Group Chat Anxiety (Part 1): Why Your Notifications Feel Like Emotional Homework

Have you ever picked up your phone and discovered a hundred unread text messages?

Likely you’re at the tail end of a group chat, and it kind of feels like walking into a party two hours late. You want to respond but wonder: will people be annoyed at you for backtracking? Maybe you even feel resentful for being added to this chat without consent. 

Group chats can sometimes feel like you’re operating with one arm behind your back – but if you suffer group chat anxiety, I think it’s important to remember that it’s because you really care about your friendships.

This episode is the first segment of a two-part series on anxiety surrounding group chats: today, we’re talking about why group chats can be tricky to navigate, and in the next, what you can actually do about it.

In this episode you’ll hear about:

• Why group chats are often used to satisfy a craving for connection but often fall short of delivering real connection people want
• The richness of in-person connection (Body language! Tone! Shared moments!) vs. the flatness of texting
• Different ways group chats can cause anxiety, from the public nature of having something you said responded to or ignored to lurker guilt
• The intensity overload of group chats, plus, different studies about texting and anxiety

Resources & Links

Listen to Episode 12 and learn about my theory about the Roots framework; Episode 100 about the Wheel of Connection; Episode 127 about using data to manage your friendship mental load; Episode 131 about the spectrum of digital connection; and Episode 134 about fringe friends.

Like what you hear? Visit my website, leave me a voicemail, and follow me on Instagram and TikTok!

Want to take this conversation a step further? Send this episode to a friend. Tell them you found it interesting and use what we just talked about as a conversation starter the next time you and your friend hang out!

This episode is sponsored by Slowly, a digital pen pal app used by over 10 million people worldwide. If you’ve been looking for a low-pressure way to connect with someone completely outside your normal friendship circle, this is it. Exchange letters at your own pace, no small talk panic required.

Download Slowly free and get 30% off Slowly Plus using my link: https://open.slowly.app/miXL/l8ei5iw6

WANT MORE?

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Dive into The Connection Reset. A 10-day private podcast to help you see the abundance of connection that already exists in your day-to-day (Yes. Really. I promise you have more than you realize). Start today. 

Transcript

Podcast Intro/Outro: 1:28

All right, gang. Here's to nights that turn into mornings and friends that turn into family. Cheers. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Friendship IRL podcast. I'm your host, Alex Alexander. Each week we talk about what is working(and what is not) in our friendships, community and connections. Have you ever wished you could sit down and have a conversation about what is really going on in your friendships? Well, you found your people. Join us as we dive into real life stories and explore new ways to approach these connections. Together, we're reimagining the rules of friendship

