 Hello, my beautiful internet friends. Welcome back. Thank you for joining me here today. This video is gonna be a little bit different for my channel. This is a subject that I'm very passionate about. I absolutely love talking about YouTube. I don't get many opportunities to do it in my normal daily life, because not a lot of people around me really know or care that much about YouTube itself, but maintaining good mental health while being a YouTube creator can be a real challenge. And I don't think it's something that there are a lot of resources for or something that even on YouTube we talk a whole lot about. So this video is gonna be about my experience trying to maintain good mental health as someone who has struggled with mental illnesses and finding the balancing point there. If you are not a creator yourself and you have absolutely no interest in it, I think this video might be interesting for you still to understand a little bit more about what happens behind the scenes for the people that you watch on the screen. And if you're considering starting a channel, if you have a small channel, if you have a huge channel, these are my two cents when it comes to taking care of your brain while making content for other people. I've been on YouTube now for two years. I have done this merely full-time for about a year. I have a full-time job as well outside of this, but this is something that I absolutely love. It brings me so much joy, but it has brought a lot of challenges as well. And I've had to figure out how to balance things. You know what containers to put different things in my mind when it came to challenges on YouTube. So these are my thoughts. These are my recommendations and some things to consider. Whether you have a channel, whether you don't, maybe you're thinking of starting one, which I think is fantastic. Without further ado, let's dive in. The first thing that jumps to my mind when I think of mental health as a YouTuber is the things that people say to you. And I think we're all very aware of trolls. That's what we like to call them, right? But the things that people say that are less than kind. And oftentimes I hear my favorite creators say things like the comments don't get to me or I just ignore them or whatever. And maybe that's true for those people, but I can tell you from my own personal experience, there are certain things that people will say to you that are going to hurt, that will hit on that insecurity and just cut you open a little bit and you'll want to respond and should you respond or should you not respond. What I have actually found to be helpful for me personally is to first of all, take notice when something bothers me and not to pretend that it doesn't. I almost feel shame in admitting the fact that internet comments have hurt me, have gotten to me, have ruined some days, but it's the reality of the situation. So first of all, notice that, recognize it and what has helped me is to dig into why that is. I'll give you an example. One thing that people said a lot when I first started my channel and it blew up is they called me an idiot for the decision that I made because I had to make a decision to actually amputate my leg for a chance at a pain less or less pain in my life and so many people were like, your leg doesn't even look bad. Like this was a stupid decision to make or didn't you look at any other options? It was like suggesting that I made this decision lightly and it made me so upset, right? It's something that someone typed for two seconds. They didn't think much about it, but it got to me and I had to think about why it got to me and the reason it got to me is because I didn't know if I made the right decision. Like this was months after I lost my leg and I'm dealing with the aftermath of how overwhelming everything is and people are telling me I'm an idiot for making this decision and I had to put that in perspective and realize that they were hitting on insecurity, that I was scared, maybe I'd made the wrong choice and that it was gonna be okay eventually. So realizing why things bothered me was really helpful and maybe that will help you too if people say things that are just unkind and not great. The last thing that I would say, which has probably been the most powerful for me, is when I've chosen to engage with people who are not being nice to me, oftentimes I find out very quickly there's literally nothing to do with me at all. Even when people say very pointedly mean things against me, we start a conversation in the comment section and I realize that this relates to something deeply painful in their own lives and I'm taking it personally because it was aimed personally, but they're just typing on a comment to work out some deep pain in their own lives and that's also helped me kind of put things into perspective when I see angry comments that this person is probably dealing with something. The next thing that really comes to mind when it comes to mental health on YouTube is the numbers. I am not a fiercely competitive person, generally speaking. I mean, I have like a healthy level of competition in me, but it's not what drives me and yet numbers on YouTube are ridiculously easy to obsess over. There is a period of time where my channel had blown up, I had like a ridiculous amount of views on subscribers in a couple months, which is not normal to have happened and then it completely plateaued and then I started losing people and I kept looking at those numbers over and over and over and being, you know, every day I'd be like, I lost 30 more people, okay, what am I doing wrong? And that just messed with me. That would make parts of my day unhappy. I'd feel like I was failing because the numbers weren't exactly where I wanted them to be and so on and so forth and what I really had to do is take a step back and be like, while numbers are cool, while analytics are important, what's actually important is the community. What's actually important is what I'm saying and why I'm saying it and so I stopped looking at numbers and I started looking a lot more at comments. I'd screenshot comments that people left that were edifying to me, that were encouraging to me, that were people were sharing their stories and I kept those in a folder on my desktop and so whenever I started getting freaked out about like, I don't know what I'm doing or I'm making terrible videos because 30 people