Scared of trolls? Here's how to handle the anxiety 🧌👀
Hi {{ subscriber.first_name }}!
In my last post I talked about how important it is to set an actual boundary around WHEN and WHERE trolls can reach you on the internet, to make sure you don’t feel vulnerable and exposed in your own time, at home or just before a romantic dinner or bedtime 🛑
What happens when you then actually open up your phone and see that someone has written something about you or your clinic? 😱
🧠I want you to put this into perspective: The fact that someone writes that you’re a horrible vet, experiment on animals, happily let animals die, and, by the way, you’re only in it for the money, cannot hurt you (yes, I’ve read all that about myself, and worse). We know this, because if you NEVER DID READ it, and didn’t have thoughts and feelings about it, it wouldn’t touch you, right?
🧠So what happens when you read it, is that your brain is going to try to make sense of it, categorise it, assess if it’s a threat, and figure out how we can survive this. Sometimes, what we read triggers us so much that our nervous system goes into high alert before our prefrontal cortex has even clocked what the person is saying. You’ll then find yourself in a state of fight and flight, and reacting from that state. You’ll read the comment over and over, heart beat racing and maybe even shaking, because your primitive brain has assessed this as a real threat, and thinks you’re in danger.
🧠It makes sense that we can't think clearly in this state, and trying to find rhyme or reason behind what the person is saying will get us nowhere. If this happens, you want to recognize what’s going on, and take as long as you need to calm your nervous system down. The best way to do this is, more than anything, allowing your body to roll with it. If you try to suppress the feeling of panic and anxiety, your brain will think you’re not paying enough attention to this obvious attack on your life, and it will intensify its attempts to get you to run away or defend yourself.
🧘🏻♀️So, sit down, take a deep breath, and ground yourself with your feet on the floor. Feel what’s going on: Fast heart beat, blood rushing in your ears, throat tightening, whatever your body does when it responds to a threat. Feel it, and just breathe into it, knowing that this is a normal physical response, and nothing has gone wrong, there’s no immediate danger (even if you’ve received death threats, you’re likely safe for the next 5 minutes, until you can calm down and analyse what to do). It might be a much lighter reaction if all the other person is complaining about is the shaved area where you took the blood sample of their persian cat, but our brains can quickly catastrophize anything and take it out of proportions!
🧘🏻♀️With your feet on the ground, just sit and breathe into the areas where you notice the anxiety or overwhelm is placed at the moment, and allow it to be there. Don’t try to get rid of it, trying to force yourself to relax, literally just keep telling yourself: Oh, it’s in my chest now, and it’s quite heavy, feels like a stone, now it’s moving down my diaphragm… and my arms are tingling, I can feel the blood pulsating in my fingers… Spend a few minutes until you don’t feel so overpowered with emotions.
🤬It could also be rage: “How DARE they write that about us??!! The AUDACITY!!!! This is SO UNFAIR.” Not anxiety, but again, you really don’t want to react from this state, as your brain is propelling you to DO something to feel better, and feel you’re in control. Same thing, sit down, ground yourself, and breathe into it. Accept it’s normal to react to something you find unfair, and - you don’t need to react to it.
Let me know if you’ve ever experienced strong emotions after reading a post or an email with someone’s opinion about you. How did you deal with it?
Up next: How to handle your mind around the troll’s declarations so you don't want to give up and work in ASDA instead...
In your corner,