Alex Alexander: 2:24

If you have ever felt a text message notification come in and your stomach drops. What about the dread of returning to pick up your phone out of your bag, and you look at it and you realize that there are 200 missed messages after a one hour appointment, if you feel like you are walking into a party, except it's that you're picking up your phone. You are two hours late, you missed the entire beginning of the conversation. You have no idea what's going on, but all of that is living in your phone. Maybe you have a fear that there is some sort of smaller side group chat where people are closer with each other than the one that you're in. Then we have the scroll of doom. You know, when you're trying to catch up, you got those 200 messages, and you're seeing messages from an hour ago that you want to respond to, but you're sitting there being like, gosh, okay, everybody's moved on. Will they be mad at me for backtracking? Am I totally messing everything up? Right? You're just mental calculation after mental calculation. Perhaps it's the pressure to always be available, or the fear of setting a boundary, like you want to mute that group chat, you want to leave the group chat you want to maybe only respond in the evenings. There's also the resentment of being added to a group chat that you did not consent to be added to, and on top of that, being added to a group chat where all the numbers are numbers that are not in your phone, who are all these people? There's that feeling when you feel like you need to match everyone's enthusiasm, like somebody sent some exciting news, but to match everyone's enthusiasm feels kind of like you're performing friendship publicly, because the message you write back is similar to what everyone else sent, but you read it and you're like, who am I? I would never say that out loud. Or maybe there's the compulsive checking, right? You sent a message, it's been a couple hours, and you just keep refreshing that group chat, because you're like, So is anybody going to respond? We also have the lurker guilt, wanting to rejoin the conversation. Maybe it's been a couple days, a couple weeks, a couple hours, I don't know, but you're afraid because you're going to get that message. It's like, oh, wow, nice of you to drop in and send a message for once. The end of the day, you might be a part of these group chats because you are craving connection, but yet none of these group chats are really satisfying the craving for connection that you have, if any of that very long list is something that you identify with. If you've ever felt one of those things, then this episode is for you. Now, I went down a deep dive trying to find some stats about group chats. You know, I don't, I don't always go find the statistics, because, quite frankly, I think people's lived experiences aren't always shown in the statistics, but I went on a search, and you know what I found is that there are so many studies on social media, but there are not that many studies on texting. There are some, but a lot of them are outdated. One study I did find by the it's a Viber study cited by the World Economic Forum said that 31% of people say texting is a daily source of anxiety, which is kind of crazy, 1/3 of people. Now, an older study, this one's from 2018 by YouGov, said that. 63% of Americans now use group chats regularly, often multiple times a day. And I would guess, because 2018 is a little while ago, that the number is actually, honestly even higher than that, especially because most platforms now, like even social media, it's the time of the DM that's social media's goal is to get people to share posts and messages and things in their group chats on the apps. So I would think that most people honestly have even more group chats than they did in 2018 so today's episode is part one of a two part series I'm going to do on group chats. Today, I'm going to talk about what's actually happening, I think, and why group chats are so hard, and then the second part will actually be what we can do about it. But today I want to give you some reframes, some new ways to think about group chats, because we all partake in them. But have you really spent that much time analyzing them? Right? They're just such a normal part of the day to day that like so many areas of connection, you probably haven't thought much about it. We just do it on a regular basis. Now, in preparing for this episode, I did go and I read spread some articles. Obviously searched out some research. One of the most interesting things I read was from a Atlantic article called group chat, culture is out of control. And in that article, it talks about a digital culture researcher at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology named Annette Markham. Now she, in this article, compares group texting to echolocation, which is the process that some animals such as bats and dolphins use to locate objects. They produce a continuous sound and use the resulting Echo to sense what is around them. She is comparing group chats similarly, right? It's a call and response. We are taking in information about our social networks and locating ourselves within these webs. We are trying to keep some form of consistency. I would also say, right? I've talked about this idea that friendship and connection, when you have consistency, when you kind of leave these breadcrumbs, it gives us this feeling of more stability. The longer the distance between the breadcrumbs, the more we can start to let our brains run wild and ask all sorts of questions. So I thought that this was honestly one of the best analogies I have seen when it comes to group chats, and you're gonna see me kind of talk about this idea throughout today's episode, because my basic thought here is that group chat anxiety reveals something that most of us maybe don't think about, right? I think a lot of people would say, oh, I need to be off my phone more. I need to get one of those bricks. I need to put my phone away. I need to be away from technology to get rid of the anxiety. I'm not so sure that's true. I think that group chat anxiety reveals how much we care about our friendships, how much