out of 50,000 left, I'd look through those comments of individual people choosing to say kind things to me about what I was doing and focus on those people and that was it and ironically when I started doing that, when I let go of that pressure that was just like eating me to get higher and higher numbers because that's the game on YouTube, right? That's what you're supposed to do. A, I got a lot happier. B, I feel like my videos got better and C, eventually the numbers sped up again when I stopped caring so much about them. I think you need to decide how much weight you actually wanna give, views and analytics and subscribers. Yes, they matter but if looking at them as having a negative impact on your mental health, channel that somewhere else, folder on my desktop with messages and comments from people who I knew I was positively impacting, worked for me to kind of redirect my energy and my attention that direction, something else may work for you. Now let's talk about upload schedules. One of the things that you will hear over and over and over and over again, if you listen to people about how to grow your YouTube channel is that you have to pick an upload schedule and you have to stick with it. Sticking to some kind of upload schedule is universally accepted as the thing to do on YouTube. I do it myself. I've never announced it on this channel because I didn't want to have to stick to it for other people, I wanted to stick to it for myself but I upload a video pretty much every other day. Pretty much for a year I've uploaded a video every other day which is a pretty rigorous upload schedule and what people drive into you is like don't miss that day. Do not miss whatever upload day you've chosen. If you're gonna upload every Sunday, make sure you make that happen. And while I would say that it is really important for channel growth, do not prioritize that above your mental health. I could think of a number of times where I've sacrificed things in my life that I should not have to get a video up because I love it and because I care about it and because I'm like, you know what, I'm just gonna spend the next two hours getting this edited and uploaded and out and then I'll be good to go where I really should have been paying attention to what I was feeling. I was using it as a mechanism to disengage from life and to not pay attention to the fact that I was like sinking in depression and needed to pay attention to that or I'd let it really stress me out. Like I have to get this video out. You know, no one else knows about this deadline except for me but I absolutely have to do this. I told myself I was going to, I'm not gonna let myself down. You know, like all that kind of aggressive negative self-talk where frankly, what's gonna happen if I don't upload that video? Nothing, nothing is gonna happen. Putting it into perspective I think is important. I know I've definitely blown getting a video out out of proportion and it's had a negative impact on my mental health so while picking an upload schedule and sticking to it is something I would recommend. Also know that you can break that and nothing bad is gonna happen. It's okay to take time off. There's also this myth which I think is actually reality to some extent that if you take a break from YouTube, YouTube's gonna like punish your channel basically. When I went to Ireland and it wasn't uploading videos for like two weeks, you could see in my analytics that there is a distinctive dip when I was gone and when I wasn't uploading, which only makes sense and it freaked me out and I was scared about the numbers and all of that. I was like, I can never do that again but that's not how people work. We have to have a break from things. We have to disengage from things to stay healthy. If you want A, your mind to stay healthy but B also your creativity and your content itself to stay fresh and what you started out to create take breaks when you need breaks. In the end, it's worth it. In the short term, you might see a little bit of a dip in numbers but take care of yourself first and foremost. I feel like on YouTube, it's been hard for me to find communities and creators who I feel like are their true selves. There's a lot of great content here on YouTube but it seems a little bit fake, a little bit put on. That's never what I wanted my channel to be and so I've had vulnerable videos, I've had vulnerable moments and I've tried to stay as authentic on camera as I possibly can be. Like what you see on your screen is who you're gonna meet in person and I'm gonna give this next piece of advice assuming that's what you wanna do as well though that's definitely not the case for everybody so tune out for the next minute if that isn't you. How do you be vulnerable on camera? That's something a lot of people have asked me about and I think we commonly think in all or nothing scenarios like I have to bear my soul to the world or pretend like everything's totally okay. Realizing that you can do it in little bits and pieces. Like if you wanna share more of yourself with your audience if you wanna be more open with your audience about something that's going on or something you've struggled with or something you love, you know, whatever that is it's okay to take it in stages. I think it's a legitimate fear to be scared of opening up online. People are not always kind but in my personal opinion it's always worth it in the end. So experiment around with it. If for instance you wanna talk about mental health that's what I have experience in. Instead of maybe doing a video about your lifelong struggle with feeling the blank depression or anxiety maybe just mention it in a video. Feel free to take it in stages. There's only one video that I've ever removed from the internet and it was on my TraumaTalk channel. I thought that I was able to handle something that was a little bit too close to home and so when people started commenting on it I got really upset. It activated some PTSD that I thought was worked through that wasn't and I felt like I had to keep that video up. I want people to hear this message but it was messing me up so much. I felt so exposed and eventually I made that video private. I realized that there was no shame in dialing things back. I've had to realize that I don't have to force myself to be open if I'm not comfortable with it. Maybe experiment and push yourself to be vulnerable or