Is Linkedin fueling your Career Anxiety? 3 tips to help you tackle this.

Have you ever logged onto Linkedin, scrolled through your feed, and ended up feeling deflated?

Are the reasons you feel deflated due to the following?

• Everyone you see on Linkedin is celebrating some sort of accomplishment.
• People on your feed seem to be progressing way faster in their careers than you are.
• You have started doubting your self worth having witnessed so many shows of success on your feed, even though you're doing fairly okay in your job/career and managing to earn a decent living for yourself?

Don't fret, these feelings of inadequacy and negative self-talk are shared by millions around the world. Before we look forward to how we mitigate these feelings, let's talk about how Linkedin as a platform adds to them

Linkedin is a professional social network. It's a place where professionals come to interact with each other and share their professional stories and updates.

Don't get me wrong, if used correctly, Linkedin is single-handedly the most important vessel of career progression. It can introduce you to people you never thought of and propel your career to the highest of highs.

But, as is the case with most if not all social media platforms, Linkedin is also a place where people can pick and choose what parts of their journey they want to post. What you end up witnessing, more often than not, is people only putting their best foot forward. Your feed is composed of carefully curated content by people acting like their own PR managers.

Let's have a look now at how to fight Linkedin induced career anxiety :

1. Seek inspiration instead of comparison

The only comparison you should seek is one with yourself. As far as your feed is concerned, seek only inspiration.

Although people put up curated content, those celebrations are often on merit. If that is something that invokes feelings of envy in you, a simple change in mentality will make all such celebrations a source of inspiration that you can tap into. Reach out to people you feel are doing, or have done, something worthy and get to know the course of the journey. Do this from a place of being inspired and wanting to learn.

Comparision is the thief of joy - Theodore Roosevelt

2. Acknowledge, then diffuse your feelings.

Acknowledge that you're feeling this way. Come to terms with the fact that you feel like crap at the moment and that there might be feelings of inadequacy, envy, and diminished self-worth.

The very next second, diffuse those thoughts and look for actionable steps to build up your self-confidence. Take small baby steps towards a better version of yourself. The more you're engaged with making yourself better, the less overwhelmed and deflated you will feel.

3. Perhaps, cut down your usage of Linkedin or social media in general.

If you're finding it difficult to shrug those feelings of comparison, competitiveness, and envy, another major step for working towards that is perhaps recalibrating how much time you spend consuming content on these networks. Try reducing your daily consumption and track how that affects your feelings or your mood in general.

Final words

Linkedin is a wonderful platform with capabilities that no other social media network provides. If used in the correct manner, it can leapfrog your career to new possibilities you never imagined were out there. However, with the rise of terms like personal branding, a lot of people on this network are showcasing a selective, carefully curated version of themselves which can induce negative thoughts in the general consumer of their content. Hopefully, the tips mentioned above can help you fact-check your feelings and help you cope whenever you feel a slump in your mood

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.