we want that echolocation. We want to be in contact, we want to have some sense of where we stand in the group. But also we want to shorten the windows between when we can drop those breadcrumbs, and that's what group chats and technology allows us to do. Right? It's not always feasible to go and update every single one of your friends about the same mundane detail, but if people are in a group chat, you can drop it there, and it kind of disseminates this information in one lump sum. Now, doing this, continuing to ping our people, to drop those little digital breadcrumbs, can be really exhausting, right? Because we're, for lack of a better word, we're kind of trying to stay relevant. We're trying to stay in people's orbits, we're trying to stay connected. And part of that, I think, is trying to kind of be this idea of a perfect friend, right? Because a perfect friend would check in, they would ask you questions, they would respond and cheer you on when you tell them something about your day or their day. Right? They would laugh at the silly detail that you dropped in the group chat. They would want to be connected. But when we take this a step further, the question I want to ask you today is, is this the right type of work is putting all of this energy into the echolocation? The right type of work, because when we are in all of these group chats, we are missing out on something really, really key, right? Which is the body language, the tone, seeing these surroundings, experiencing moments with people, making memories, and all of those things, I think, are the things that we actually crave. Like, if somebody tells me exciting news, the group chat is great, sure, right, yay, woo hoo. Like we're throwing confetti around on an iMessage. But what I want, what I really if I could tell you and just snap my fingers and make anything happen, what I want is to be sitting across from someone and watch their face light up and watch them lean in and watch them smile for me, I want to give them a hug. That's what I really want. So when we're out here trying to survive off of a type of connection where we are missing all of these other things, like the body language, the tone, the memories, the physical contact, when we are trying to survive off a connection that is so flat, honestly, I think that we are basically operating with one arm behind our back. So this episode today is not a delete all of your group chat series. It's a way to reframe the energy and effort that you are putting into these group chats, and how to think about them differently, and where to actually put your energy. Right is the work? Is the goal to just forever maintain these group chats, or should the goal be something else? Because I kind of think it should be something else. That's what we're going to get into today. So the first thing I want to do is I listed off so many fears and anxiety points in that first little chunk of this episode, but I want to go just a little bit deeper on a few of them that I feel like are maybe the most universal, or the ones that I've gotten the most messages about the first one is the fear of the smaller group, this idea that maybe you are in some sort of group chat, right? It could be four people, it could be five people, it could be 20 people. You're in a variety of like, larger group chats, and it gets you wondering. You're like, Are there side chats that are smaller and closer that you're not a part of? And I get why this fear exists, right? We most of the messages we have out there are about kind of trying to be this peak friend for people, right, trying to be their best friend, their closest friend. And I have done so many episodes trying to reframe that belief that we are, like climbing some sort of hierarchy, some places you can go to rethink that would be episode 100 where I talk about my wheel of connection. Episode 12, where I talk about my roots of connection, framework. And Episode 134 which is all about fringe friends and reframing the idea of being a fringe friend, which is really probably what you think you are, if you feel like you are part of the big group chat, but you're not part of the smaller side chats. I would listen to those three episodes, because Episode 12, about the roots in Episode 100 will give you some sense of, maybe, really where you do sit, and an understanding of the types of actions you could take to get closer to people, to develop some of these smaller side chats for yourself. And Episode 134 maybe I'll just have you thinking a little differently if you feel like you're the extra friend. I actually think there's a lot of positives to that. You know, when I think about this smaller side chat, I find it really interesting, because I have a variety of smaller chats. I'm a part of big chats. I'm a part of small chats. I also know for a fact that there are small. All group chats that I am not a part of, that like my friends are a part of, and I am not one of them. And I'm okay with that, because they have their own dynamic. They have their own friendship, and I think that is fine. I understand why they would message each other similar to like, why I would message one group chat? Example would be about a certain thing we're doing together, or an interest we share, right? I have a funny group chat, and we talk about a variety of things, but we always message each other about new sparkling water flavors. It's like a thing for the three of us. I have another chat that I would message if I found a really good Facebook marketplace deal. I have another chat that I would message about with some of my, like, oldest friends, where I might message honestly a little bit more about, like, a catch up life situation. And that third chat, we probably should work on finding some more interests so that it's a little more regular. So it's all to say, I think when you understand why certain chats exist, versus just feeling like you're on the outside, I think that makes it easier to stomach. And those three episodes will help you do just that. Now, the next fear is the fear of being behind, opening your phone and seeing dozens, if not hundreds, of messages. And you're like, gosh, where do I