I hate being online, but I have too much social anxiety to go outside

how social media apps isolated me from the world

Since 2019, I’ve existed chronically online.

I had just finished my education and started my own business. I stepped out of codependency into autonomy.

Of course, that was paired with loss. If your whole social network is built on codependency, you will need to quit it altogether. (Or hope that some people are willing to get real as well, but that usually doesn’t happen.)

I followed my gut and quit. So I didn’t have any friends that year, after deleting my Facebook and my whole social network along with it.

Now, I was ready for the Real Thing. I was resolved to go out into the world again.

2020 would be the year I got social.

And we all know what happened then.

For two years, in-person social interaction was prohibited. Our smiles were hidden behind masks. We migrated to a mangled digital half-life or plain old isolation. I adapted by moving my business and my friendships online.

In 2022, I could have gone back to the way I did life before, and make good on my initial intention of wanting to go out into the world again.

But I actually liked working online 100%. Before the pandemic, I had had an at home spiritual practice (which was way too overwhelming, having all these people in my space) and made painting commissions that I sent through mail—all very physical. But these were not things I was interested in anymore on a business level. And no matter how much like-minded people I had met during the pandemic (and I actually did, in my city, we had a Telegram group and everything), the emphasis in my life had shifted to social media. This was where the most important things happened for me.

Sneakily, I had become one of those people that was living chronically online.

Living online was my new normal

Sure, I had made acquaintances in my area that I met up with from time to time and some ‘third spaces’ I liked to visit.

(In case you don’t know, a third space is a term for somewhere that isn’t your home or your work, where you can find other people.)

But nothing that really filled out my life. No community that actually led anywhere, or something that called my soul. So I kept looking for that online. Every time I lacked something, anything, I went online. This had become normalized for me during the pandemic.

And I think for many people, in these years, online habits were built that have lasted way beyond social distancing being obligatory.

When the only ‘third space’ you can visit for a year or two is online, and this space is designed to keep you addicted, it’s understandable to loose track.

I hated that this was my ‘new normal’ and I also hated that term, but yup, it happened.

With all of my supposed spiritual awareness, I was deeply caught in the web of social media. It had scooped me up as it did with so many people during the pandemic.

I didn’t want to be online.

But I had somehow lost the path towards living in-person. The pandemic came in a transition time for me, and it had transitioned me to online living.

My ‘match’ to this had everything to do with the survival stress that had gotten trapped in my nervous system, a.k.a, dysregulation.

But then, I deleted my addiction

When I started working with my nervous system by the end of 2024, I accessed regulation in my nervous system again. To my surprise, all of my addictive, unhealthy online habits were suddenly deleted from my brain. It was the last straw to heal my Instagram addiction.

Without batting an eye, I now deleted all of the social media that had supported the addictions as well.

This was literally how it felt: brain pathways beings erased, so much so that I outright forgot to do the habits they had sustained.

My addictions got healed, because the underlying survival energy got healed.

But what now? I had built my whole life around my online habits and the platforms I was on, at this point. Deleting them meant deleting most of my life.

So that was how it was, then. Once again, I quit.

Suddenly, I was dropped into the Void. Starting over from scratch again.

This is a good thing, I told myself. I finally found my way back to my values.

And yet, it was completely terrifying. Good thing I had just found more regulation in my nervous system, or I would have freaked out.

Alright, I did freak out.

Because I had to admit to myself that, actually, I hated being online, but had now acquired too much social anxiety to go outside into the world again.

My fast-paced social media addiction had hid the extent of my aversion to being online. The craving for dopamine hits had taken precedence over what I felt deep down about the platforms I was on. I felt a lot of hate about being online—my actual values were very different.

But I was also frozen in place by levels of anxiety that had risen during the pandemic (not because of germaphobia though), that prevented me from easily finding refuge in offline connections.

Caught between a rock and a hard place

At first, this was a very all-encompassing state of stuckness.

I felt frozen between not wanting to be online, and not wanting to be offline.

I had caught a bad case of anxiety and that included social anxiety. Seeing all kinds of intense darkness in the world will do that to a person.

(Have you recovered from that? The trauma of waking up is real. I had been on the spiritual path for years, but many people woke up during the pandemic, which must have been intense. The years we’re in now are the years that our body shows and purges up the fallout from all that stress. But that’s a whole different post.)

So, the whole process of going out and making new friends, joining clubs and turning small talk into new friendships suddenly felt daunting to me. My nervous system was just too overwhelmed and locked into dysregulation. And it had been for years.

Now, 2 years afterwards, rather than avoiding this problem by perpetuating my pandemic-born habit of resourcing connections online, I faced my discomfort.

I evaluated everything that had to do with working and living online.

