Mental Health #2: My Love/Hate Relationship with Social Media

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. This week on Founder’s Journal, we're doing things a little differently. We are dropping a mini series focused on mental health. I'll talk about my own battle with anxiety, the effect that social media has on our psyche, and break down my own mental health routines–I like to call it my mental health stack. That means instead of just one episode, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, this week we're giving you two: a new show that you won't want to miss plus a classic episode you maybe haven't heard before. If you haven't listened to today's classic episode, go back and check it out. Today, I am talking about my love-hate relationship with social media and how I manage that relationship. Let's hop into it. 

The pros of social media…

Social media has been a massive gift in my life. It is a sandbox for me to brainstorm and test ideas, like Career Therapy, the new concept that we started on the show recently, it came from testing the idea on Twitter. Social media is also how I've connected with amazing people, whether it's hundreds of Founder’s Journal listeners, or people who ultimately became Morning Brew employees or founders that I ended up angel investing in, or professional athletes or artists who I'm now friends with. Social media has also created so many options in my career, like a place to market my company or market my podcast and allowed it to grow. It is like this compounding asset, similar to money, that grows in value and importance over time if nurtured properly. Money gives you financial freedom and an audience that is built on social media gives you creative and lifestyle freedom.

…and the cons

But social media is also a massive curse, and at times it has been the worst thing for my mental health. It is exceptionally good at distracting me from doing the things I want to or should be doing, AKA it's great at making me procrastinate. And I find that procrastination weighs heavily on my mental health. When I procrastinate, I don't keep my word to myself, which leaves me with something I like to call an integrity hangover. Social media also creates self-doubt and triggers my long-held feeling of imposter syndrome. From the outside. People look at me and may think Alex is this successful entrepreneur who's super calculated and knows what he's doing, but when I spend a lot of time on social, I can't help but compare myself to the people that I follow. And some of these people are on their third, fourth or fifth business, or they've sold a company for a billion dollars, or they're just so much more of a subject-matter expert on topics that I'm interested in, whether it be crypto, product management, or investing. And that leaves me doubting my abilities as an entrepreneur and feeling like a fraud. And finally social media creates a massive amount of FOMO at times. Every single time, I see another entrepreneur raising a venture fund or loading up on some new NFT project, I feel the urge to get involved myself, even if it's not what I truly want long-term. So it's clear that social media both serves me and works against me, which means what I have to figure out is how can I find the right tools to protect myself from it working against me, while still allowing it to serve me. Now, I want to tell you what I do today and what I may do in the future to protect myself. 

How I protect myself from the downfalls

The first thing that I do today is separation. I talked about this on my recent episode around why we procrastinate and I'll link to that in the show notes, but I make it impossible to feed my addiction by removing myself from technology altogether. It works a lot of the time, but sometimes it's not realistic to be separated from my phone, leaving it in my bedroom if I'm in my office. I also do something on my computer where I don't have Slack or iMessage installed. So I don't even have the opportunity to get sucked in by the pings and dings. The biggest flaw in this strategy is that in reality, I need to just sometimes have my phone to be able to do work. And then what happens is all of a sudden, I'm looking something up on Google for Founder’s Journal,  and that turns into me checking Twitter as quote unquote research for the episode. 

The second thing I do is disable social media. On my computer, I use the app. SelfControl, where I create a list of websites that I want to disable for a period of time. And typically I disable these apps as long as I want to spend time on what I call deep work, the work where I need to be focused for an extended period of time. On my phone, I use the Screen Time function that comes with every iPhone. I set a max usage for all of my social media at an hour per day. So I basically have an hour total to be spent on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and any other social media platform. And basically once I hit that hour mark, a big pop-up appears when I go to one of the apps and it says, you've reached your time limit. And then you have the option to abandon your commitment and ignore the time limit for an hour or for the rest of the day. Now, the flaw with this strategy is far too many times, I click ignore. I go against my commitment and I keep using social media after the time limit is up. 

The third thing I do to protect myself from social is investing in myself and my mental health long-term. By  investing in things like gratitude practice or mindfulness, exercise, diet, reading, and everything else that's part of my mental health stack, I can create more of an awareness around what intrinsically drives me and feel settled with those things, which at the end of the day will make me feel more impervious to the temptations, the doubts, and the FOMO that is created by social media.

Still more to do

So those are the three major things that I do, but honestly, I don't think it's enough. I'm more distracted than I'd like to be. I still find my relationship with social media and specifically Twitter far too stressful, and I'm spending two and a half hours a day on social media. So as a final exercise, I wanted to brainstorm a few things I can do to fight back against the addictive, cortisol-inducing poll on social media. Idea number one, add a passcode to screen time. So I have a few friends that do this and the basic idea is, you know, the tactic I was telling you about before, where I set a limit on screen time on my phone for social media apps? Well, I can do that same thing, but I can add a passcode to it, which basically means if I want to have access to my social apps after I hit the hour time limit, I need to put in a passcode to be able to access those apps. And so what my friends do and I'm thinking about doing is I'm not going to create the passcode for myself. I'm going to have my fiancee create the passcode, so only she has the ability to access these apps, which means that I'm not even going to be able to go against my temptation or go against my commitment, because I don't even know how to get into these apps once I've hit the time limit. That's the first idea. Idea number two, remove everyone I am following so my social media platforms become more of a place for creative expression than a place for consumption and comparison. So this is a tactic that people like Naval or Sahil, the founder of Gumroad, do on Twitter. If you look at their Twitter audiences, Naval has an audience of more than I think 2 million people, Sahil has a very large audience as well, and they are following zero people. And so just think about how, if I go on Twitter, I create a tweet, but there's no feed of thousands of people that I follow to doom scroll through. I think that'd be really helpful for my mental health. Now the third idea is a radical and out there idea, but I want to share it. The third idea is to actually get quantitative or tangible with my mental health. And so the concept is, what if I get a wearable that measures my stress and cross-reference my spike in stress throughout the day to my Screen Time numbers? Basically, so I can bring awareness to myself that when I go on social media for more than X hours a day, or when I go to social media at this time, it is proven by this wearable that I am wearing, that it is stress-inducing and I should probably change my habits. 

I want to hear from you

And so this is how I think about my relationship with social media. It's how I manage my relationship today. And I also want to just share three ideas for how I'm thinking about evolving my relationship with social media in the future. Now, I would love to hear from you. Over the weekend, I caught up on more than 700 emails from Founder’s Journal listeners, and it literally made my weekend. And I want to get to know so many more of you. So if you haven't yet shot me an email, email alex@morningbrew.com and introduce yourself, who you are and why it is that you listen to the show. And right after you send the email, please head to the podcast player of your choice, wherever it is that you listen to Founder’s Journal, Apple, Spotify, or whatever other, and subscribe and review the podcast. It is the number one way that we grow the show. It is the number one way we get to the top of the charts. And it's the number one way that new people find out about Founder’s Journal and they become a part of the community. As always, thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.