even start? And then you have all this mental math, right of okay, so I actually want to talk about something they talked about 45 minutes ago. Do I drag the conversation back to that? It kind of seems like everyone's moved on, right? We now have features, kind of like the quote in reply. Do I start a thread under that message? Is that going to confuse people? Are people even going to respond because they've moved on? You know, in a room, if you think about it, if we were to party, you can read the room when you throw out the thought you have about a topic that everybody covered 30 minutes ago. You can see with your eyes and with people's body language, if they look excited to revisit it, do they look annoyed? And in a group chat, you have none of that information, so it would make sense that you have some anxiety because you're really partaking in this interaction that is very flat, right? You don't have all the information that you would have if you were in another space. Then there's the performance pressure. I really feel this one, this one aligns with me, which is where, when you're in a group chat and somebody shares some sort of news. It could be good news, it could be bad news. The response that you give doesn't just go to that one person, right? It is visible to everyone. And so sometimes one person maybe is better equipped to provide emotional support about this problem, right? Maybe they've experienced it, or maybe they're just really good at being the listener. Maybe that's not your skill set. And so the thing is, though, even if it's not your skill set, if you don't respond, that doesn't look good, because everybody else sees it, even though maybe if this was a one on one text message, or you were in a room together, that person maybe wouldn't have come to you for support, because they know that it's not your strength, but because you're in this space where everyone can see you, you kind of have to show up in a way that maybe feels performative, right? It feels like whatever you say is being evaluated, not just by the person that you're responding to, but by the whole group. Somebody could walk away from that interaction and be like, Wow, Alex, was really not that excited for you, even though maybe you were, but it just didn't match the level of enthusiasm that everyone else somehow conveyed in their message. I think there's this other thing that happens where I've experienced this you're in a group message, and somebody sends a text that requires, like, a very nuanced, thoughtful response, right? It's a lot of work to craft a message that is emotional. Emotionally supportive in the way that you want, and everybody else is kind of silent. And you know that you're the one that has that skill set, and so you know that everybody's just waiting for you to send kind of the first message and break the ice, because every. One else is going to be like, yeah, exactly what Alex said. I've been there. There's also the situation where maybe you sent a message and it's been a couple hours and 30 minutes. It could be any length of time, but nobody's responded, and then one person responds, and then suddenly there's this cascade of everybody responding, and you're just sitting there and you're like, gosh, I'm pretty positive all of you had your phone in your hand. You just nobody wanted to be the first one to respond. Or what about the times where you sent a message to the group, nobody's responded. And then whoever you're closest to in the group, you send them a one on one side message, and you're like, Go respond to my message. The dynamics group chat. Then we have what I'm calling the lurker guilt. I know a number of people who have decided right that they are just going to mute various group chats. It could be the group chat that they've got put on for the PTA at their kids school, where they don't really know anyone. It could be a really close friend who's going through something kind of intense, and they just don't just don't feel like they have capacity to be sucked into those messages at any moment, right? They want to, like, sit down and be thoughtful, and so they mute the group chat, knowing they will check it maybe that evening. But I think what happens is not always, not always. It depends, but in some group chats, you might mute the chat, and if a whole conversation goes on and then you're like, Okay, I have some mental capacity to do the work or the emotional labor, or to read this conversation. I'm going to join in now. People get upset. They're like, Wow, it's so nice of you to drop in, thanks for giving your opinion. And then you're like, oh, okay, okay, well, I give up, right? That fear of re entry can be really, really overwhelming, and I have done episodes I don't remember the number off the top of my head for this one, but we will link it in the show notes about kind of like the shame spiral that can happen. And I think that is very relevant here you start to really get in your head about every single interaction, every single message, whether the delay in your response requires you to explain it, yada yada yada. That's a lot of work. It's a lot of mental work. Then I think there is what I'm calling the visibility anxiety. Some people, right, are very sensitive if nobody responds to their message. Now, maybe the conversation was kind of wrapped up, or maybe people didn't have the capacity to answer. Maybe people didn't want to answer. I don't know why, but if you are somebody who has all this anxiety about the fact that you sent the message that turned out to be the last message. Nobody responded to it, and you're just like, I don't really need this kind of stress in my life. Another visibility component is adding or leaving a chat like, I think so many people get frustrated that they got added to a chat without their consent because they don't want to leave a chat, because normally there is, like, a public message. There also might be some FOMO, right? Maybe you decide to leave a chat, but you don't really want to leave the chat, so you hold off on doing so, because it's like, well, everyone is still in there, and I do want to know what they're saying. I just wish I could see it