As Told Over Brunch

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How to Love Social Media

I hated social media for a bit, mainly because of FOMO (click here for a flashback to my issues with anxiety online). As a public relations student, one of the main jobs you get straight out of college in these days is doing social media. I vowed to myself I wasn't going into social media. I already got stressed with my own pages, so why would I want to do it all the time as a job? Then I got an internship in social media, which was the most healing experience between me and social media. It reframed my mind and made me feel a lot less anxiety about being on social media. Here's all the ways working in social media has helped me feel better about my life on social media:

1. You are posting for people other than yourself. This makes spending all day on Facebook healthier because you're on someone else's newsfeed and not stalking out your friends profiles and wondering why their lives seem so much more fulfilling.

2. It tuckers you out. I used to spend all my free time on social media, but since I do it for a living now, I don't really want to waste more time on it after work. I basically check it on my phone and then put it down and refocus on something else that I haven't been doing all day.

3. It helped me mature. I used to follow some whiners. It was a huge sobfest on my timelines, which did nothing but make me want to complain and gave me a negative worldview. Once I made it into the industry professionally, I started connecting with relevant people and my timeline went from a high school locker room to a forum for articulate discussion.

4. Probably the most important part about working in social media for me has been understanding it as a way to no longer feel social anxiety. I get it all now. I understand the practical and pragmatic networking abilities and it stops becoming such a powerful emotional experience. Transitioning from this heavily emotional forum to a logical outlet for communication has helped me respect social media more and feel less possessed by it.

I'm not saying that everyone should work in social media to feel better about it (because then I would be out of a job), but once you stop letting social media dictate how you feel, life becomes a lot less stressful.