- As a YouTuber, is your mental health at stake?
We're gonna talk about it and we're startin' right now.
♪ That's just how it is, can't wait to move me ♪
What is goin' on, my name is Nick from TuberTools.com,
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Okay this is a serious topic and I want to discuss it
because a lot of content creators tie their self-worth
to what is happening on their YouTube channel
or how many followers they have
or how well a video performs and things like that.
There's also the side of things like,
what happens when your channel gets popular,
you start having people follow you
and like what it is that you're doing
and how does your brain manage that kind of stuff.
We're gonna talk about it and this is all in reference
to you, so make sure that you watch this entire video,
because it's important for your own mental health
that you are in tune with some of the stuff
that you might go through as a new content creator
or as you're channel grows.
There are some changes and some things
that you might think about that it's really important
to make sure that you are aware of
so that when those times come, you're prepared.
Now I wanna start with talking about intertwining
your self-worth with who you are on the internet.
The realities of doing anything online are that
sometimes things are gonna be up,
sometimes things are going to be down,
sometimes you're gonna get a positive response,
sometimes you're gonna get a hater or you're gonna get
some type of response that is gonna make you feel like crap.
Now of course it is healthy to take feedback
but on the other hand, when you start getting tied up into
this persona that you're putting out online
and you start getting tied up in the way
that people are reacting to you online,
it can really do a number on your self-worth.
And the reason for that is because you know
when things are going well it's like
yeah you know I'm feeling awesome, everything's goin' great.
And then when things you know, go down a bit,
you know you might be like oh my gosh, what's happening,
it's all over, people don't like me anymore.
And that's where the real problem sets in,
because in situations like that,
the problem isn't that they don't like you anymore,
it's just you know, it might be something
that's out of your hands, it might be like
an algorithm change or it might be something else.
Maybe it's in the content in terms
of how people are responding to that content,
but it's the content, it's not you.
And the important thing to always remember
in that situation is okay if you have a video that goes bad
or you have a bunch of comments where people are like
oh my gosh this sucks, why did you even do this
or they're picking on you know the way you look
or they're picking on something because it's the internet
and it's anonymous and they can do that sort of thing,
try to not let yourself get caught up in that.
Because like what it is that you do in terms of
you know you're YouTube content creator,
you're a content creator for the internet.
What it is that you do isn't who you are
and it's really important to make sure that you
remember that because when you start getting these attacks
on your ego essentially, you start getting these attacks
from people in the comments section
saying bad things about you
or people aren't responding to your videos
the way that you would like or whatever.
Or let's say your numbers start dropping,
whatever that happens to be,
when you start tying your self to those responses
and you start tying your self-worth to those responses,
they can, I mean it can lead you down a road,
down a spiral so to speak into a place so where
you go from feeling awesome to all of a sudden
you're getting these weird responses on the internet
and you start feeling horrible
about yourself for no real reason.
And you might even be going through
something like this right now, but a funny thing is like
as you start to grow your influence online
in addition to the bad side of it right,
in addition to the side of you know
people saying you suck or they're picking on how you look
or how you say things or whatever it happens to be.
In addition to that you have
the flip side of that coin as well,
which can be equally as damaging but on the other side.
When you start building a following on the internet
and you start getting the numbers that
you're chasing initially when you start a YouTube channel,
when you start getting those numbers
and you start getting the accolades that come
from having a successful YouTube channel
or a big Twitter following or a big Instagram following,
whatever it is for you, when you start having
all of that positive feedback coming in
and people are always saying hey, this is amazing,
this is good, you're helping
or you're getting emails from people
and they're telling you like these changes
that you've helped them make and things like that.
When that stuff starts happening, it can go
the other way to where you start feeling like,
hey I've got a big head in this, right?
It's like wow, I'm like making all of this change
and like I'm helping these people out
and I'm like doing this stuff and that can also be damaging
because what happens is you take your normal self
and again you're attaching to what it is
that you're doing on the internet.
Now of course if you're doing good,
you're doing good and you can embrace that
but on the flip side, you can't let that be who you are.
Like you can't let your videos and the response
that you're getting from your videos
come through the internet and be who you are, so to speak.
Because you're not, you're not your YouTube videos,
you're not your Twitter posts,
you're not your Instagram posts.
Sure you're in your videos,
maybe you're in your Instagram pictures and so on
but that's not who you are.
You are not that stuff, right?
But the thing is, is it's really easy to get caught up
in all of this feedback that you're getting because
before you started doing the online stuff right,
like before you started uploading to YouTube for example
you just had your normal life and you just had your you know
immediate circle of people that you were in contact with
and then now that you're putting yourself
out onto the internet you have an entire world
full of people that are giving you feedback
that are letting you know their thoughts
and they also get to hide behind it
on the internet as well for the negative side.
But on the positive side, again it's something to where
even if you aren't doing well,
you have to manage in your brain
that your YouTube channel and your YouTube success
or your Instagram success or LinkedIn success
or whatever it is that you're doing,
like that is not who you are, right?
It's something that you do and that work that you've put in
has brought you that success but that success
is not who you are as a person.
