It’s the beginning of a new year. While most people in the Western world are locked in on self-improvement, you really don’t know how to proceed with your own life.
You recently underwent a scheduled surgery that required a two-week hospital stay. Everything went according to plan—except for the alarming discovery that was made after the procedure.
Cancer has hijacked your entire life, and you’re terrified.
You don’t really know how to tell your young children that you’re about to undergo chemotherapy, so you keep it between yourself, your husband, and select members of your family.
You decide to step away from your work responsibilities and keep to yourself as you navigate this health crisis. Unfortunately, your silence and scarce appearances out in public spark wild speculation throughout the community.
News to you is the facelift you’ve had, the eating disorder you’re recovering from, your divorce due to your husband’s cheating, and your being held as a hostage by your in-laws.
At first, you simply roll your eyes and shrug it off.
Gossip is nothing new, and you don’t owe anyone an explanation.
As the speculation intensifies and the claims become more salacious, you start to worry about your children getting the wrong impression of their father and grandparents.
You attempt to put the rumors to rest by posting a sweet photo of you alongside your children on Mother’s Day. That only fuels the rumors even more. People caught on to the editing that was done to make you look healthier and more vibrant. Everyone seems to feel entitled to know every detail about your personal life, and they’re happy to fill in the blanks themselves the longer you remain silent about your health struggles.
You make the difficult decision to go public with your cancer diagnosis. It really isn’t fair that you’re being coerced into sharing something so vulnerable before you’re ready, but you really don’t want your family to continue being dragged through the mud over it.
You muster up the fortitude to curl your hair, put on makeup, and dress stylishly to film a video in the serenity of your garden.
You put a smile on your face and graciously thank everyone for their support—though their gossip was anything but helpful—and calmly disclose the general details of your harrowing ordeal.
“[My husband] and I have been doing everything we can to process and manage this privately for the sake of our young family. It has taken us time to explain everything to [our children] in a way that is appropriate for them, and to reassure them that I am going to be ok.”
These are the words of Catherine Middleton, Princess of Wales, and this is how she became a victim of the internet’s tendency to jump to conclusions before validating facts.
Most of us may not be able to relate to Princess Catherine’s prestige and wealth, but I’m sure we can empathize with her as parents and people with the inescapable risk of serious illness.
Can you imagine how difficult it must have been to face public scrutiny in the midst of battling cancer and trying to protect their young children from undue anxiety? The whole situation was just cruel and unnecessary.
Still, it serves as a cautionary tale about the unintentional harm we can cause when we fail to stop and think carefully before speaking or taking action.
Cultivating patience can help us avoid these pitfalls as we interact with people in our communities—both online and in-person.
How Health Misinformation on Social Media Puts Real Lives at Risk
Social media’s global reach has played a pivotal role in expanding our sense of community. Never in the history of mankind has it been easier to exchange knowledge and information with people all over the world. Unfortunately, not all of the information being shared is useful or even accurate.
The media circus around Princess Catherine’s cancer battle highlights the pervasiveness of destructive misinformation in our digital community. Its harm isn’t limited to prominent figures, either.
For example, the global wellness industry—with an estimated value of $6.3 trillion—is rife with dangerous and potentially fatal misinformation being used to inform life-altering medical decisions.
If you watched Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar, you’re quite familiar with the Belle Gibson scandal.
She was an Australian blogger who claimed to have cured her terminal brain cancer through nutrition and alternative therapies. Her seemingly inspirational tale of beating extreme odds without invasive treatment resonated with hundreds of thousands of people on Instagram, giving rise to her holistic brand The Whole Pantry.
Through carefully curated, magazine-worthy posts, Belle inspired cancer patients around the world to join her on “a quest to heal [themselves] naturally…empowering [themselves] to save [their] own lives, through nutrition, patience, determination and love–as well as vitamin and Ayurvedic treatments, craniosacral therapy, and a whole lot of other treatments”.
It’s not difficult to understand the appeal of her story. While cancer treatments are highly effective, they often lead to serious side effects like infertility, lowered immune function, hair loss, severe nausea, and pain.
However, the problem with Belle Gibson’s message of hope and self-healing is that it was based on a lie.
She never had cancer, and her false narrative had devastating consequences for genuine cancer patients who’d been inspired to opt out of research-backed medications and procedures to try unproven holistic options.
Belle Gibson profited off her audience’s medical anxieties and natural desperation for survival.
I really wish I could say that this was an isolated incident, but I can’t.
The unfortunate reality is that numerous content creators, media outlets, and corporations value profit over the wellbeing of their audience, and they’re willing to weaponize features of our basic psychology against us.