talk about something that you wanna talk about but it's hard to talk about but remember that you don't owe anybody anything. You don't owe people your story. You don't owe people the deep dark depths of your soul on camera and you get to choose how you wanna present yourself and how much of your story you actually wanna share. I feel like YouTube is a very unique, specific thing to do that if you don't do it yourself you maybe don't totally understand everything that goes into it and how much it takes and also all the cool stuff about it and all the intricacies of it and all of that and finding someone to talk to was so helpful. Messaging fellow creators and being like hey is this something you've dealt with or like how did you deal with it when people fill in the blank or what do you think about the new policy changes on YouTube or whatever. Finding people you can actually communicate with about YouTube has been incredible for my mental health. I have a good friend in real life who I talk to about YouTube all the time and then I have a number of online YouTube friends who are YouTubers, who are content creators and having that outlet of people who are in the community and understand some of the specific challenges without you having to explain it has been a godsend when it came to my mental health on YouTube. I would encourage you to find the same thing. Message creators who are in your area or talk about the same things that you talk about and make a connection, build a friendship with them, collaborate, but go further than that. Don't just do it for your channel, do it for yourself, do it for the connection. Taking YouTube out of just my house alone and actually being able to talk to real people about it has made all the difference because it's a very lonely thing to do. It's a very lonely career to have. It's absolutely beautiful and I love it. It's, I can't speak highly enough about how grateful I am to be able to do this, but it is really lonely. And I think one of the ways you can combat that is by connecting with people who do the same thing that you do. It's like talking to coworkers. I'm not sure about you, but I have personally found that there's often a lot of pressure to make a certain kind of content. And while this may not necessarily relate entirely to mental health for me, it does. I've experienced pushback when I've spoken on certain things, right? People being like, you know, we don't wanna hear this from you and that's okay. I'm happy to respect someone else's opinion, but if you wanna do this and you wanna do this long term, I think it's really important that you determine for yourself why you're doing this and what you want out of it so that when you're faced with those questions, like terrible audio quality from dogs walking around in the background, so when you're faced with those questions, you have some kind of mental roadmap. For instance, for me, when my videos took off, a lot of people saw me as this inspirational, positive character. And so when I started releasing videos that they hadn't maybe gone far enough back on my channel to see about how things were really hard and I was struggling, people would tell me, we don't wanna hear that from you or, you know, that doesn't look good or, you know, that's not a great representation of being an APT or whatever that is. And that's totally fine, except that I didn't set out to become any kind of representative. I set out to tell my story and that's what I'm doing. And so having a platform to come back to of why you're doing what you're doing, when you face criticism, when you face pushback, when you face whatever it is that you face, I think is really important. It's helped me a lot. And when I've listened to that and continued to come back to the reason that I started this, the reason that I'm doing this, I've enjoyed this process. It's benefited me instead of being a source of stress. Along with the cautions, I think that there are also really positive mental health benefits to being on YouTube and these are some of them at least for me. First of all, it's been something for me to focus on. As someone who is dealt with depression and anxiety and panic attacks and PTSD, it's great to have something to channel my energy into. It's great to have a reason to make myself get out of bed on the days that I have to get out of bed. It's helped me in my healing process, healing from my amputation surgery because I wanted to make cool videos but I was terrified to go outside and making the cool video trumped the terror I felt of being stared at in public. And so by making videos for this channel, I overcame some very serious fears in a really positive, healthy, happy way. Another thing is YouTube helps me realize again and again that I'm not alone. Whether I'm putting words to the things that I'm experiencing and people in the comments section are like, hey, I get that, I've been there too, you're not alone, or I'm finding other creators and I'm watching their videos where I'm like, that's exactly it. There's this community that's built and it's helped me realize again and again that I am not the only person experiencing what I'm experiencing and there is so much power in that. It can be a really great community and awesome source of support, but the only caveat I would add there is it's not everything that you need. Talking to people in real life, having real life friendships, seeing people face to face, looking in their eyes is really important as well. And so YouTube is great and it helps me in so many ways but real life has to take a bigger part all the time. So what do you think about mental health on YouTube? Are you a YouTuber? Are you considering starting a channel? What are some of the challenges for you? Or what are some of the joys? I would love to hear from you in the comment section down below. If you're a regular on my channel, I really appreciate you sticking around to the end of this video because this is very not my usual kind of content, but I absolutely love YouTube. I love the creativity. I love the ability to create whatever you wanna create. Oh, my dogs are driving me nuts with this audio. Puppies, can you stop walking around on hardwood floors? We're just, it's not gonna happen. They're very hungry puppies. I'm gonna go feed the dogs so they stop being crazy. I love you guys, I'm thinking of you and I will see you in the next video. Bye guys.