So if it were to get taken away tomorrow,
you would still be you, but that side
of what it is that you do would be taken away.
I mean don't get me wrong, you know,
having the numbers and stuff, it's cool,
but again it's not who you are.
And the more that you let those numbers
define who that you are, good or bad,
if you let those numbers define who you are,
then you're kinda losing a part of yourself into this
and you become emotionally dependent on it,
which is where the real problems start to happen.
For example, put out a video, does great.
You're like, yes I'm amazing.
Put out a video that does poorly and then you're like,
oh man I suck, that was a bad decision, right?
Now don't get me wrong, there is you know,
hey I need be better at this,
or hey you know okay I'm doin' well, how can I do better?
But the side of directly attaching yourself
to the individual results or the total results
and connecting your self-worth to that
is a really damaging thing to do to your emotional state.
Now another layer of this comes down to your personal time.
And a lot of people struggle with this one, I did as well.
But it comes down to your personal time
because as you start growing your influence
you're gonna have people start reaching out to you
from all over the place because again
you went from having your personal circle of friends
and you know maybe you had like a you know
bigger connection on Facebook but you have like
that tight knit group of people, right?
But then now you are having success on social media
and because of that people are reaching out to you
on Twitter, on Instagram, on Snapchat.
They're sending you emails, they're in your YouTube comments
and all of that, it's important,
and this is gonna sound terrible, but it's really important
that you put up some type of barrier
because you have to protect your personal time.
When it comes to doing all of this stuff, yes of course,
you want to interact with people as much as possible
but set aside time for it, right?
You don't want to constantly be interrupting
your real life experiences interacting on the internet
because you feel, hey these people
are reaching out to me I have to connect with them.
It's good and that's very good practice
but at some point you have to reserve
some of your personal time so that you can,
one remember who you are, right?
And two, so that you can do the things that you want to do
outside of the social media influence
that you're trying to build.
But what I'm telling you here is that it's okay, right?
Like I'm giving you that permission right now,
it's okay to give yourself a barrier of sorts
to where you're protecting some of your personal time
because that personal time
for just managing your own thoughts
and not always being caught up in
what's going on with you know your social media accounts,
like that personal time, like that's where your real
like personal growth is gonna come from
and then when you have that personal growth
then you can apply it to what it is
that you do on social media
which can help you get better results that way.
Instead of just constantly feeling
like a slave so to speak to social media.
So you're creating that separation.
And another thing with creating that space is that it
also becomes difficult to manage things if you don't
because you know as all this stuff goes along,
you know you start getting these additional opportunities
that come in and then of course
managing everything becomes more of a task.
And when you're doing all of that, you know,
if you're constantly working on the feedback side,
then that takes away from the creative side
and from the productive side of actually taking things
farther in what it is that you're doing.
And the cool thing about it,
for the sake of your mental health,
is once you do setup some type of boundaries
with what it is that you're doing
and how much time you allot to social media.
Once you do set up those boundaries,
you can setup exceptions anytime you want.
So let's say for example, you're hanging out on the weekend
or you're hanging out you know some night during the week
and you have some extra time and you think to yourself
you know what, right now I could be doing something else
but I don't really want to do much
so I'm just gonna sit around
and I'm just gonna answer comments for example
or I'm gonna interact a little bit more on Facebook
because at this point in time it's not going to impede
on my social life or the barriers that I've set.
I can bring it down just a little bit for the evening.
But I'm sure you've seen it online,
I'm sure you've seen it when you've been out and about
and so on, like when you start letting this stuff
take over your life so to speak,
you start letting it take up all of your mental space,
what can happen is you're out with your significant other
or you're out with your friends or whatever.
And when you are out in your real life,
what you're doing is you're constantly checking your phone,
you're answering comments while you're sitting there
with your boyfriend or your girlfriend
or when you're hanging with your buddy,
you're sitting there and you're answering comments
or you're you know replying to tweets and things like that,
instead of taking that time to do the healthy thing
for your brain, for your mental state,
which is interact with the people that are
sitting right there in your personal space.
- And I know that this is a little bit ranty,
but stick with me here.
Now another thing that a lot of content creators do,
because we obviously love doing this kind of stuff, right?
Another thing that we often do is we'll do it too much.
So it's like we're always working on video ideas,
we're always making videos,
and we're not takin' much time for ourselves.
And what can happen is there, is especially
if you're somebody that doesn't do this full-time
and you work a job then basically you're going
and you're working your job and then when you come home
you're doing this so it's like you're working two jobs.
And you're not leaving much time for yourself,
which can really, overtime, right?
Maybe in the moment it's like,
okay I'm like doing what I should be doing.
But overtime if you don't pace yourself somewhat,
that can result in burnout
and burnouts like a legit thing.
I went through it on my channel, not this channel,
but I went through it on another channel as well
and during that process I wasn't full-time on YouTube yet.
So I had my design service and then I was doing YouTube
so I was doing basically two full-time jobs
and when I was doing that I just couldn't handle the work.
And that's what it came down to
and it got to the point to where I was
actually not doing the work that I needed to do
because I loved making videos
and it ended up causing me even more stress
than I was dealing with in the moment
because I just wanted to go all in on YouTube
but I just wasn't there yet in the journey.