As time went on and I sat with my triggers, I started to realize that I actually didn’t hate being online per se.

I just hated fast-paced social media. And that was something I had to look at first, processing all that pent-up emotion that had previously been suppressed, before I could access my social energy in the outside world again.

All the things I hated about being online

I got really honest with myself. What had been actually triggering me so badly, all along? What had I hidden from myself, covered up with addictive scrolling?

It was extremely liberating to admit the following things to myself:

I hated the way spiritual entrepreneurs were prompted by the algorithms to market themselves as some type of glamorous social media guru.

I hated how everybody in my echo chamber seemed to think this was normal and we should all aspire to become Insta-famous and sell expensive coaching-coaching-to-coaches courses. I hated weird parasocial dynamics where I was expected to be an endlessly compassionate non-reactive Mother Teresa and provide my services for free in the comment sections.

I hated that my videos that I thought were the least interesting (starseeds) went viral, and yet I couldn’t find a way to create an online income out of it that was satisfactory.

I hated that I had built so many online friendships with people that I would never see in real life, because most of the connections weren’t that deep (only a few were) and also I hated traveling.

I hated the whole vibe of the capitalistic self-help industry and how I had totally fallen for an (American) dream that wasn’t even mine.

I hated that my attention span had become too short to function. I hated that I had become addicted to the social media slot machine. I hated the nervous system dysregulation and high sympathetic rev Instagram had brought me in, always hurrying to post, keeping up with the algorithm.

I hated how my life force was gushing out like an open artery, and I couldn’t find the fullness that I portrayed online in my real life, because I had only so much to give.

I hated that my online business exactly mirrored where I was unhealed—because yes I also own my side of all this—and that I didn’t know how to fix it.

Those were the things I hated.

image

I actually loved being online

After I got clear on what I hated and started purging my pent-up emotions, it was actually really easy to see what I loved.

Prepare for a dive into the Old Internet, before it died and turned into whatever bot-ridden disaster this is.

As a teen, the Internet was my safe space.

I was a fantasy nerd, and that was of course very uncool in school, so I found my refuge on online forums where my favorite books and movies were discussed. I read and wrote profusely.

Then, YouTube came along, with weird, nerdy videos. I followed tons of funny British YouTubers and I loved how they produced their own witty content in their bedroom. Much of my online humor has been shaped in that era—I hope that explains things.

All in all, these were little corners of the internet, dedicated to particular interests and filled with small communities of well-meaning people and only very few trolls.

Then, I went to art school, where instead of me becoming more myself, I was rewarded for being aloof and unsentimental. I collapsed and found refuge on the spiritual path. I traveled for a bit as a free spirited hippy, and when I came back, I wore raggedy old clothes and an ascetic mindset and had lost all access to my expressive, nerdy teenage self.

Smartphones were introduced. Instagram was on the rise.

I held off for as long as possible, but then I ditched the off-the-grid hippie persona and got a smartphone. Art school had damaged my creativity big time and my off-the-grid break was not the answer. In an attempt to get back into self-expression, I went on Instagram.

I loved Instagram as it was back then, when reels weren’t invented yet, when there were only perfectly square single photos and the algorithm still showed you everyone you were subscribed to.

I regained my creative flow there, eventually started my online business, fell completely out of love with the way Instagram developed, and we’re back at where I started this story.

Quick recap: since 2019, I had started living chronically online with my business.

I didn’t mean to. It just sort of went like that.

And being on social media, combined with the pandemic, had serious repercussions for my nervous system health.

It felt like after my Saturn Return had reset me in 2019 and moved me out of codependency, all ready to conquer the world and migrate to a better tribe (my HD Sat Return incarnation cross was Migration), I was plunged into a big bad field of darkness instead.

So when I went back into regulation, there was a whole fallout of online habits that I now had to sort through.

I had to relearn to be social again. It was like this capacity had withered.

Being on social media makes social anxiety worse

I believe that when we spend too much time online, our social engagement system diminishes. In the brain, what we don’t use, we loose.

How I understand it from my research about the nervous system and neuroplasticity (like the Polyvagal Theory by Porges and ‘The Brain’s Way of Healing’ by Norman Doidge), is that we are wired for social connection: it’s how we co-regulate and it’s our primary way to find safety, apart from self-regulation.

On our own, we can spark it by looking up from our screen around the room (shh, just do it right now), connecting with our body and our environment and all the beings in it. (Although we might have stored survival stress that makes this more stressful than regulating at first.)

When we forget to look up from our screen, only engage with apps and content that activates our fight/flight and freeze and don’t see people physically, regulating our nervous system gets a lot harder.

