There are twice as many of you watching my videos now and it's made me terrified to make
new content.
Three months ago I collaborated with Buzzfeed to create a video about a real psychologist
reacting to mental illness in movies.
As that video started to take off and got millions and millions of people watching it
this channel started to take off and my subscriber numbers took off it completely doubled in
size.
And that has paralyzed me.
I've talked before about how I grew up with social anxiety and how I've overcome that
in many areas of my life where I still experience it is when people are judging me in professional
contexts when I'm in a room surrounded by other psychologists or I'm speaking to a bunch
of parents or I'm doing an assembly at a school or here when I'm making videos and sharing
them with the world.
When I get anxious like this I really worry about doing things right getting them as perfect
as I can and I usually end up dealing with that by not dealing with it.
It's not a new problem it happened for me in grad school when I was working on my dissertation
and I would do this thing where I would get really anxious and worried about working on
my research.
I would not do it and then I'd tell myself don't worry Ali you're just going to wake
up early on Saturday you're going to wake up at like 6am you're going to spend 12 hours
working on this project you'll completely catch up and it'll be amazing.
It's this thing that is called All or none thinking it's a thinking trap a cognitive
distortion.
And I didn't realize that it did this that I would build things up to have to be a certain
way and then if they weren't that way which was always the case because I never woke up
on Saturday and then I would wake up late on Saturday and feel crappy about myself and
say OK it's worthless.
I'm not going to make any progress.
Might as well not do it.
And the note avoid it.
That's kind of what's been happening for me with The Psych Show.
What I feel like are expectations going up more people watching me more eyes on this
channel.
More e-mails coming through.
I've coped by not making content.
It's gotten really bright.
So I got a change.
There we go.
That's a lot better.
Last week I have dinner with my friend Bill Wadman.
He's this amazing photographer.
He made this one of me kind of is a parody of all of all those subway doctors he called
it subway shrink and I'm talking to Bill about this frustration I have.
Then he asked me Well you're an anxiety expert.
This sounds like anxiety.
What would you tell your patient if they were experiencing the exact same problem?
That's actually a really good question.
I don't know I didn't think to ask myself this question.
This is why we're biased and why I can help other people and sometimes I can't quite help
myself.
So I tell my patients it sounds like you have this fear of failure and what we need to do
is help you to get some real world experience with what happens when you create something
that doesn't seem perfect that falls short of your expectations.
When I was in grad school I worked with a dissertation coach Alison Miller.
She's amazing she's awesome.
She changed my life in some ways and she helped me to think about this and to say don't make
a rough draft make a crappy draft.
Let's lower down the expectations you have because your expectations are perfection and
that's no way to try to write.
And what Bill and I were talking about was the same thing.
So here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to practice making content that isn't perfect for the next two weeks I'm going
to make one video every day on the weekdays, the weekends I'm going to take off.
I'm not going to write out a fancy script.
I'm not going to exhaustively research every topic.
I'm just going to make a thing and then share it with you.
Gotta change the video settings because the sun and this is case in point I guess like
this video is not going to be perfect and you're going to see me like editing this stuff
and the lighting is not perfect but whatever.
Have you ever dealt with perfectionism or all or none thinking or this fear of failure
and if so how have you dealt with it?
Let me know in the comments below if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you want
more content like this that is celebrating mental health.
Be sure to subscribe to this channel.
And also I want to think my brand new patrons there's a lot of them so I want to thank Tae
T. Steve M. Anne Claire.
Brian T Nicky C. Samuel A. Thank you folks.
Thank you so much for becoming patrons of this channel and if you want to help me make
videos like this.
Check out my Patreon on where you can get more behind the scenes stuff and learn more
about how I make all the stuff.