So it's important to pace yourself.
Don't stop, you know, keep going.
But it's important to pace yourself
and know how much you can handle
or figure out how much you can handle.
And once you kinda take it to that line,
pull it back a little bit to make sure that you can sustain
because the last thing that you want
is to put all of your efforts into something
and all of your passion and your heart into something,
to create something awesome, and you create that
but then you can't hold it together
because you've kind of over committed yourself.
To where it's like, you know I've got this job
and then after this job I come and I make YouTube videos
and then I also go on podcasts and I'm like live streaming
and then I'm like you know interacting
with people on Twitter and Instagram.
And then next thing you know it's like,
wow I'm like not even sleeping as much as I should
because I'm trying to do all of this stuff.
And then you start falling into like depression
or just feeling that extra stress
or whatever it happens to be.
It's not worth it.
Now with that said, of course you know with anything,
you know there's gonna be sacrifices that you have to make
but what I'm saying is you need to
try to find some type of balance.
Of course you're gonna need to put in that extra work.
If you've got a job and you want to do this also,
sure you're gonna have to put in some work
in order to make that happen.
However, putting in work versus over committing yourself
to the point to where you're not even
sleeping enough at night for a long period of time
because you're just trying to this too much,
it's not good for your brain.
Now when it comes to burnout,
one thing that you might want to just be aware of is
like if you start reading your comments
and you start like resenting comments and you start you know
resenting the process of making videos.
You start getting to that point to where you're like,
you know what I don't even want to make a video.
Like when those things start to happen,
you're probably starting to burnout.
Because you know that newness of like,
hey this is great, you know everything's startin' to roll,
like that newness is startin' to wear off
and you're like okay now I'm getting into
like the rhythm of this but it's too much
and because it's too much
it's becoming negative for me in my brain.
So like those are things that you should start looking for
like if you're not enjoying any part of the process
or it becomes something you become resentful at
then you might want to take a step back
and give yourself a little bit of breathing room
for the sake of being able to sustain it longterm.
And with any of this stuff or anything in life really,
like as things start to do well
and you start to get that success,
then you start getting more pressures that come with that.
So make sure that as you are making these transitions
into different phases of your journey,
make sure that you also give yourself space
to kinda work through all of that stuff
and to deal with the pressures as they're coming
so that you don't just grind it all out
and then next thing you know, you wake up one day
and you're like this is, like what have I done?
Right, like I'm not happy, I'm not like enjoying this.
So like make sure that you work yourself through that.
One thing that I do for that is I meditate
and that helps me tremendously.
Another thing that's really important to do
when it comes to your mental state,
is when changes happen on YouTube, instead of going
and consuming all of this content about them
and trying to you know form opinions based on
what all these different creators are saying.
First, take a step back and say okay,
how does this effect me exactly, right?
Is it an inconvenience, is this something that's gonna be
like a destroyer of my channel?
Like what is actually going on here?
Because there's a lot of people that will make videos
and hype up negativity for the sake of getting views.
So because of that, you know you want to make sure
that the content that you're consuming
around this stuff when changes do happen,
that you have your opinion formed first
and then you go through and you start consuming the content.
Because if not, then you're gonna just get bombarded
with all this negativity which typically is just people
hyping everything up to make it seem worse
so that people will watch their videos.
But when it comes to that stuff though you know of course,
you want to be knowledgeable
and you want to know what's
happening in your industry, which is YouTube.
Of course you want to be knowledgeable,
however you just don't want to get caught up
in the drama side of it because as soon as you start
getting caught up in that hype
then it can do some serious damage here
in terms of how you see what's actually happening.
And how you see the opportunities
that you have here as a content creator.
Now there's other sides of this stuff also,
like you know another thing that a lot of people do
is they have like comparisons to where it's like,
oh well they connect themselves not only
to their social media success or failures.
But they also connect them to other people's
which makes it even worse, right?
Because instead of just looking at your own self
and your own improvements and things you can do better,
you're looking at other channels
and you're comparing yourself to them
which is making you feel bad, right?
Because in your brain, you're like
why is it working for them and it's not working for me?
And it could be something that you're not even like seeing
at this point in time but at the end of the day
it's really that they are doing their thing,
they're a totally different person,
doing a totally different type of content.
Even if it's the same genre,
they're still doing it in their way, right?
So it's a different person, doing things their way
and then you're this person doing things your way,
so of course you're gonna get different results.
And without having backend access to a channel,
unless you have stats access to where you can
actually go in and see what's actually happening,
it's not healthy to make comparisons
because when you do that, you're just kind of guessing
on what could possibly be happening on these channels,
compared to yours instead of actually having data
to lean on when it comes to making those assumptions
or forming those ideas.
So make sure to keep your mind together,
but I made a whole video actually
about the whole comparison thing.
You can watch it right here.
And if you have a YouTuber friend,
just pick one YouTuber friend
and share this video with them.
Just because it's important that content creators know
how to manage their mental state
and just be prepared for their YouTube success.
Thanks for watching, I'll see you next time.