and not have to actually be a part of it. Right? There is this public nature to everything, joining, leaving, having your message being seen, having your messages not be seen, and then wondering why nobody responded. Here's the final anxiety, which I'm calling the digital connection gap. The one that underlies all the things I have mentioned here is that we all crave connection, but often text messages, group chats aren't quite satisfying that craving, but we keep showing up because it feels maybe like the most accessible. Feels like the thing everybody else is doing. It feels like the way that everybody else is available. People. I've done episodes on calling friends. Episode 127 stands out for that one, and there can be a lot of anxiety about bothering people. So messaging just seems like, Okay, well, they can get back to me whenever they want, right? So you keep trying, but you might feel like something is missing. Which brings me to kind of my, I don't know, underlying thesis, like the my personal takeaway from all of my reflection in the last couple weeks about group messages, as I was preparing for this episode. Why are group chats so hard? I think that we are basically operating with one arm behind our back, because we are missing out on that body language, tone, facial expressions, all the things that when we are in person with someone, or when we are voice messaging, when we are on the phone, we may be limited, but they aren't all gone, right? If you're on a video call, you still get tone and facial expressions. If you're voice noting, you still get tone if you are Marco poloing, you're getting these things. If you're in person, you're getting these things. When you are texting, it is such a flat interaction. And by that, I mean you just have the words, but we want all the meaning. And so then what happens is that our brains, as I've talked about in many an episode, our brains decide to make up the meaning, because we want it right? Like, let's talk about an in person reaction. Let's pretend. Well, we don't have to pretend. Let's talk about this podcast right here. You and me, we are interacting. Okay, you can hear my voice. You can hear when I'm excited, you can hear when I'm sad, if I'm talking to you and you just asked me if I would do something for you. I'm like, yeah, no problem. You probably have some sort of sense that, like, Oh, okay. She seems like she's fine doing that. But if I'm like, Yep, no problem. We don't get that in a message, right? All I write, all I type, is, no problem. You don't get any thing else. Now, if you and I were standing together, you would also get my body language. So maybe I said it like, oh, yeah, no problem. But something about my body language told you that I actually didn't feel that way. Right? When you have all these cues together, it gives you a sense of what I actually mean. Do I look unbothered? Am I smiling at you? Am I laughing at you? A group chat has none of that. We are left with words and emojis and an overused hahaha, if you are a millennial like me. Now, another reason why we are operating with one arm behind our back here is I want you to imagine that we are at a party. We are in a room together. Everybody might be there, the same people that are in the group chat. Let's say it's a 10 person group chat. Everybody's in that room, and there are going to be moments, maybe, where we draw everyone's attention to one person, and that person talks and people respond and everyone listens. But then what often happens is that some side conversations start, and we don't think twice about it. Everybody's still in the room, but people kind of turn to each other. They're responding to something. Somebody asks somebody a very personal, specific question, and suddenly the room is alive, with four to five one on one conversations. Maybe we come back together. Maybe it ends up being two groups across the room, right? But the dynamic flows and keeps changing, and when we are in a room together, that's okay, that's normal. Nobody gets mad about that, but for some reason, that's not okay. In group chats, right? You can't have those side combos. Somebody's gonna be mad. I also think that when everybody forces in, let's say a 10 person group chat, everybody to stay in this flat interaction with no side conversations, we might get frustrated because two people might want to have a side conversation, and now they are having a 40 message long conversation that probably would have been a side chat, or should have been a side chat in this message, where everybody's just reading it, and sure if you were in a room at a party, maybe. Be you would stand off to the side and you would listen to their combo. But what's more likely than not is you would either jump in or you would be like, Oh, well, they're having nice little conversation, and you would go off and you would talk to someone else. When I think of digital connection, I often try and compare the situation to what would it be like in person, but remember, in person, we have all these other cues that we don't have access to digitally, which I think just turns the dial up, makes everything more intense. Now, another reason that I think we are operating with one arm behind our back is that we have a context switching problem. If you were in person again, I want to compare digital to in person, because I think it helps us to think of this. If you were in person and you were at school pickup and you were talking to some of the other parents about a fundraiser that's coming up. You're talking about a homework assignment that was really hard for your kids. You were talking about somebody's kid tripped and fell and broke a tooth and had to go to the ER. You were asking what they did about that. After all these conversations, you would get in your car, and you would have a break, right? You would have a switch moment. You would have a transition. That's the word I'm looking for. Then you would arrive at dinner with a friend. You would be in a different headspace, and then you would go back and forth and have a conversation, maybe go a little deeper. Now, if we compare this to a group chat. Let's say you're sitting there