What To Do When You Go Viral

1. Regulate your nervous system.

Your adrenaline will spike, so take good care of yourself.

Take a walk, stretch, get a hug, lie on the living room floor until you feel better.

When something like this happens, it activates our fight / flight / freeze / fawn nervous system response. You might want to take down every troll in the comments (fight). You might want to run away from the internet forever (flight). You might crawl into bed and not move for hours (freeze). You might try to pacify everyone who shows up (fawn). You might do all of them in quick succession.

Calming the nervous system is one of the most powerful things we can learn for ourselves - and it’s essential when something you put online goes viral and people start attacking you or having a lot of opinions about you out of the clear blue sky.

Some of my favorite ways to regulate the nervous system are:

  1. Get out in nature

  2. Move your body - take a walk, do some yoga, hit the gym, go for a run, dance like an unhinged muppet to your favorite song

  3. Get into water (shower, bath, pool)

  4. Do somatic or nervous system regulating stretches (google to find some ideas)

  5. Breathe - in for 6, hold, out for 8 (or whatever feels right)

  6. Eat something nourishing

  7. Get a hug

There are also some energetic tips in the video at the bottom of this post.

2. Remember that other people's opinions are about them not you.

Full stop, end of story.

Remember that people are viewing you through their own lens, the way they see and understand the world.

If someone calls you a liar, it’s because they’ve been lied to (or are a liar themselves). If someone denies your experience, it’s because they haven’t experienced it for themselves and don’t have the perspective or empathy needed to put themselves in your shoes. If they say “That never happened!” it’s because their life may be so lacking in interest and magic that they don’t believe it’s possible for anyone else. If they call you names, it’s because they’ve been called names and are lashing out.

For some people, being a troll on the internet is the only outlet they have, for their trauma, their rage, their unhappiness. Not that it makes it okay, but it’s helpful to remember that it’s them, not you.

Happy people don’t troll.

3. Decide how you want to respond.

Decide how you want to respond. You get to respond however feels right to you. You can respond to everyone, you can respond to no one, you can block to your heart's content.

I’ll say it again: Do whatever feels right to you.

If you decide to respond, the more you can respond from a place of regulation (take care of that nervous system!) and a place of compassion and desire to understand, the better things will go.

If you don’t want to do all that emotional labor, you don’t have to respond at all.

Remember that the block button exists and you are allowed to block in whatever manner you please. (I block anyone who is mean or feels off.)

(My personal opinion is that the internet trash fire is a reflection of people's trauma, so when we can approach people with kindness and a desire to see and hear them, things often resolve. Unless they're straight trolls. In which case, hello handy block button!)

4. Remember that you’re worthy.

You’re worthy of being seen, being heard, having an opinion, and taking up space on this planet. You don’t have to earn anyone’s respect.

No matter what gets said on the internet, you’re a good person, a worthy human, and you are loved.

Do whatever you need to do to remember that.

5. Viral posts are a flash in the pan.

It may seem endless in the moment, but it will die down and you can go on about your life.

I hope this has been helpful as you navigate the wilds of the internet’s attention!

Sending you lots of love,

Amber

P.S. Want to read my story about going viral for the first time?

This video includes some energetic ways to help you clear your energy from the massive push that is internet attention, so listen to the end if you'd like those tips.

If you've experienced this and want to share something you've learned, leave a comment for anyone else who happens to find this post!

Feeling overwhelmed? need some emotional and energetic support?

As an intuitive and energy healer (with a bit of experience in the realm of The Internet Has a Lot of Opinions About Me Right Now), I’d love to help you regulate your nervous system, receive whatever messages, guidance or wisdom this experience has for you, and help you move forward in a way that feels really good.

We can turn an influx of internet trolls into spiritual and evolutionary gold, my friends.

Spread Your Wings!

We’re expanding into something new. Here’s some guidance on the current energy and how to step into what’s next for you.

(If you’re drawn to this, there’s something here for you - no matter when you run across it.)

