MBW Views is a series of exclusive op/eds from eminent music industry people… with something to say. The following is an extract from Sound Advice, a health-focused career guide for artists, written by MBW Contributing Editor Rhian Jones and performance health and psychology coach Lucy Heyman.
The book covers the mental and physical health problems research suggests musicians might come up against and offers lots of tools and techniques to help aid prevention. Its international edition, aimed at people outside of the UK, lands on November 14, published by Shoreditch Press. This version has been supported by UMG, Sony Music and WMG in the US.
Expect original interviews with leading researchers, health experts, business execs and a host of artists including Laura Mvula, Imogen Heap, Wayne Hector, MNEK, Nina Nesbitt, Ella Eyre, Jonathan Higgs, Lady Leshurr, and many others. Also included are quotes and advice from a long list of globally successful acts like Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift, Alicia Keys, Justin Bieber, Demi Lovato, Ed Sheeran, JoJo, Lily Allen, Amanda Palmer and Matty Healy.
What could be more relaxing than kicking back after a long day and scrolling through hundreds of people doing exciting and cool things with their lives while your own life seems comparatively boring and full of failure? About three million things, to be frank! It’s all well and good to suggest you rise above it, that you be happy for other people, that you count your blessings and are grateful for what you’ve got. But in truth, it’s tough to do that when a band or artist you see as a peer is doing all the things you want to be doing, or is getting all the reviews you think you should be getting, or has been added to New Music Friday playlists when you haven’t.
Compare and despair can be an easy pattern to fall into when using social media, as the BRIT Award-winning singer and songwriter Mabel discovered at the beginning of her career. “I was in quite a destructive phase [with social media] when I was really addicted to it,” is her recollection. “‘This artist is doing that, she’s wearing this, she played that show.’ It was really holding me back from being the best I could be because I was focused on other people’s journeys and not my own.”
But as fellow singer and songwriter Nina Nesbitt points out, it’s important to remember that everyone is probably going through the same thing and yes, that means even those who look like they’re hashtag-winning. “I think sitting on Instagram looking at other artists is very tempting, what are they up to, what have they done? But at the end of the day, I hang out with a lot of these artists and they’re all thinking the same thing, like how to break through or is the music I’m putting out good enough, is it getting enough streams? Everyone’s facing the same thing. So try and not get carried away with what you see online and just work hard and love what you do.”
No matter what level you’re at, there’s always going to be another mountain. As Miley Cyrus once noted: it’s the climb.
Unless you’ve got a Buddhist level of enlightenment — unlikely unless you were practising as a very advanced and spiritual child — one solution is to simply avoid looking. Just don’t follow people whose posts result in negative feelings of comparison. If it’s awkward not to follow them, there are ways of muting or removing them from your feed, depending on the platform. (Don’t accidentally block them though — that could cause untold drama.) Composer and producer Hannah Peel has the ‘ignorance is bliss’ mode finely honed. She says:
“I sometimes don’t even look at my social media feed because it can affect your ability to create, how you feel, or your self-worth when you see all these amazing things. One of the phrases that should be implanted in everyone’s minds somehow is ‘all that glitters is not gold’. Behind every tweet that says, ‘Hey, I’ve got a gig or have composed this’, is probably 50 hours of work and people don’t see that side of things. It just looks like someone is doing really well or they are really beautiful but have actually been transformed by an app!”
If unfollowing or muting doesn’t work for you, another option is to put the more superficial solution to one side and dig deeper: to go to the root of the problem and to work out what it is that’s causing those negative feelings. Using that information, you can take action that may be more meaningful and more helpful in the long run.
Comparison coach Lucy Sheridan, who helps people get out of the compare and despair pattern, takes a different approach. She says the jealousy and envy that sometimes arise as a result of scrolling through social media are signals that perhaps you have an unmet need you can take steps to address. “I try and manage my way through it,” she says of her social media strategy. “What is this trying to tell me? Because yes, I can be jealous of seeing someone checking into a departure lounge because they are going on holiday again and maybe I haven’t had any time off in months and months. I can keep feeding this beast within me that will never actually feel full or I can follow it through and say to myself with kindness: ‘Well, so what? What are those holiday pictures telling you about something you can do in support of yourself?’ So what I know it’s telling me is: ‘Okay Lucy, book a holiday, no one is going to give you a medal if you work another Saturday.’