We don’t spark our social engagement system as much. Our heartbeat is less regulated now. In order for our system to come down into (a semblance of) calm, we can get stuck in a functional freeze pattern of doomscrolling. This means: procrastinating what we needed to do, numbing out and losing time on social media apps that are designed to keep us in that state.

This dissociative pattern is both caused by the way fast-paced social media is set up, as well as (often) a reflection of the survival stress that was already stored in our nervous system.

So, we join a social media app, and before we know it, we have anxiety.

Also, the whole reason we spend so much time online can come from trauma around social connection in the first place. We might totally use it to avoid confronting our social discomfort, which will only make it turn into a hungrier beast.

In any case, if we have some underlying social anxiety, that can get exponentially worse with these platforms. The comparison, the highlight reels, the lack of consistent offline interaction that we had in the pandemic, that sparks our social engagement and keeps us regulated and the way social media revs up our sympathetic nervous system (fight/flight) with all kinds of outrage and clickbait, all conspired to make us less and less regulated. And then, we were on the apps even more to cope.

Ultimately, we can start feeling socially anxious and isolated, even when we aren’t. This is because these toxic apps create nervous system dysregulation, also where there was none.

So then we get into a situation where we say:

“I hate being online, but I have too much social anxiety to go outside”

Maybe you’re like me, and you found yourself living online too much over the past years, spending valuable energy scrolling through social media and, without realizing it, replacing crucial social engagement offline with online habits.

Thereby making your social engagement system wither and creating more dysregulation, like it happened to me.

Even if you’re already on the path of living more intentionally, it can definitely be a whole area of blindspots what you do online, because it’s less physically visible.

Maybe, being online in the way that we are, doesn’t align with our values at all.

But somewhere down the line - like during the pandemic when it was the only allowed third space - we got caught in the web of social media.

And it made our overall state worse.

What to do about it?

Well, regularly looking up from our screen would be number 1 (don’t worry, you can do it again. This really is a habit to build.

a meme classic

Going out for a walk and saying hi to people (if that feels safe) would be a good number 2, then we really get some of that social engagement going.

Of course, if the social anxiety is too bad, even that idea can be already triggering. I would suggest connecting with animals. Children’s petting zoos are a good idea if you don’t have a pet. Smooching baby goats is my personal favorite pastime. They are rambunctious enough to handle it, and will get all over you, so wear old clothes (I’m fully choosing to believe in this idea that you will actually go visit some baby goats now).

Another way is humming. Keep feeling your body as you do this. Make weird sounds as guided.

These are all simple things to spark the ‘social engagement branch’ of your nervous system, that you can do daily.

They help us to wean off from being online, and readjust our nervous system to the outside world again.

If we’re ready to take it one step further, making music together is a nice way to connect with people without having to talk - I like mantra singing circles, but of course, that has to be your jam, too. Finding some kind of club for your hobby is a common tip as well, if you want to socialize more—the library might offer something.

Sometimes, our ‘social anxiety’ or even ‘agoraphobia’ just melts away as soon as we go outside. Maybe then it wasn’t ‘real’ social anxiety or fear of going outside, you can say (an argument that gets used a lot by skeptics of non-mainstream healing). But I have a different theory.

We can get locked into a dysregulated pattern on social media and The Internet, and start developing social anxiety or agoraphobia in that context, that melts away as soon as we spark our social engagement system again.

In my opinion, the types of issues that are in the DSM (the manual with the definitions of all mental health disorders) stem from nervous system dysregulation anyway. And I’m not the only one that’s critical about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In fact…

Robert Spitzer, one of main creators of the DSM, said in an interview with BBC in the ’90’s:

“What happened is that we made estimates of the prevalence of mental disorders totally descriptively, without considering that many of these conditions might be normal reactions which are not really disorders. That’s the problem, because we were not looking at the context in which those conditions developed.”

In my opinion, this alludes to how trauma (‘normal reactions to certain contexts’) creates ‘disorders’.

A good example of that would be the ‘social anxiety’ caused by being on addictive social media apps. It developed in the context of these apps. Seeing it as something completely separate from social media, while it is a normal reaction to it, would do us a disservice in our healing process.

(Of course, if you actually do have serious social anxiety issues that originated well before social media, healing this might require a kind of support that goes beyond what I can write here.)

I just want to highlight the importance of that initial switch in gear from doomscrolling to looking around the room regularly - and going from there, spending 20 minutes on a walk (or 20 years in the woods), and reconnecting back to the world, to heal this type of anxiety.

This is how I started regulating my own nervous system and it is deceptively simple, however, it is really the bulk of my practice.

But that wasn’t everything.

Then, I had to deal with the fallout of my online habits and totally reshape my life.

