The Anxiety of Leaving Social Media: What’s Really Happening in Your Brain (and How to Reset)

This post was adapted from Writing Off Social: The Podcast, Episode 88. You can listen in here!

If you’ve ever felt like stepping away from social media might ruin your writing career — or worse, somehow betray your calling — you are not alone, and you are not being dramatic. That feeling of panic is real, it’s physiological, and it has a name. Brain coach and author Ashriel Huber joined us this episode to explain exactly what’s happening underneath that anxiety, and she brought some incredibly practical tools to help writers reset, re-ground, and move forward in peace.

Ashriel describes herself as “a personal trainer for thought patterns.” She helps women calm their bodies, quiet the mental spirals, and actually experience God’s peace. And she’s quick to point out that she’s not just coaching from the outside looking in. She’s in the middle of writing, creating, and launching herself. She feels that same tension, that same whisper of am I doing enough?

So when she talks about the anxiety around leaving social media, she’s lived it.

Why Social Media Creates Such a Strong Fear Response

Here’s what Ashriel wants every writer to understand: to your brain, this isn’t about marketing. It’s about safety.

“When a writer considers stepping away,” she explains, “it’s not just should I post? It becomes will anyone find me? Will my work still matter? Am I hurting my future?” Visibility has quietly become tangled up with provision, belonging, and relevance. So when the possibility of losing it arises, the brain doesn’t calmly evaluate strategy — it sounds the alarm.

“It’s not weakness,” Ashriel is careful to say. “It’s our wiring. Our brains are wired for belonging. Being seen used to mean survival in a tribe. So this is less about Instagram and more about identity and safety.”

That reframe alone can bring a lot of relief. The panic isn’t a sign that you’re making a mistake. It’s a sign that your nervous system is doing its job — just about the wrong threat.

What’s Actually Happening in Your Brain (the Neuroscience, Friendly Version)

Ashriel calls it “algorithm panic,” and she’s experienced it herself. She describes sitting down to write, making the mistake of opening Instagram, and within thirty seconds feeling tight-shouldered, urgent, and hopelessly behind — even though nothing has actually happened yet.

That’s because once your body enters that response, the thoughts follow. You’re not thinking your way into the panic, she explains. You’re feeling your way into those thoughts.

“Your amygdala — your brain’s threat detector — is activated,” Ashriel says, “and it doesn’t distinguish between physical danger and perceived career risk. Your brain is doing the exact same thing whether it’s a giant bear or Instagram.”

(We may have laughed a little at this, but she’s entirely right.)

When we step away from social media, the brain registers it as lost visibility, lost belonging, lost opportunity. It drops out of the thinking brain and into fight-or-flight. And from survival mode, we simply cannot access creativity, clarity, or the kind of grounded decision-making our work actually requires.

The CREATE Reset: A Practical Tool for the Panic Spiral

This is where Ashriel’s work gets beautifully concrete. She walks us through a framework she created specifically for writers and creatives — the CREATE reset — using a fictional writer named Emma to illustrate what it looks like in a real moment of spiral.

Emma is working on her book. She reads a marketing post that tells her she needs to post every day, do Reels, and dance on TikTok. She opens Instagram not because she wants to, but because she thinks she’s supposed to. Within seconds she sees other writers announcing launches and showing up everywhere, and now she’s not just distracted — she’s staring at a blank screen wondering what she’s doing with her life.

But Emma has a tool. She uses CREATE:

C — Catch the alarm. Pause and name what’s happening. This is algorithm panic. My brain is trying to keep me safe, not help me make a decision.
R — Regulate. Move and breathe first. Stand up, shake it out, roll your shoulders. Slow your exhale. Tell yourself: I don’t need to solve this right now. I need to settle first.
E — Engage a better question. Swap what should I post? for what serves my readers today? and what actually matters right now?
A — Anchor to truth. Say it out loud — Ashriel encourages making it a little awkward. “I don’t build from pressure. I build from purpose.”
T — Take one aligned step. Not everything. Just the next right thing. One paragraph. One outline section. One email.
E — Exit the noise. Close the app. Return to the work.

“Nothing actually changed externally,” Ashriel points out. “Her laptop didn’t magically start creating the story. The TikTok post didn’t go away. Everything’s the same — same day, same circumstances. But Emma’s state changed, and that changed everything.”

When Leaving Feels Like Grief

The CREATE reset addresses panic in the moment, but many of us who’ve been on social media for years are dealing with something deeper when we finally step away: grief.

We know this personally. For a lot of writers, social media hasn’t just been a platform — it’s been connection, identity, and validation. Leaving can surface a question we weren’t expecting: who am I without this?

Ashriel approaches grief with the same grounded gentleness she brings to everything else. The first reminder she offers is this: you’re not losing your calling. You’re changing how you express it.

Then she offers three simple moves for processing the loss:

Name it as grief. Studies show that naming an emotion actually reduces its intensity — it lowers the stress response. Saying “I’m grieving the loss of visibility” or “I’m grieving the feedback loop” is not weakness. It’s the beginning of moving through it.
Separate your identity from your platform. Gently shift from I’m someone who shows up online to I’m a writer called to serve readers. Your calling never came from a platform, and it doesn’t disappear when the platform changes.
Give the energy somewhere to go. The brain doesn’t just need to let go — it needs to re-anchor somewhere meaningful. Take that same energy that used to go into Instagram and redirect it toward creating something small. One draft idea. One new thing you want to try.

“Grief doesn’t mean you made the wrong decision,” Ashriel tells us. “It just means it mattered.”

How You Know You’re Ready to Move Forward

We asked Ashriel what the shift actually feels like on the inside — that moment when a writer has done the nervous system work and is ready to start showing up in new ways.

She describes it as an “inside-out makeover.” Not dramatic. Not a lightning bolt. Just steady. Things start to settle. Shoulders drop. Thoughts aren’t so loud. You stop second-guessing everything.

“You start to trust God and then trust yourself — not in a striving way, but in a steady, God-rooted confidence,” she says. “You don’t have to figure everything out. You just need to take the next right step.”

Most women she works with don’t describe it as a big breakthrough. They say things like I feel more like myself again. Calmer. Clearer. More sure of what they’re doing with God. The circumstances haven’t changed, but the experience of those circumstances has.

That is the transformation the Lord longs for us as creatives. He never intended for us to do this work from a place of panic, frenzy, and constant comparison. There is a way to create that feels peaceful, aligned, and sustainable.

And when you find yourself in that spiral again, Ashriel leaves us with one question to come back to:

What serves your reader today?

“Your readers don’t need your algorithm performance,” she reminds us. “They need your voice.”

This post was reformatted from our original transcript by Claude and edited for accuracy by Mary K.