Being a YouTuber with Depression with Alana Arbucci: The YouTube Power Hour Podcast 356

“It’s amazing to wake up everyday and not feel hopeless.”

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Alana Arbucci is a content creator with over 546,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel. She creates content about cosmetic procedures, beauty, fashion, first-time home buying, budgeting and finance, lifestyle, relationships, and more! She puts all of her energy into creating entertaining and informative content for her audience, and no topic is off-limits. Alana’s philosophy is that this country and this  world is hard enough to navigate as a woman, so she does her best to share everything she’s learned with her audience to help make it a little more bearable. But most of all, she hopes her audience can smile along with her.

So how did Alana become a full-time YouTuber at the age of 24? Her plan before YouTube was to become a Physician’s Assistant, so she got her license as a nurse’s aid going into college. Despite that, she always had a strong urge to try YouTube, and she started her channel her freshman year in college. It took about two years of consistent posting for her to be able to do it full-time, but in hindsight, she’s glad it took two years, because now she knows how to grow an audience. After two years of balancing school, her channel, and working as a nurse’s aid, she had a consistent financial income from social media, and she decided not to go back to school.

Alana has been very consistent with her channel since the very beginning… so consistent that she hardly ever missed an upload or took a day off. She was strict with her upload schedule in a way that was almost militant, and she struggled with her schedule and having a work-life balance. She also initially would say “yes” to every brand that came knocking, as long as she enjoyed the product and the company and she ended up overworking herself like crazy. She’s getting better at saying “no” or “not this month” and having boundaries.

Alana’s struggles with depression

Alana was very candid and vulnerable in our interview, especially around her struggle with depression and anxiety. Often, YouTube and other social media platforms make it worse. Alana would often wake up deep in the throes of depression and having to force herself to put on a mask for social media. She had to be creative, fun, sexy, and outgoing, even when on the inside, she was feeling the effects of depression deeply. She was so strict with her upload schedule that she never gave herself a break. Even her vacations were spent filming. Working that much in any job can affect anyone negatively, but being on camera and being extra vulnerable to online comments only exacerbated the problem. As a content creator, she was in the public eye, and because of that, she was often the target of a lot of feedback, and it wasn’t always positive. This can be extra hard on someone struggling with their mental health.

As content creators, and especially vloggers who share a lot of their day-to-day life, it’s hard for people to turn off. YouTube played into Alana’s propensity for perfectionism and her workaholic nature, and not necessarily in a good way.

“I knew I needed to go to therapy because I couldn’t fix it by myself.”

The breaking point

Alana decided she needed to get help when she realized how hopeless and numb she felt daily. She wasn’t enjoying things she should have been enjoying. She wasn’t ever in the moment and she never felt satisfied with anything. She was constantly feeling like something was wrong with her for not being able to enjoy the human existence the way she was supposed to. When you live that way for so long, you start to have dangerous thoughts. She knew she needed help. So two years ago, she started going to therapy

It took about a year of intense therapy for her to finally start feeling better, to relax the strict rules and pressures she had put on herself, and to even take a weekend off without feeling guilt. She learned healthy work-life boundaries, and it took a lot of work to unlearn a lot of her negative habits. She realized one day that she hadn’t felt the extreme symptoms of her depression in about two weeks. She was both excited and nervous; afraid that it was temporary and that the other shoe was going to drop. Now she has the skills that she has learned through therapy, she can continue to maintain her mindset. She realized that she had the ability to fix this if she put in the work.

Sharing her struggles on YouTube

So how much did she share about this with her YouTube audience? A little. But the problem with being an influencer is that people think they know what your life is like based on the small glimpses they get. Alana would post one video in a sea of hundreds of videos about makeup or fashion when the reality was that her depression was something that affected her so significantly that it was almost always in the forefront of her mind. Alana has about 4 videos on her channel dedicated to mental health, but most people see your channel as a whole and make assumptions about you based on it. On her worst days, she could mask her depression so well that nobody knew she was suffering. 

Final Thoughts

Alana’s advice to YouTubers? Remember that as tempting as it is to post something for views that you may not be comfortable with, don’t post something just because you know it will get views. If you know it will be controversial and if you know it will get a lot of comments and those comments tend to affect you, it’s not worth it. Think about why someone would watch your content. You have to make someone laugh, teach them something, or be someone they look up to. You have to draw people in quickly. Don’t sacrifice who you are, your morals, or your comfort for quick views. If you keep doing that, it’s going to paint an overall picture of who you are and it might not be a great one. 

Alana has put in a lot of work in her years of therapy, and I want to thank her for sharing her story with me. It’s not easy to open up and be vulnerable like that, and I’m hoping that her story will help someone listening to the show. Reading the emails and messages from people who have thanked her for sharing her story or telling her that her content influenced them to get help is what keeps her going.

“The more honest you are, the more people will relate to you and connect with you.”

Mentioned in the Episode:

LIVING WITH DEPRESSION (major depressive disorder)

I beat my lifelong depression…& this is how I keep it away

Does therapy actually work?

What I have been hiding from everyone | MY DEPRESSION STORY 2018

Dealing with extremely depressing thoughts | My Mental Health & Depression Story 2018

First time admitting to a professional that I need help…

Connect with Alana:

Alana Arbucci on YouTube

Alana Arbucci on Instagram

Alana Arbucci on TikTok

Podcast Music Credit: Boop by x50 @x50music
Music provided by Free Music for Vlogs youtu.be/o52xQkQWzyU

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