Research suggests that intense emotional reactions—both positive and negative—can interfere with our ability to accurately evaluate the credibility of information received in the moment.
It also increases the likelihood of us passing it on to others, and algorithms are designed to capitalize on this.
We live in an incredibly volatile attention economy. Anyone hoping to make a living online must be prepared to battle thousands, if not millions, of other creators in their niche for a few seconds of our time. Unfortunately, click-bait and rage-bait are often fast passes to virality compared to reasonable takes and realistic depictions of daily life.
I know this all too well. I’ve had to accept that my avoidance of attention-seeking behaviors on social media realistically means a slower path to steady engagement. Though it’s frustrating, I do understand the pressure that motivates people to make outlandish claims or spin the truth to build a following.
Online platforms will continue to be breeding grounds for misinformation as long as algorithms continue to favor provocation over authenticity and quality. Still, we can slow the flow of fake news and unproductive outrage by refusing to share things without evaluating their validity and potential impact on others.
We can also block creators and media outlets that rely too heavily on click-bait, spread misinformation, or fail to disclose paid partnerships—instead of hate viewing (consuming the content solely for its controversy).
Algorithms do not know or care about why we are watching or reading something. They only care that we are, and they’re trained to reward problematic content for the amount of consumers’ time and attention it captures.
The Online Disinhibition Effect: Why We Say Things Online We’d Never Say in Person
Princess Catherine wasn’t just a victim of misinformation. She was also the victim of the online disinhibition effect.
In a 2004 paper, Dr. John Suler described this phenomenon as some people’s tendency to “self-disclose or act out more frequently or intensely than they would in person.”
Do you feel personally attacked?
I do. I can’t tell you how many times Facebook has wrecked my day with a memory from my early adult years. If I could travel back in time, I would tell my young self that people don’t always need or want to read every single pseudo-intellectual thought that pops into our head.
Before we get lost in the cringe of our past, it’s important to note that online disinhibition isn’t always a bad thing.
According to Suler, “disinhibition can work in two seemingly opposing directions.”
Things like discussions that reveal people’s secret thoughts, feelings, anxieties, and desires or “unusual acts of kindness and generosity” are forms of benign disinhibition.
I’ve personally benefitted from this type of online interaction. The candor of so many fellow travelers is what helped me finally put names to things I’d experienced in the past and psychological issues I’d been struggling with for as long as I could remember. Having that information changed the course of my treatment, and I finally gained the tools I needed to lock in on my healing journey.
My hope is that my own openness will be a positive contribution to the conversation around mental health.
While our tendency to freely express ourselves online can be a force for good, it can also be incredibly destructive when wielded improperly.
Toxic disinhibition trades acts of kindness and community for indecency and division. According to Suler, it’s what emboldens people to “visit the dark underworld of the internet—places of pornography, crime, and violence—territory they would never explore in the real world.”
It also fuels the insults, public shaming, mass outrage, hate speech, threats, and doxxing we’ve become all too familiar with in online spaces. Avatars and usernames create an illusion of separation between the real-world and the digital world, but our internet behavior has consequences that don’t always go away when we log off.
Princess Catherine is a real person with a real family and the same mortality risk as the rest of us. The rumors and memes seemed like harmless entertainment to many, but they added another layer of anxiety and complication to a situation that was scary enough on its own.
I say this as someone who has had to break the habit of lurking snark spaces dedicated to certain celebrities and influencers. The reality is that we do not really know any of those people, nor do we know the ordinary users we engage with in comment sections.
We do know that not a single one of us is perfect. We all make mistakes and have physical imperfections and vulnerabilities. Taking a moment to pause and think about how we would feel if we were on the receiving end of our online behavior can help us avoid saying and doing things we’ll regret later. It also helps us show love and kindness to strangers and promotes peace in a world that needs these qualities more than ever.
Collective Trauma Is Making Us Meaner Online—and What to Do About It
Imperfection isn’t the only area of overlap between us and the people we encounter online or in-person. A survey conducted by Stress in America™ in 2023 revealed “mounting evidence that our society is experiencing the psychological impacts of a collective trauma.”
The widespread trauma APA psychologists are referring to includes the Covid-19 pandemic, global conflict, racial tension, economic stressors, and climate-related disasters. Many people’s nervous systems haven’t had a quiet day on the job since 2020, and it shows.
