Digital Creator Tinx Is Helping Reduce Anxiety One Follower At A Time

You know you’ve hit a career milestone when you become associated with a mantra. For Tinx, it’s a profound one: Comparison is the thief of joy.

“I didn’t make it up, but I just love it and it totally changed my life in my mid-20s because that’s the time when everyone starts to splinter off and go in different directions. Some people go back to school, some people get married, some people start a new job. And it’s really difficult because you start to think, Am I behind? Am I supposed to be doing something else? And then you layer on social media and it’s, Am I supposed to have a six pack? Am I supposed to look like that?

“Here’s the thing. Comparison has never done anything positive. Ever. So instead of trying to dig into that, I just started using this mantra like ‘control alt delete.’ Instead of thinking why, why why, it’s nope… Comparison is the thief of joy. And you create a new neural pathway. I’m very into neural pathways. They get stuck in a loop, and if they get stuck in a loop long enough that becomes fact in our minds. So it’s about finding little catch phrases and mantras that help snap you out of it in the moment. This one came to me at a time when I was very lost and was being so comparative.”

Welcome to the world of Tinx, nee Christina Najjar, the digital creator who’s taking social media by storm and just launched a twice-weekly podcast, It’s Me Tinx!, on SiriusXM—a full circle moment for the 31-year-old who got the bug while taking a radio class during her studies at Stanford.

A natural at comedy and connecting with people, Tinx hit her stride in 2020 with posts like her “rich mom starter pack” series and an endless array of parodies.

But this is no superficial social butterfly. What keeps her followers—a current 1.5 million on TikTok and 452K on Instagram—coming back is her persistent relatability; her knack for doling out advice, big sis style, to her audience of primarily young women; and her ability to normalize the gut-wrenching as well as the cringey.

So while Tinx may be gracing more red carpets these days and have her own line of ice cream flavors at the posh Craig’s Vegan, she gets ghosted. She gets nervous. She gets Botox. She gets anxiety that sends her to take her prescription meds. And she shares just about all of it with her followers.

“It only makes sense to talk about things that are genuinely near and dear to your heart. Mental health has been such a big part of my life, and I know it is for a lot of people,” she says. “We’re now at this paradigm shift where it feels more acceptable to talk about it, and it comes naturally to me. The more I feel comfortable with my followers, the more I share. Like this morning, I told them, I had to take a Xanax last night. I’m stressed out about the [Russian] invasion. The news stresses me out to no end, and I think a lot of people are honestly at their wit’s end with their anxiety and their stress and this pandemic.”

Not just playing along but “overjoyed” to be part of the conversation, Tinx hopes her commentary encourages others to prioritize their brain health. “Imagine if we checked in on our mental wellbeing as much as we checked in on our physical,” she posits. “Think about the amount of time we spend on our hair and our nails and our face and our bodies. What about our brains?”

It’s a topic she’s never shied away from discussing.

“I remember the first interview I did where I talked about it and my mom—and this is no fault to her because she’s a different generation—was like, ‘You’re really going to tell people that you had depression?’ And I was like yeah, I am. Because if someone out there looks up to me in any way and they think if I had it then it makes it a little more acceptable to them, then that’s a win for me. I didn’t ever really think twice about it. Which I think just means that this is what I was supposed to do. I really do think this is my calling.”

With that calling comes deep interaction, over DMs, comments and her podcast, with her followers. The questions tend to corral around two topics: Dating and body image.

“Body image plagues women,” she says. “I haven’t really started to talk about it enough because I don’t even know what angle to come at it from because what goes on in our heads about our body image is a plague.

“I’m frustrated for women younger than me. Someone asked me this morning, ‘What would you have told yourself when you were 25?’ I would’ve told myself, You’re not fat. Stop worrying about it. You’re 25, go enjoy it. Go put on a bikini and love yourself and don’t even spend a second because it’s a waste of energy. It’s something I’m going to be talking about on the podcast for sure.”

She has equally strong feelings about today’s dating scene. “It’s gotten incrementally harder with everybody having phones. The idea that we have 100 percent access to someone else through our phones at all times is strange. And it’s stressful, and it adds pressure. A lot of, especially young women are caught in this bad cycle with the phone. They’re lost. They just want someone to say it’s OK, and that I’ve been through that and you’re going to be fine. And that’s what I try to do. It’s so cheesy, but I try to be what I needed when I was younger.”

Of course, Tinx wasn’t 25 all that long ago. She credits her ability to keep trying new things, and to trust herself along the way, for bringing her to a place where she can impart wisdom and confidence.

“When you are in your 30s you start to feel like, I’m going to stop hating myself, firstly. And secondly, I’ve got my back. I can be my own best friend. I feel pretty solid that whatever I get into I’ll be alright. Whether it’s a good decision or a bad decision, I’ll be OK. I’m forever an optimist ultimately, I really am.”

Her optimism began to bubble over in early pandemic days, when people were spending even more time scrolling in search of some hope.

“My hope is that more people view this pandemic as an eye opener. That nothing is guaranteed, that life is fragile, that we need to quiet the noise and really be smart about things,” she says.

“It’s been a huge couple of years for equality. Black Lives Matter has come out of the past couple years, and that is so crucial and important. I don’t think it’s helpful to focus on the negative, even though there is plenty of it. Personally, I’m going to look for the light. Personally, I’m going to amplify how I feel about the pandemic, how I feel about Black Lives Matter. I can’t do anything but try to affect the people who I touch in their everyday life.”

As her life has hit the fast lane, Tinx remains dedicated to her own self-care routine—which includes lots of baths and the Calm app for sleep aid.

“I go to therapy every week, come rain or shine, it’s very important to me. I walk every day. And I drink water, and I read. Those are my non-negotiables,’ she says.

“I always talk about having your non-negotiables. Especially as women, we’re like rubber bands and we just stretch and stretch and stretch. If you have your non-negotiables, you get more grounded. So I have those things for myself that I can’t get rid of. That’s my self-care.”

Asked the last time she’s taken a day off, she pauses before acknowledging, “ I need to get better at that because I am needing one of those days, so I will soon. I’m tired, it’s a lot. It’s all good stuff, but you have to take a break and know that it will all be there when you get back.”