A Yoga Teacher’s Struggles with Social Media
How To Be in Peace With Ourselves When We Feel Obliged To Use Social Media
I recently talked with one of my students who told me he didn’t have a Facebook account, by choice. He was my age, so I was surprised, it is not common, especially in Israel. I asked him if he had the feeling of “missing” something, he told me that it could happen but that most of the time, not really. He even seemed to be more happy without actually. I was blown away by his choice and felt that I wanted to be like him, to be away from Facebook, Instagram and keep living my life as it was before I fall into those virtual social “traps”.
He also told me that many applications were designed in collaboration with psychologists and neuro-scientists to develop some addictions in the brains of their users. For example, the scrolling-down action, instead of having to click on a button to go to the next picture is a very powerful way to keep us scrolling and scrolling, as we always want to see more, almost mechanically, without any awareness in our actions. Getting Likes on Instagram, Facebook, Tweeter is very addictive and it releases in the body the same hormones that are released when we consume drugs or smoke a cigarette, the chemical which is associated with pleasure, the dopamine.
This conversation also reminded me a Ted Talk I watched the week before, from Adam Walter called “Why our screens make us less happy”. One of the idea he shared there was that in almost every business industries, people were trying their own products to make sure they were good enough to be sold to others. It’s called the “dog-fooding” strategy, in reference to the chairman of a dog food company who got convinced that he had to taste his products to demonstrate that if it was good for him, it was good for dogs.
The exception to this rule was the screen-based tech industry. Steve Jobs didn’t give an iPad to his kids to play and limited how much technology his kids was using at home when he released the iPad in 2010 because he knew how bad it was for them. This is pretty scaring when I think about it.
When My Job Was To Be On Social Media
In the last few months, I spent a lot of time on social media. I actually had to do it because of my job. I was working in a start-up and part of my job was to manage its Facebook page. Some people would find this job pretty cool but I actually hated it. I was spending hours on Facebook and Instagram looking for some interesting contents to share on my company Facebook page. I was posting things that I found desperately meaningless and googling questions such as “what is the best time to post on Instagram?”, “How to have more likes on Facebook?”. It was driving me nuts and my soul expectancy was going down day after day.
I was looking for influencers on social media, digital nomads who were traveling the world, who were making a living from showing the best aspects of their lives and were sponsored by various companies to use and write about their products. It was truly inspiring to see people living this lifetsyle, yet it was a torture to sit on a chair in front of a screen eight hours a day, watching at their lives while I had the feeling I was wasting mine.
I started to compare myself and to think about the past, when I also was a free-spirit traveling the world and living my dreams. I was not living the instant present, and worst, I was watching other people’s lives, which were things that I had stopped doing after I started yoga.
After my stay in India, I thought I was « immunized » against those patterns of habits but I realized that the path to freedom through yoga was far from being a linear process but was instead a lifetime process that could easily be challenged by new situations and circumstances in life.
The Dilemma as a Yoga Teacher To use Social Media
I eventually ended up quitting this job but the short time I spent there have been quiet damaging and I started to question more and more about the use of the social media and my relationship with them. Even after I have quit this job, I kept the habit to spend time on social media and I was experiencing some mix feeling of guilt and pleasure, thinking that I was wasting my time but at the same time I could not resist the craving for it. This would just make me take my phone almost automatically and scrolling down the flow of new feeds on Facebook or Instagram.
As a yoga teacher, I paradoxically started to feel the growing necessity to be present on social media to promote myself in a new country where I didn’t have much network and friends. I became more and more convinced that a yoga teacher needs to master the art of social media to get attention and “differentiate” him/herself among the mass of all the existing instructors. This differentiation is based on a superficial layer, I don’t say that a yoga teacher who will master the social media will be a good teacher but it seems to me to be a prerequisite to get attention as a new yoga teacher.
I never was against social media, I actually quite like to spend time on it, to follow my favorite people’s pages where I could find inspirational and useful information. I found them really useful to share pictures with my families and friends all over the world. But I was always very cautious about protecting my privacy. For example, my Facebook profile’s settings were all set in a way that only close friends and family would see my posts and pictures. It took me a while to make the move and create a Facebook business page, since the idea to make myself public to everyone was scaring. But at the same time I felt I had to do it if I wanted to start advertising myself as an independent yoga teacher.