Because When You Stop Being Utterly Fascinated By Your Own Life You Have To Find Some Other Way To Occupy Your Time

The more interesting my life gets, the less compelled I feel to write about it. This is new for me, because writing about my life used to be my favorite thing. Mostly because it was how I figured out myself and my world. Either I've gotten speedier at diagnosing the misalignment of my internal cogs or I've stopped caring. But since I love writing, when I stopped being super intrigued by myself, I had to write about something else. So my inner world spit forth a tiny British town full of nattily-dressed raccoons, scone-baking dormice, world-weary lemurs, and not-so-clever foxes. Since I also love this blog and wanted to share, I posted my first raccoon story with zero explanation or introduction, which led one person to wonder if it was some extended animal metaphor for my life. (It was not, though I dearly wish it was.) I presume it lead everyone else who read more than a paragraph to scratch their heads and wonder what sort of illegal substances I've gotten into this time. (None, surprisingly.)

I've written about nine of these animal stories and don't seem to be stopping, so I may keep sharing them here. Or I may not. For everything is subject to my whim and that's the way I like it. It seems to be shaping into a series of stories for kids in the six to ten range, so if you have one of those and think they might like reading/hearing about raccoons and displaced giraffes, let me know and I will send you chapters as I finish them.

My other project has been creating a youtube series with my friend Ben. He's an official licensed-in-the-state-of-California therapist. I'm not licensed to do anything in the state of California except drive and even that seems a bit questionable at times. But if you spend a great deal of your life trying to figure yourself and the world out, you end up with a lot of opinions. So we turned on the camera and started talking about things like making friends and rejection and finding your life purpose.

Someone called it Car Talk for Therapists, which tickled the hell out of me because I always loved Car Talk. I couldn't care less about cars, but they always sounded like they were having so much fun. That's sort of what we're hoping will happen with this - we find ourselves very entertaining, thank you - but we're still experimenting. The videos are here, if you're interested. Now that we've made a bunch of them, we're looking for ways to make them as fun and useful as possible. Suggestions and heckling welcome. 

Adventure Project #30: Busting Through Self-Spackled Walls

I started doing these videos and then I stopped doing them and then I started again and that's mostly the process of doing something new and intimidating. You start, you ride the high, the high drops to a plateau, the plateau feels flat because that's how plateaus work, and you wander off in search of higher ground. Or you invent drama to give yourself an excuse to wander off, which is what I did. Boy drama, specifically, because that's my favorite kind. You can excuse yourself for a lot of things when boy drama is happening. But you know what doesn't help the drama? Excusing yourself. Because that makes you less you. Because doing the things you love keeps your engagement with life at a steady burn and being engaged with life makes everything better, especially drama you invented because you wanted to give yourself some faux high ground. Or maybe you invent drama because you hit your upper limit of excitement and feel a subconscious yearning to drag yourself back down to a more understandable level.

When I find a foolproof formula for raising the excitement ceiling and squishing the drama, I'll let you know. For now, it seems to boil down to "do your shit and let yourself feel as good as you can as much of the time as possible."

So here I am, back to talking with my face about my process of doing scary things like becoming the person and the writer I want to be and, yes, that is scary. I'm also putting them here now, because that's a bit more commitment than just throwing them up on youtube and hoping nobody notices.

Sometimes I doubt the value of the writing I do here under the juggling panda and the face talking I do on youtube. Because my external notion of what's "valuable" doesn't always match up with what my insides tell me is worthwhile.

But I do believe there's value in sharing experiences. Because if you share, you and whoever's feeling reflected in that experience both get to feel less alone. Because emotions and the wrangling thereof aren't discussed nearly enough in our culture. Because if I feel it, someone else out there feels it too. Maybe that someone is you. I am not nearly the special feelings snowflake I thought I was. If I feel scared and lonely and joyful and overwhelmed and stuffed with love for things, you probably do as well. And the more we talk about who we want to be and what we love, the more connected we are. In the end, that's all any of us want: to feel love, to feel connected, to just plain feel.