Every time I see that little red number in my inbox, my first thought is: Did I mess up? My brain jumps to the worst-case scenario—maybe I said something controversial, and now everyone’s correcting me and downvoting my stupid comments. Even though, most of the time, the messages are actually helpful and fun, that number still triggers some sort of insecurity and anxiety. The bigger it gets, the louder my worries grow.
Logically, I know I don’t screw up that often, and most feedback is neutral or even positive. But deep down, my insecure monkey brain panics at the thought of being wrong—or worse, publicly called out. Even when I’m right, the number still makes my stress levels spike up. What if people disagree with me? What if they don’t like what I wrote?
And yes, I see the irony in posting this. Writing about it is basically asking for it and feeding the very anxiety I’m trying to ignore. Maybe it’s my version of exposure therapy.
That is very interesting. Talking to people about weird things like this shows me that we use the same tools in very different ways. For example, many people prefer to look at the “all” feed and filter it with an ever expanding black list. I do the exact opposite, which is to use a reasonably short white list. Just ignore the “all” feed for the most part, focus more on the “subscribed” feed, and you get what you want.
Now I can see that people don’t even use the notification inbox the same way. If there’s an alternate way to do things, some people are going to do it that way.