The Physiology of Showing Up

Why “just start posting” is sometimes good advice — and sometimes only half the conversation

There is a particular kind of advice that follows almost anyone trying to build a business or personal brand online:

Just start.

Turn the camera on.
Post before you feel ready.
Stop worrying about what people think.
Consistency creates confidence.

And sometimes, that advice is exactly right.

Sometimes we are procrastinating. Sometimes we are inexperienced. Sometimes the only way to stop feeling awkward on camera is to spend enough time being awkward on camera that it eventually becomes ordinary.

But I am becoming increasingly interested in the people for whom knowing what to do isn’t actually the problem.

They know how to make the Reel.

They know what they want to talk about.

They understand that social media could help their business.

They may even have an entire content strategy sitting in front of them.

And yet, when it comes time to press record — something happens.

Maybe they rewrite the caption seventeen times.

Maybe they record a video and never publish it.

Maybe their thoughts suddenly disappear the second the camera turns on.

Maybe they spend an hour finding something wrong with their face, their voice or what they said.

Maybe they tell themselves they need a better strategy.

And perhaps sometimes the question isn’t:

“How do I become better at social media?”

Perhaps the more useful question is:

“What does being seen feel like to me?”

Being seen is not a neutral experience

Human beings are extraordinarily sensitive to social evaluation.

That isn’t motivational language. There is a substantial psychological literature examining what researchers call social-evaluative threat — situations in which an aspect of ourselves could be negatively judged by another person.

One influential meta-analysis by psychologists Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny reviewed 208 laboratory studies of acute psychological stress. They found that tasks involving social evaluation — particularly when combined with a sense of uncontrollability — were among those associated with the strongest cortisol responses. (⁠PubMed)

That research was not studying Instagram.

We should be careful about pretending it was.

But it tells us something important about humans: the possibility of being negatively evaluated by other people can have a measurable physiological component.

And social media introduces an unusual form of evaluation.

You speak, but you cannot see most of the people listening.

You publish, but you cannot control the response.

People can watch without responding.

Someone you have not spoken to in fifteen years can suddenly have access to your opinions, your work and your face.

A prospective client might be watching.

So might your former boss.

Your school friends.

Your family.

Your competitors.

And the audience is largely invisible.

Interestingly, a 2026 experimental study involving people with elevated social anxiety found that anxiety increased during an online speaking task. Participants who could see themselves on camera while the audience was not visible subsequently rated their performance more negatively and engaged in greater negative post-event processing than participants in other conditions. (⁠PubMed)

Again, a Zoom-style experimental task is not the same thing as posting a Reel.

But there is enough here to make me question the assumption that reluctance to appear online is always simply a confidence problem.

Sometimes visibility itself may be the difficult part.

The camera may not be what you’re afraid of

Ask someone why they don’t show up online and they might say:

“I hate videos.”

But keep asking questions and something else can appear.

What if people think I’m full of myself?

What if someone from my old workplace sees me doing this?

What if I say something stupid?

Who am I to teach this?

What if nobody responds?

Or perhaps the quieter one:

What if this works and suddenly a lot more people can see me?

Now we’re no longer talking about ring lights and content hooks.

We’re talking about self-presentation — the way we attempt to influence how other people perceive us.

Self-presentational theories of social anxiety have long proposed that anxiety can arise when people care about the impression they make but doubt their ability to create the impression they want. Contemporary work continues to examine social anxiety through the lens of perceived acceptance, rejection and social value. (⁠ScienceDirect)

This does not mean that someone uncomfortable making Instagram videos has social anxiety disorder.

It means something much simpler:

Caring about how other humans perceive us is remarkably human.

And public visibility turns the volume up.

There is another layer: identity

Social media doesn’t simply ask us to communicate.

It often asks us to declare who we are.

“I am a photographer.”

“I am a consultant.”

“I am an artist.”

“I know enough about this subject to teach it.”

“This is what my work costs.”

“This is what I believe.”

For someone moving into a new career, building a business or becoming more publicly visible, that can create an interesting gap between privately becoming something and publicly claiming it.

Research into online self-presentation suggests that identity and self-concept can be relevant here. One study of 220 emerging adults found associations between greater identity coherence and more realistic/authentic online self-presentation, while greater identity confusion was associated with more idealised or false-self presentation. The study was observational, so it does not establish cause and effect, but it offers an interesting connection between how clearly we understand ourselves and how we represent ourselves online. (⁠PubMed)

Perhaps this explains part of why showing up can feel particularly uncomfortable during periods of transition.

You might not simply be learning how to make content.

You may be learning how to occupy a new identity while other people watch.

So is “just do it” bad advice?

No.

And this distinction matters.

Avoiding everything that makes us uncomfortable isn’t necessarily the answer either.

Psychological treatments for anxiety frequently use graded exposure: approaching feared experiences progressively rather than continually avoiding them. The American Psychological Association describes graded exposure as beginning with mildly or moderately difficult situations and progressing toward more challenging ones. (⁠APA Dictionary)

The principle gives us an interesting way to think about visibility — without pretending social-media coaching is psychotherapy.

Perhaps the alternatives aren’t:

Force yourself to do it

versus

Don’t do anything until you feel completely safe.

There is a large space between them.

Maybe someone’s first step isn’t a five-minute Instagram Live.

Maybe it’s recording a video and watching it back without criticising themselves.

Then sending one to a friend.

Then posting a voice-over.

Then sharing a talking Story.

Then making a Reel.

What constitutes a manageable stretch will be completely different for different people.

The goal isn’t necessarily to remove every uncomfortable feeling before acting.

It may be to build enough experience that being visible becomes something you know you can tolerate.

Before strategy, identify the actual barrier

This is where I think social-media education could become far more individual.

Before telling someone to post more, perhaps we should ask:

What is actually making showing up difficult?

Because different answers require completely different support.

If the problem is skill, teach them how.

If it is clarity, help them work out what they want to say.

If it is inexperience, give them repetitions.

If it is fear of evaluation, perhaps the next step needs to be smaller.

If it is perfectionism, the practice might be publishing something that is merely good enough.

If it is identity, they may need time to become comfortable publicly occupying their expertise.

If it is boundaries, they may need to decide what they are not willing to share.

And if someone feels significant or persistent anxiety around visibility, that may sit beyond the role of a marketing strategist altogether and be better explored with an appropriately qualified mental-health professional.

Because not every social-media problem should be solved with more social-media strategy.

Showing up is personal

I still believe in starting.

I believe confidence is often built through action rather than discovered beforehand.

I believe we can waste enormous amounts of time waiting for some mythical moment when we finally feel ready.

But I also think “just show up” skips an interesting part of the human experience.

Showing up isn’t the same experience for everybody.

For one person, pressing publish is a mildly uncomfortable marketing task.

For another, it represents judgement.

For another, it means claiming expertise.

For another, it means allowing people from one part of their life to see who they have become in another.

And perhaps that is why the conversation needs to move beyond confidence.

The question isn’t only:

How do we get people to show up?

It might be:

How do we help people understand their relationship with being seen — and gradually build the capacity to be visible without having to become someone else in the process?

That is a very different conversation about social media.

And I think it is one worth having.