To prevent me falling back into detrimental habits as soon as I grabbed my phone again, I guided myself through a 5 step process to realign all my online habits to my values and make them feel inspiring, relaxed and motivating again, instead of draining.

I have now made that 5-step process into an easy workbook, because I want you to take your power back from the algorithms as well, and feel as inspired and happy about your online time again as I now do: Intentionally Online Workbook.

A new online habitat & how’s the anxiety now?

Back to my story. After spending years living chronically online, then rebelling against it and wanting to spend 20 years in the forest, I found a balance.

I know exactly what I like and hate about being online now and have made radical adjustments.

I took a fine comb to all my online habits and weeded out everything that was addictive, unnecessary, time-absorbing, distracting, gross, sad and in any other way didn’t align with my values.

Now, I live intentionally online.

I only interact with the online spaces I actually do like.

Best sign of online health: I remember everything I did on the internet at the end of the day. All of this healing around my online habits has freed up so much of my energy. Naturally, I started reorienting myself back to who I was before I started my whole trial and error process (aka, adult life) in my twenties.

Turns out I actually knew myself pretty well as a teen. So I reclaimed many of my teenage Internet hobbies, like my interest for writing, reading profusely (Substack perfectly matches this) and nerdy YouTube videos.

In short, I’ve found my way back to being online again, on my terms, and fell back in love with The Internet.

As for my social anxiety, that’s a work in progress. For me, the solution is to ‘just connect to people’, be with the initial discomfort, and quit the stories about the ins and outs of my presumed ‘social anxiety’ — to see the discomfort in my body just as a normal reaction that has arisen from a toxic context, and that I now have to reconcile with bit by bit.

This social media landscape is weird but we can human our way around

I truly believe there is a way to engage with the Internet that is not lifeless and artificial, but adds more value and engagement to our life.

The Internet can be a great place.

But we need to be intentional and conscious about our choices.

This online landscape is often designed for profit through addiction.

Now that search engines are focusing more on AI (have you also noticed that search engines don’t seem to bring up as much useful results anymore, making us go more for the AI options?) we need to think critically even more, and learn how to do research and everything.

It goes beyond social media. Not just ‘social engagement’, but everything we do online needs to be examined, in my opinion. The staggering rise of AI has already sparked a lot of debate (and now 2 new studies have been done about the effects of using AI on our brain, that show exactly what we already knew, because duh), and AI use a perfect trigger to re-evaluate our online habits.

It also asks of us to be intentional with our offline life. To cultivate that in a meaningful and balanced way, if we have been living chronically online like a lot of young or semi-young (millennial like me) people.

To find ‘third spaces’ that we like. To engage with our environment, first, by actually looking at it.

If you’re like me, that requires moving through the initial social anxiety or isolation that the apps have caused, to find our way back into human connection.

Recap for your brain

In short, we can come out of this ‘freeze pattern’ that our online habits have manoeuvred us in, where we are stuck and can’t be online nor offline.

We do this by slowly reorienting back to our physical life, and doing that regularly and with intent, then following our interests and what makes us feel (socially) engaged with life.

I advice you to be radically honest about exactly what you hate online. That’s the step in my workbook that I loved the most, because it liberated my life force energy that was buried beneath my addiction and gave me my power back.

I didn’t hold back on any part of my dislikes around aspects of being online - the list I shared above the picture - and I hope that inspired you to honestly examine and own what you like and dislike, too.

If you know what you hate online, then you can curate your online spaces much more consciously. In a place that wants to keep us unconsciously consuming and laboring for free by providing data for big tech companies, clear intent is key.

Getting stuck in the ‘I hate this’ phase is of course not the intention—we can shift these things, which I teach with the rest of the steps in the workbook. I didn’t get stuck in what I hated online, but I used it to get clarity.

I truly care about helping people become more intentional about their online behavior. The zombie-like scrolling on smartphones as observed in the urban landscape is disturbing to me (and I had to admit that I started going in that direction more and more myself), so now that I got it all realigned again, I want to help people shift this as well.

My workbook is for everyone that cares enough about intentional (offline) living that they want to bring total awareness to their online habits, too.

In a space that has gone alarmingly fake and artificial, raw honesty full of quirky and weird expression is exactly what I’m looking for to curate and seek out in my little corner of the internet. And if you’re on Substack or subscribed to me, good chance you’re interested in that too.

So check out my workbook, if you want some help. It contains the 5 steps I used to heal my online experience. With these steps, you’ll have all the tools to feel relaxed, inspired and in control over your online experience again, and maybe even fall back in love with the Internet!

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Disclaimer: none of this is medical advice and I’m not a medical professional. This is for entertainment and education purposes only. Get professional support if you need it.