Diving Deeper Into the “Insta World” and Using a Lots of #Hashtags
As I launched my website and blog, I started to become more active on Instagram, I didn’t want to have a dormant account so I tried to post as regularly as I could even though it was more of an effort than a real pleasure at the beginning. I went from making my Instagram profile private to public, and this simple thing was again a big decision for me and it took me a while to do the move. But I thought that I didn’t have anything to hide in the end as my life was already quiet publicly displayed on my newly launched blog.
Once I started to dive into the “Insta world”, I realized that there was a whole world out there with its own language, codes and communities. It was a place that brought together yogis from all over the world, that allowed them to “know each other” and connect by the simple touch of the screen. I found this idea very powerful and I liked this feeling to be part of this community.
So I started to “play” and experience what was Instagram, not only in my private circle of contacts but in the whole community of the Instagram users, especially the yogi community. I started by posting pictures or videos of me doing yoga poses in nice settings, using hashtags such as #yogaeverydamnday. I never really connected with this hashtag idea and I realized that I was just trying to fit into the mold of the Insta rules. I was also taking it like a sort of experiment to see what people actually like to see on Instagram, and it seems people liked those kind of pictures.
I realized that it was opposite for me, I didn’t find any inspiration looking at pictures of people that I didn’t know doing nice yoga poses in beautiful settings, instead I would feel more inspired by friend’s posts, travel posts, funny quotes or cooking recipes. I found how that Instagram could bring me something and inspire me without giving a feeling of guiltiness, not being there just because I had to, or because I have nothing else to do, but because I consciously choose to do so.
Why I Realized I Preferred to Stay Away From Social Media
The thing that I found out after playing on Instagram is that it really became addictive, it just feels good to see that people like your posts and you can really forget the outside world, having the illusion to have many people who like what you are doing. It reminds me about a friend of a friend whom I met recently. This friend was getting paid by YouTube and Instagram for her contents. My friend later told me that she had hundred of thousands of followers on Instagram and was traveling often for her job. But she also told me that she in was quiet lonely in her real life and didn't have many friends. She was also very dependent upon the numbers of likes and followers on her account , her mood would just follow the curve of this trend day by day and she could get really sad and upset if one day there would be many people starting unfollow her. Those numbers sadly became the way how we measure our “success” in those virtual platforms.
It makes me realize our dependence toward it and the importance to make a clear distinction between the real life and what happen behind the screen. I also realized that social media will never replace the pleasure for me to teach yoga in the nature, meet my students in beautiful settings, having picnics after class and possibly making real friends in the real life. It is not something that I want to compare, both are not opposed and can be used together. I just want to emphasize that I try to use social media just as a tool to achieve this second purpose and knowing why and how to use them with this clear objective helps me to stay focus.
Blogging Is The Middle Way I Found
Creating my blog was a step further in the process of publicly sharing information about myself but I found out that blogging was a way for me to reconcile with the screen and the virtual world, to go beyond the static image of a picture or an accelerated video, by expressing myself with words. I found out that writing was very therapeutic and releasing. I later also realized the power that words could have on people. After I shared a post about my personal yoga journey and about chasing our dreams, I received many messages from people all over the world who were saying thank you for writing this post, telling me that they were resonating with its content. It was so empowering to read those messages and to know that by the simple touch of your keyboard, telling about your personal stories could inspire and maybe help other people across the globe.
So I don’t want to blame everything about social media, they are the vehicles to spread positive messages around the world, to share with people that you would have otherwise never meet. They are a wonderful tool if you decide to use them with awareness. I do think they can be powerful tools that we should use but like everything else, with moderation and with a clear objective of why and how. I have accepted the idea that sometimes I can spend time on social medias and I try no to judge myself for doing it. And this post is not about telling if it is right or wrong to use social media, I am the first one who does use them and I openly acknowledge it. It is simply a honest sharing of the internal conflict that it has, at some point, created in my mind and my soul. Sharing my thoughts can be a good therapy and I hope it can also helps you if you have the same dilemma.
Thank you for reading this post, I would be happy to hear your feedback, comments or questions.
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