It’s Not You, It’s My Anxiety

Juggling the melancholy of social distancing and the heightened anxiety of staying in contact with friends 

By Beryl Belmonte

After refreshing my school email for the hundredth time, anticipating further updates on how the COVID-19 crisis will impact the University of Minnesota, a new notification pops up at exactly 1:07 p.m. My heart drops when I open the message that reads, “All students on all campuses will be taught virtually through at least Wednesday, April 1.” Like many of my peers, I begin to feel the early effects of loneliness at the thought of staying inside my house for another two weeks and not being able to see the University friends that I’ve grown so attached to. To distract myself from my spiraling thoughts, I make plans to maintain contact with all of my friends despite being 400 miles apart. 

Fast forward two weeks, and I’m awoken by twenty notifications that I have yet to respond to. What happened to keeping in touch with everyone for every second of every day? Why am I starting to leave people on “delivered” for hours at a time? Is it because I’m a terrible friend? Or could it have to do with the sensory overload that comes with trying to stay updated on multiple people’s lives on multiple social media platforms?

Believe it or not, my social anxiety has heightened since transitioning from face-to-face conversations to on-screen communication. Without my daily run-ins or scheduled meet-ups with people on campus, all of my social interactions are consolidated into variable periods of time, providing no routine for me to keep up with. With all of us living separate lives off campus, there’s this increased urgency to catch up on everything new that has occurred in all personal dimensions―academics, family, etc.―in order to avoid being left out of each other’s social spheres. As a result, I have to be ready to respond to any chime, ding, or beeping sound that comes my way at any moment of the day and uphold fifteen different conversations about completely different topics—even if my social battery is drained and my mind is paralyzed by the amount of stimuli that it’s simultaneously exposed to.  

With our phones being the only way to stay in touch with people we care about outside of our homes, there’s this added pressure to ensure that every single text and call is meaningful in some way. With limited nonverbal cues to enhance the expression or interpretation of what people are truly thinking, there are more opportunities to overanalyze. Consequently, there’s additional weight placed on the perceived consequence or stigma of leaving people on “read” or writing an insufficient response. If I don’t reply at lightning-speed, a growing sense of uneasiness creeps over me, filling my head with fears that my friends will think I’m purposefully closing myself off to them. The same feeling is reciprocated when my friends don’t reply as quickly as I do, pulling me into this rabbit hole of rereading my messages and wondering what I typed wrong.

So what now? Do we continue to go through this anxiety-inducing process for every conversation that we have? Do we drop off the face of the earth and completely pull the plug? 

 If you need to go on a digital detox to clear your headspace, it’s perfectly understandable to inform your friends about it and to take some time to yourself. Once you decide to return to the grid, creating a routine for yourself can help restore the regular pace of social interaction that you’re used to. Instead of texting thirty people at once, you can start a group FaceTime call to evenly distribute the social pressures of a conversation. For one-on-one conversations, agreeing upon a time to catch up with certain friends can help make the pile of notifications less overwhelming. But if all of this doesn’t work, don’t beat yourself up. These are uneasy times, and the last thing you’re expected to do is resolve your anxiety within a few weeks. While social media and technology have been invaluable for maintaining communication with friends, people may not realize that these platforms can be sources of heightened anxiety for some. In the midst of uncertainty and fear, these feelings are valid, and your mental health should remain your top priority.