on your couch and you have a bunch of messages from today, and so you're going to go through and you're going to respond to them, and in that first message with all the parents from your kids school, you are responding in kind of this acquaintance tone, right? You have a mindset of, I don't know these people very well. I want to be sensitive to the fact I don't know them very well. Maybe I don't need to divulge the same amount of information to them, because they're just acquaintances. And then you close out of that chat, because you've responded to everything. You open up the next chat, and it is a friend who is telling you something very, very serious about their life, and suddenly you're like, okay, okay. I was just filtering myself. I was just keeping it really casual, and now I need to provide very deep, intense emotional support. And while all of this is happening, if you're a parent who is doing school pickup, you know, you probably have some kiddo pretending he's Spider Man in the background, maybe of a partner trying to get your attention to help pull something hot out of the oven for dinner. And our brains are trying to do something that is honestly not very natural to have to switch this fast from one context to another. I think that another reason that we are operating in group chats with one arm behind our back is the intensity problem. Let's say that somebody, a friend of yours, sends a stream of consciousness they have told you about the new shoes they bought. They've told you about the high school friend they ran into. They have mentioned that they're tired today. They need to find a Diet Coke, whatever other 100 messages of trivial information is coming in. And because this is kind of that echolocation, right? You feel like you have to acknowledge all of it, perhaps, maybe not. Maybe you and your friend have some sort of agreement that it's fine. It can just exist there and you saw it, but maybe you feel like you do have to acknowledge it. And so you have a mix of, you know, I liked this one. I hearted that one. I replied to this one. I actually sent my own thoughts about the Diet Coke, because I also want a Diet Coke. And now we're back to shoes. And this is just in one thread. Imagine if this is going on in multiple group threads, and you have 100 messages of honestly, kind of trivial things to sort through, which, on one hand, you want right because you want to know your friend, but on the other hand, you have a whole life happening around you. You have to leave and get in the car. In 10 minutes, you have a meeting. You are trying to take the trash out with you, as you're also trying to do this echolocation stream of consciousness. And so you might go through and you might read all of it. You might be able to keep up with all of it. You also might be a person that's like, you know what, when I get to the end of the day and there are hundreds of messages that I didn't read, I. Feel really overwhelmed just looking at it so I don't read them. I just mark them all as read, and we'll try again tomorrow. Now this episode didn't really give you any solutions. I just agitated all the problems. Sorry. Here is what I hope you walk away from this episode with, I think that a really big part of group chat anxiety is that you really care about your friendships. That is why you keep trying to connect. That is why you are dropping breadcrumbs with tiny little messages about your day. That's why you're trying to respond to the big stuff. That's why you're trying to juggle all of these different inputs all the time, and so you keep showing up even when it's exhausting. And if you feel this way, I don't think you're broken, I don't think you're bad at friendship. I think that you are trying to maintain your connections in a way that actually is maybe harder than it needs to be, because we're working with very limited tools. We are working in this very flat environment. So if you are somebody who cares deeply, and that's why you keep trying. That's why you keep telling yourself you're going to get better, you're going to figure it out. But no part of these group chats quite feels like what you're actually craving. Then in part two, which will be next week, I'm going to talk about what we can actually do about this, how to think about group chats case by case, because not all group chats are created equal. Permission to leave lurk, set boundaries, how to have conversations with people about your expectations, strategies that can actually help. So if you are feeling very seen right now about your experience in group chats and you're like, Okay, but what do I do? I promise that is coming. And if you have not already, in the meantime, in the next week before my next episode comes out, and you're like, but I want to go deeper. I would suggest going to listen to Episode 131 it's called the spectrum of digital connection. And this is something that I kind of came up with, because I am definitely a person who feels like she is bad at texting. And what I realized is I am bad at certain things, but I'm really good at other things, and I think that's okay. I think that we can't lump all the digital connection into one bucket, and we need to think about them a little differently. So if you want to continue to reframe how you're thinking about your digital connections, then go listen to Episode 131 the spectrum of digital connection. And with that, we'll be back next week with part two.

Podcast Intro/Outro: 40:49

Thank you for listening to this episode of Friendship IRL. I am so honored to have these conversations with you. But don't let the chat die here. Send me a voice message. I created a special website just to chat with you. You can find it at alexalex.chat. You can also find me on Instagram. My handle, @itsalexalexander. Or go ahead and leave a review wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts. Now if you want to take this conversation a step further, send this episode to a friend. Tell them you found it interesting. And use what we just talked about as a conversation starter the next time you and your friend hang out. No need for a teary goodbye. I'll be back with a new episode next week.