Nothing in this article constitutes or should be taken as financial advice. It is for illustrative and educational purposes only. Always do your own research.

This week is Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK, and the whole month of May is dedicated to this cause in the US. Looking at my Twitter feed over the last couple of days (more on that later) and my DMs with frens (that’s what we call friends in NFT land) who are in the space, it seemed fitting to dedicate this week’s column to navigating mental health in web3.

However, as I write this, I can’t help but feel a tad hypocritical, because the truth is, I am far from having found a healthy balance in my web3 adventures. Since truly going down the NFT rabbit hole in January this year, many things went out the window – daily meditations, regular exercise, yoga, glorious weekends of doing sweet nothing.

My day job has become somewhat of a reprieve from the endless overwhelming consumption of information on the subject of NFTs, virtual coffees at 6am with people on the other side of the world, dealing with FOMO and never having enough ETH to buy into the projects I like. All of this against a backdrop of an emotional pendulum where I keep swinging from “this technology will change the world” to “this is all a giant fad and I’m insane for believing in it.”

It helps to realise that your frens who have been in this space for much longer (NFTs years are like dog years – 1 for 4), often feel the same way. It also helps that people I look up to in this space, like Zeneca, address mental health on their platforms.

So, what are the ways our mental health is being affected in the context of the weird and wonderful world of NFTs?

Information overload

The pace at which we consume information has never been faster. Enter stage NFTs and, all of a sudden, the pace seems to have tripled. In the non-fungible space (as opposed to normal crypto), it takes time to get to know the project and the community (if you are serious about your research), and so much of the market dynamic is linked to behaviours that have nothing to do with normal market dynamics. It is the beauty and the curse of NFTs – they are the culture currency, and the patterns of success are hard to follow. On any given day, I would listen to at least two hours of podcasts, spend just as much time on Twitter and Discord, and would still feel behind on the news. As I slowly get more comfortable, I am learning to filter the information and focus on a handful of sources that I have grown to like. You will never absorb it all!

Time

Time is the most valuable resource we have. Time cannot be bought which makes it ever more frustrating when the only way to make more time is by sacrificing sleep. I often think of the founders of NFT projects and what a whirlwind they have been living in for the last few months. Founder burnout is, unfortunately, a common occurrence, be it IRL, web2 or web3. I jump into Twitter Spaces and listen to people who left their jobs to pursue an NFT project and I can only imagine the pressure they are under, sandwiched between exhilaration and fear. I also often think about mums – the ultimate all-consuming lifelong job is that of being a mum. I meet these super-humans in Discords – bubbly and happy, en route to work or to pick up their kids from school, they pop in to say hello to their communities. Overcome by respect, I often wonder if the promise of this equitable new web3 world is not so equitable in reality, as it favours people who have the luxury of time. We will never have enough of it – prioritise what matters.

Money

You know how I mentioned my Twitter feed? Well… in case you’ve been living under a rock, I’ll give you the punchline – the financial markets have melted, including cryptocurrency and NFTs (who knew!). My Twitter feed, where the word ‘bullish’ appeared in every second Tweet, has now split into two camps – the doom and gloom squad and the financial veterans, who’ve once survived a bear market and lived to tell the tale. The sad truth is that behind many NFTs, is not only our hard-earned ETH but also our hopes of multiplying it. Who hasn’t heard a story of people making enough for a down payment by flipping JPEGs?! Greed will make you do irresponsible things. But times like these are exactly what clever people had in mind when they told us to only invest what we can afford to lose. From this, we will learn.

This is the part where someone asks me, ‘if you could give a piece of advice to yourself from 6 months ago, what would it be?' Well, one simple piece of advice that I can give out with conviction is to prioritise your sleep as much as you can. Number two (and I should take my own advice here) is to meditate – even 15 minutes a day makes a world of difference and shifts your perspective. And finally, talk to someone if you feel that the pressure is getting the better of you.

A wise (and very senior) man I once worked for used to say this every time sh*t hit the fan at work – ‘no matter what, the sun will rise tomorrow' – because there are things in life that are bigger than NFTs, bigger than money, and bigger than all our problems put together.