) Growing up in my house,  negative feelings had been treated like a disease that had to be  banished. This didn’t just come from family but from the entire culture  where I was raised. I explained to my therapist that even as an adult I  felt like a streak of tar ran through me that marked me as broken, and I  lived in constant fear of people seeing it. So when my anxiety  revisited me, I tried to hide it, but piling that shame on top of it  only made it worse. I wanted simultaneously to jump out of my own skin  and hide inside my house forever.

Then I remembered what Brene Brown said in her book on shame: that silence fed shame while a sense of  common humanity combatted it. That meant talking about what I was  feeling. Reaching out to tell someone was a major part of fighting shame  because it made you feel less alone. Then it occurred to me: what if I  just preempted this terror of someone discovering my anxious state and  just _told_ them? If I owned how I felt in advance, perhaps I’d  feel less shame because I wouldn’t be so desperate to hide it. Problem  was, any time I tried to talk about it in person, I completely fell to  bits and I didn’t exactly want to put myself through that over and over  again.

So instead I opted to put it on Facebook.

Of course,  Facebook is the capital of oversharing and I normally kept my digital  shouting box strictly to jokes. But I just didn’t see a better way to  inform people of what I was going through or that my behavior might be  different than my usual. In fairness to Brene Brown, she clarifies that  reaching out to others in order to combat shame needs to be aimed at  people who are receptive to hearing your pain. She definitely doesn’t  suggest blasting it all over your social media. But that’s what I did.

              I wrote a long explanation of my mental state asking for  compassion rather than advice and hit “post” before I could change my  mind. Now, I should be clear that I didn't exactly blast this to  everyone I knew on Facebook. I used customized security settings so only  those in the same city as me and my oldest, closest friends could see  it, and I blocked my whole family as well as loose acquaintances. I hit  post and immediately shut my laptop, vowing not to log into Facebook for  at least a couple hours. I’d purposely planned my post to coincide with  a concert I was attending because I knew it would prevent me from  checking my phone constantly. I figured if anyone was judgemental or  shaming, the bite might sting less if several hours had gone by — or  possibly I wouldn’t even notice it in a flood of other tiny red  notifications.

When I finally gathered the courage to open  Facebook again, I had a torrent of messages and notifications. Most of  them carried the same sentiment: I have anxiety, too. While I’d  certainly blasted my personal world with my emotional state hoping to  get some level empathy, I didn’t anticipate which corners of my social  circles would be delivering it. Close friends of mine, people I used to  share every secret with, messaged to tell me they’d recently gone  through something similar and not talked about it. Acquaintances wrote  with ideas and (indeed) some advice. Much of the advice wasn’t  especially helpful, but knowing that I wasn’t alone made a world of  difference. For months afterward, casual acquaintances told me that  sharing my experience actually helped them feel less alone, which I  hadn’t even thought about.

I can't pretend like simply talking  about my anxiety made it go away or even lessen much. It still took  another year of focus, self care, and work before I truly felt like  myself again. Sharing my anxiety online allowed me to deal with it  without shame and without feeling like I was broken. In other words, it  meant one less roadblock to contend with, and — given my emotional state  at the time — I might not have made it through the anxiety without it.


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