Working as a creator comes with unique mental health challenges for both the creator and their audiences.
Common mental health advice involves social media breaks and detoxes that are not possible when your livelihood is reliant on social media. Creators often work from home or feel the need to constantly be looking for content, making it hard to mentally and emotionally take breaks when they’re with family or friends. Creators also carry the weight of the hard balance between the need to raise awareness around problems and the fact that their audiences are really overwhelmed with information and bad news. And the parasocial relationship creators have with their audiences means that their followers and subscribers may often private message them for advice and support.
“When we look at the things that influence our audience’s mental health, creators, social media, media in general play such a huge role,” said Courtney Knowles, senior media advisor for the Jed Foundation, during a News Creator Corps webinar on how creators can battle burnout. “We started doing these events across the country, where we would bring 30 to 40 creators together, everyone would turn off their phones, and we’d say, ‘What’s going on with you?’ And what we found out is that there are a lot of unique struggles and challenges that you are going through that there aren’t a lot of resources out there specifically to support.”
Knowles laid out several strategies he recommends that creators use to manage their own mental health and their audiences.
For creators, he emphasized grounding techniques that can keep you present. These include even a simple meditation practice, avoiding your phone for the 30 minutes before you go to sleep and 30 minutes immediately after you wake up and forest baths – or simply just movement in nature.
Here are some of Knowles’ grounding techniques for creators:
- Avoid your phone around sleep times: Knowles recommends staying off your phone and social media for 30 minutes before you go to sleep and 30 minutes when you wake up. This will protect your sleep and prevent starting your day with anxiety.
- Meditation: You can use apps like Calm or Insight Timer, but Knowles said meditating can be as simple as focusing on your breath for five minutes, making an effort to return to your breath as thoughts enter your head. You can also get a similar outcome by doing things like listening to a song the whole way through intently, rather than it playing in the background while you’re doing something else.
- Moving in nature: Get outside and move your body in a way unrelated to a fitness routine.
- 5-4-3-2-1: Identify five things you can see around you, four things you can physically feel, three things you can hear, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste.
- Pick a song that brings you joy and listen to it intentionally during happy moments, when you’re driving and see a great sunset or recently got good news. Shaping the attachment to that song will mean it will eventually remind you of good feelings whenever you listen to it.
- If you work from home, find ways to create mental and emotional separation between work and the rest of your life, when the physical separation of going to an office every day isn’t possible. For creators who may constantly be receiving notifications and DMS or who may be constantly looking for content ideas, it is particularly important to remain present with family, friends and hobbies outside of work.. For example, have short meditation sessions to mark the beginning and end of work days or take a 15 minute walk right after work to transition your mind and body out of work mode.
Knowles also drove home the importance of knowing the mission and intention of your work as a creator.
For example, if you’re overwhelmed trying to respond to every DM you receive from people looking for recommendations, asking questions, wanting content trades or offering unpaid opportunities.
“This is a trap I fall into a lot because there’s so many opportunities to do good,” Knowles said. “We were talking before about the importance of intention setting. Thinking about what your intention is as a creator, and when a new request or an opportunity comes in, turn everything off for a second. Sit for a minute, breathe, sit in that intention and then look at that thing again. Does it align with what your purpose is supposed to do? If not, there’s this great art we have to learn of saying no gracefully.”
It’s important to realize you are doing a disservice to your mission when you say yes to things that you don’t have the bandwidth to carry or that don’t clearly fit in that bucket, he said.
One of the other things creators often struggle with is engaging with audiences who are burnt out or experiencing mental health issues. Many creators are worried about overwhelming their audiences with bad news or are getting DMS and comments from people who are distressed and in need of support.
For example, if you typically post travel content, but harmful things happening in the world may be impacting your audience, like immigration enforcement raids in the U.S., you may feel conflicted about posting lighter content. You can acknowledge to your audience that advocacy issues are at the top of your mind and while it may be an odd time to think about your next vacation, there is power in joy, particularly for marginalized communities and communities under threat or experiencing harm, and you are committed to making your platform somewhere where both can exist.
Knowles said there are different levels of support – some of which a creator provides and some of which they cannot.
“The lane that you all live in is providing support from a standpoint of creating stories and sharing information in a way that can make people feel more grounded in who they are, can help them find experiences that help them enjoy life more, all of those things,” he said. “That is different from being a support network.”
One of the challenges in a digital age with these parasocial relationships that exist between followers and creators is that when you and your followers aren’t struggling, it may feel like you are part of each others’ communities or support networks, Knowles said.
“But when they hit distress, there’s very little evidence that says you, as somebody they don’t know and that they’re not interacting with on an ongoing basis, can help support them,” he said. “So when people reach out to you and they’re struggling, it’s a fine line.”
Knowles recommends if you are working with communities that are living in high states of stress or danger and getting multiple messages from different people, respond to those messages by creating a video or a carousel, instead of responding individually.
That content can include your thoughts and resources, so that way you’re providing information, but not engaging in a one-on-one way that creates the illusion of a support network that will be realistically hard for you to carry through with followers.
Knowles also recommends sharing your own journeys with audiences on how you’re trying to cope better with burnout or overwhelm. Maybe that content won’t perform as well as your other content, but “it’s really, really important for the people that follow you and look up to you to see in action the kinds of things that they can do that make them feel overwhelmed and that make them feel braver stepping into situations like travel, if that’s something that’s intimidating.”
You can find more tips, tools, and advice in The Jed Foundation’s Digital Storytelling Guide, a mental health resource created for creators. If you’re struggling yourself and need support, you can call, text or chat 988 anytime or text HOME to 741-741 for a free, confidential conversation with a trained counselor any time of day.