“It’s like a puzzle — go in, get your information and then get out of there and do something with it. When we are in those moments of feeling down, these horrible friends of social media comparison come into play like envy and jealousy. There is nothing wrong with any of that, because they are our feelings and they are valid, but instead of it taking us ten feet down, it can take us seven and a half feet down and we can come back up again. Things can feel very different there.”
Beyond that, try to understand that what you see online is not real life. Like Peel said, images are airbrushed and filtered, years of work and disappointment may have gone into that one exciting announcement, and it’s impossible to gauge whether emojis are genuinely representative of how that person is feeling at the time. Mabel continues:
“You have to remember that it’s the highlights we’re seeing. On my page if you looked at it you’d be like, she just did a big awards show, she smashed it, but you wouldn’t know that two days before I was crying about it, or stressed about it, or all the dramas about my outfit. It’s so important to remind ourselves that what we are looking at are the highlights of somebody’s life and we don’t see the fact that maybe they woke up feeling another type of way today.”
Ben Anderson, who spent five years building up British band Rudimental’s social media presence, agrees that awareness regarding the lack of reality on social media is imperative if you want to get out of that comparative mindset. He explains:
“Social media is like an advert — so look at it actively rather than passively. Someone on social media might be objectively one of the most beautiful people in the world but even they have to airbrush their image to make themselves look more beautiful or to present this image of perfection. If they can’t maintain that then how are you expected to, and is that even what you want? When you are consuming stuff, if you understand that it’s not real, it’s a fake perception of reality and those people are ideal selves, they are projections, you can kind of disengage with it a little bit. You might as well be looking at a cartoon! Also, the stronger those foundations are of who you are, who you want to be and what you stand for, the easier it is for you to protect yourself.”
If you find yourself getting into the habit of comparison, try and find clarity in the knowledge that your life is the only one you can live. Whichever struggles you’re facing, yours is a completely unique journey that’s probably being coveted by others too. It’s also worth remembering that studies have shown again and again that once we have our basic needs met, along with a certain level of income, it’s the things we can’t buy that make us happy. According to the Harvard Study on Adult Development, which tracked 724 adults over 75 years, good quality close relationships are the crux of what keep us happier, healthier, and living for longer. So it’s going to pay off massively in the long run to invest your energy into positive relationships in the real world, instead of working on increasing your follower count in the online world and dealing with negative feelings that arise as a result of scrolling through Instagram.
Finding it difficult to watch endless highlight reels? Instead of following peers, perhaps curate your feed like it’s a magazine designed especially for you. Follow the people who inspire you, accounts posting motivational quotes, funny memes, beautiful pictures, great recipes, cute animals, or whatever else sparks positivity.
HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?
As has been widely discussed in recent years, social media platforms have been engineered by smart people in Silicon Valley to be highly attractive to our primal need for acceptance and validation. That’s to make sure that we spend as much time as possible on them, meaning in turn that advertisers spend more money. We see a like or a follow, a red heart or a thumbs-up, and our brain gets a dopamine boost that’s associated with pleasure and social acceptance. The same thing happens for other addictive stuff like drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, which is why it’s quite easy to waste hours stuck in an online feedback loop searching for those little hits of satisfaction. That’s largely a total waste of time, distracts us from the thing that actually makes us happy — real-life human connection — and shifts focus from what’s going to result in a long and sustainable career and personal fulfilment: in this case, making good music. As singer, songwriter and BRIT-winner Ella Eyre puts it: “I think for me a lot of my stress [with social media] is built up by having to be creative on another platform that actually doesn’t really help me financially. We put a lot of time and pressure on ourselves to make our social media the best it can be, but at the end of the day, it’s a vanity project.”