A popular trope circulating on social media recently is the “Gen Z stare.” Videos poking fun at this alleged phenomenon usually feature a Millennial or GenX’er pretending to interact with a Gen Z service worker. The customer greets the employee or asks for assistance only to be met with a dead-eyed expression and awkward silence. I myself haven’t really experienced much of this, but a lingering consequence of Covid-19 is my heavy reliance on grocery delivery and curbside pickup—not normalizing it, just being honest.
Nonetheless, “Gen Z stare” content resonated with enough people to go viral, so there could be something to it.
Though I’m not a big fan of generational jabs—let’s say for argument’s sake that this trend is rooted in truth.
Should we really be that surprised Gen Z might be struggling with customer service skills?
Covid-19 hit when most of them were still in school. During one of the most critical stages of social development, Gen Z students were stuck at home interacting with their teachers and peers on camera.
This provided little opportunity for them to practice getting to know new people and navigating conflict in a relatively low-risk environment. Covid-19 robbed them of some of the best aspects of childhood and adolescence. They deserve a little grace and compassion—not mockery.
Perhaps we could start by treating them the way we expect them to treat us.
Beyond Gen Z’s alleged social struggles is the fear and anxiety driven by our bleak news cycle. Nothing has gotten better since the earlier part of the 2020s. In fact, it can feel like things are getting worse.
War, volatile gas prices, skyrocketing food costs, and political violence keep a significant amount of the population in a constant state of fight-or-flight. As explored in the peace series, this can cause the prefrontal cortex to step aside and let the amygdala govern our thoughts and actions.
This part of our brain doesn’t think. It reacts. It demands an immediate response to ideas and actions it perceives as a threat. It really isn’t in the business of taking someone else’s comfort into consideration, nor does it pause to evaluate whether or not a reaction is proportionate to the offense.
We know how hard it is to override these responses. It’s the very reason we’ve been exploring the topic of patience in the first place. As we’ve learned over the course of this month’s theme, being patient in the face of interpersonal conflict, long-term hardship, and daily hassles is a skill and mindset that must be cultivated.
Unfortunately, not everyone has the bandwidth or motivation to practice patience.
Considering our current timeline, it’s not too difficult to understand why that’s the case for a high percentage of the population.
So many displays of entitlement or blatant hostility are being driven by instinct—not necessarily character.
We have the choice to meet people with the same negative energy or counteract it with kindness and empathy. Choosing the latter isn’t an endorsement of bad behavior. It’s a refusal to allow someone else’s nervous system access to our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. Life’s way too short to spend so much time being outraged by people we’re unlikely to encounter more than once.
Next Steps for Your Self-Discovery Journey
If you’d like to join me in making patience a daily practice this month, here are some resources to help you get started.
Subscribe to receive your free Patience Readiness Toolkit, designed to help you explore this month’s theme at your own pace.
Gentle Ways to Apply This:
- Slow down before you react, share, or spiral in response to online content. This free Content Awareness Tracker helps you identify what gets under your skin, impulsive reactions, and appropriate boundaries that can protect your nervous system from common attention-seeking tactics.
- Pause, check your intentions, and consider the impact of your words before saying things you can’t take back. Use this free printable, Is This Worth Saying?, as a gentle reflection tool.
- Understand your emotional triggers and build a personal toolkit for responding with intention instead of impulse. The Emotional Regulation Toolkit offers gentle, non-clinical worksheets for staying grounded when your nervous system is under pressure. It offers the flexibility of “pay-what-you-can” pricing.
How to Be Patient with Others—and Why It Matters More Than Ever
Collective anxiety often tests our ability to be patient with the people we encounter in our daily routine, but the way we respond to these challenges has the potential to create a ripple effect over time.
Choosing to block misleading or inflammatory content instead of engaging with it signals to the algorithm that it doesn’t belong on our feed. If enough people do that over time, there will be less incentive for creators to rely on rage-bait for virality.
Pausing to try to see things from others’ point of view before commenting or sharing can help us avoid getting involved in harmful speculation and public shaming. It isn’t as difficult as it seems if we keep in mind that we’re all doing our best to survive in this time of widespread instability and uncertainty. True, someone else’s best might feel like the absolute worst in certain situations.
Still, there’s always a possibility that our best effort to remain patient under pressure might be the very thing that puts someone else on the path to emotional healing.
If this post resonates with you, please share it with anyone who needs a reminder that patience is a sign of strength and an act of love.
What helps you show patience to others in stressful situations?
Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. If you’d like to receive an email notification when the next post goes live, you can subscribe using the form below. The next theme we’ll explore is goodness.
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Keep it kind, respectful, and focused on self-love and growth—let’s make this a safe, uplifting space. 🌿