So how much time online is too much time online? According to GlobalWebIndex, the global average time spent on social media per day, per person, is two hours and 24 minutes. The point at which that time can have a negative impact on mental wellbeing is between the two and three-hour mark, as revealed in a study by researchers at the University of Oxford in 2017. Another research project by academics at the University of Pennsylvania suggested that keeping use down to 30 minutes a day can lead to better mental health outcomes and a reduction in loneliness, depression, anxiety, and the less clinically recognised, but nonetheless very real condition of FOMO (fear of missing out). Those recommendations are a loose guide that depend on the quality of time spent online — an hour spent messaging friends on Instagram is unlikely to be as detrimental as five minutes arguing with a racist on Twitter or ten minutes investigating an ex’s new partner. But it’s clear that there is such a thing as too much, which is why it’s important to check in with how something is making you feel while you’re using it. Stephen Buckley from mental health charity Mind says red flags to look out for include “disconnecting from relationships with your friends, family members, or colleagues” and “sleep and rest being impacted as a result of spending too much time looking at a screen.”
Some of that advice can apply to anyone, regardless of job — but it’s more complicated for musicians for whom social media is now part of the job. That said, there are still ways to limit the time you spend on socials and creating a manageable relationship with your online profiles will allow you to get on with being creative elsewhere. Working smart and approaching social media as a task to complete in a limited amount of time as part of your working day can help avoid wasting hours in an online loop. So have a daily plan of what you want to do on there, perhaps focusing posts on those three pillars that Anderson outlined earlier — your identity as an artist, the world/scene you’re relevant to or operating in, and what you’re promoting.
Then, have a weekly check-in to sit down and think about whether that plan is working for you and tweak it accordingly. Do you find it easier to get social media out of the way first thing in the morning, for example? Or is it best to split up one hour into twenty minutes at the beginning, middle, and end of the day? Do you prefer to store up a bank of content to post as you go about the rest of your work? Is it possible to dedicate a day to filming and photographing in various places to then post over the coming weeks? Before you go to an event or gig, is there a specific post you want to get out of that experience? That could be a shot of you performing, or with someone you admire, or a live behind-the-scenes video. Having an organised schedule and focused strategy about what sort of thing you’re publishing can also avoid that all too common procrastination due to being indecisive over what to post.
Moreover, if you’ve finely honed your online voice, it’s easier to hand over your account to be managed by someone else without losing authenticity (which may well sound absurd — but you might be surprised to find out how many of the artists you’re following on social media have already taken that leap).
Ella Eyre is one such artist and finds that having a plan and people to help facilitate that has helped her manage the pressure that she feels to be ‘always on’. She explains:
“I’ve found that having a plan in place that’s focused on a schedule works. So if I’m in the middle of releasing [new music], which makes life a lot easier because there is a point to posts, it’s about having a team of people around you who are helping. They make sure that the engagement and posts and content are there whether or not I’m 100% there. It’s helped me have a much more positive and relaxed relationship with social media because I’m not panicking and stressing about it all the time. It’s not just me having to come up with a caption that engages well and has a point to it and hopefully promotes me in some way.”
A word of warning: if you do hand your accounts over to someone else to manage, make sure they are linked to your email address and that you have all the passwords. If they are registered with someone you work with, and that business relationship sours, you could lose all the hard work that’s been put into building your fanbase online.
For Eyre, having a posting plan for the coming week helps her focus her creative efforts elsewhere, and that’s something anyone can do whether they have a team or not. She continues: “It really helps to know what’s going to happen that week before the week has started. Then I can focus on the part of my job which is being creative in the studio or being on stage, as opposed to worrying about how many likes my gif has got from the video.”
If you’re frequently finding yourself stuck in that online loop, take a break. Go cold turkey and delete the apps from your phone. The world isn’t going to stop turning and your career will go on if you’re not posting for a week or two. It might be difficult at first, but if you can move past the initial FOMO, tranquillity will eventually arrive. There are some great apps out there like Buffer that can queue up posts to be published throughout the day. You can log in first thing in the morning, create a few posts for that day or week, and leave it to do its thing while you get on with life in the real world. If you do need to be on social media every day, carve out specific times to do that work, then close the apps and move onto something else. Some artists find that removing apps from their phone and only using socials on a laptop, or moving them into a folder three home screens deep, reduces temptation.
Music Business Worldwide