FEAR OF MISSING OUT (FOMO)

What Is FOMO?

This is a social anxiety stemmed from the belief that others might be having fun while the person experiencing the anxiety is not present. It is characterized by a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing. FOMO is also defined as a fear of regret, which may lead to concerns that one might miss an opportunity for social interaction, a novel experience or a profitable investment. It is the fear that deciding not to participate is the wrong choice.

Social networking creates many opportunities for FOMO. While it provides opportunities for social engagement, it offers an endless stream of activities in which any given person is not involved. Psychological dependence on social networks can result in anxiety and can lead to FOMO or even pathological Internet use. FOMO could result from not knowing about a conversation, missing a TV show, not attending a wedding or party, or hearing that others have discovered a new restaurant. The fear of missing out refers to the feeling or perception that others are having more fun, living better lives, or experiencing better things than you are, and involves a deep sense of envy and affects self-esteem. FOMO is also the sense that there might be better things that you could be doing at this moment and involves a sense of helplessness that you are missing out on something big.

Brief History

The idea that you might be missing out on a good time is not new to our era. However, while it has presumably been around for centuries (you can see evidence of FOMO in ancient texts), it has only been studied since 1996. Social media has accelerated the FOMO phenomenon in several ways. It provides a situation in which you are comparing your regular life to the highlights of others' lives. Therefore, your sense of "normal" becomes skewed and you seem to be doing worse than your peers. You might see detailed photos of your friends enjoying fun times without you, which is something that people may not have been so readily aware of in past generations. Social media creates a platform for bragging; it is where things, events, and even happiness itself seems to be in competition at times. People are comparing their best, picture-perfect experiences, which may lead you to wonder what you are lacking.

The roots: FOMO Comes from Unhappiness

Those with low levels of satisfaction of the fundamental needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness tend towards higher levels of fear of missing out as do those with lower levels of general mood and overall life satisfaction. So you’re not feeling so great — whether you realize it or not — and you turn to social media to make you feel better. Only one problem there: it actually makes you feel worse.

The Attention Deficit

The problem with FOMO is the individuals it impacts are looking outward instead of inward. When you’re so tuned in to the ‘other,’ or the ‘better’ (in your mind), you lose your authentic sense of self. This constant fear of missing out means you are not participating as a real person in your own world. And the key to happiness really comes down to one word - Attention. Your happiness is determined by how you allocate your attention. What you attend to this, it drives your behaviour and it determines your happiness. The scarcity of attentional resources means that you must consider how you can make and facilitate better decisions about what to pay attention to and in what ways. If you are not as happy as you could be, then you must be misallocating your attention. So changing behaviour and enhancing happiness is as much about withdrawing attention from the negative as it is about attending to the positive. People with FOMO stop paying attention to life and turn to social media for their happiness cure.

The Social Media Illusion

We all know that Social Media doesn’t provide a very well-rounded picture of people’s lives. Often it seems like if bragging and showing off were banned, some people wouldn’t post anything at all. But despite knowing this, studies say we can’t help but compare our lives to others. If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

As Erica Jong once said: “Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.” Even if we logically know Social Media isn’t an accurate depiction of people’s lives, well, confronting your seeming inadequacy 24/7 against an unachievable false reality can hammer your already vulnerable self-esteem. But engaging to alleviate your discomfort also has an important secondary effect: by presenting your carefully edited version of life awesomeness, you just made anyone who sees it feel worse. You’re spreading the virus.

1)      Social networking sites are both a cause and an effect of FOMO, acting as a mechanism that triggers higher social networking usage. It appears that FOMO is linked to both feeling a need to engage in social media and increasing that engagement, thereby contributing to a negative, self-perpetuating cycle.

2)      You may find yourself seeking a greater connection when you are feeling depressed or anxious, and this is healthy. Feelings of loneliness or exclusion are actually our brain's way of telling us that we want to seek out greater connections with others and increase our sense of belonging.

3)      FOMO can be experienced by people of all ages. Smartphone usage was related to fears of negative and even positive evaluations by others as well as linked to negative effects on mood.

4)      FOMO is linked to lower life satisfaction.  Fear of missing out was found to be associated with a lower sense of having one's needs met as well as a lower feeling of life satisfaction in general.

5)      Aside from increased feelings of unhappiness, fear of missing out can lead to greater involvement in unhealthy behaviours. FOMO has been linked to distracted driving, which in some cases can be deadly.

Minimizing FOMO

Change your focus.: Rather than focusing on what you lack, try noticing what you have. Add more positive people to your feed; hide people who tend to brag too much or who are not supportive of you. You can change your feed to show you less of what triggers your FOMO and more of what makes you feel good about yourself. Work on identifying what may be sapping your joy online and  minimize these as you add more to your feed (and life) that makes you happy.

Keep a journal.: It is common to post on social media to keep a record of the fun things you do. However, you may find yourself noticing a little too much about whether people are validating your experiences online. If this is the case, you may want to take some of your photos and memories offline and keep a personal journal of your best memories, either online or on paper. This can help you to shift your focus from public approval to private appreciation of the things that make your life great. This shift can sometimes help you to get out of the cycle of social media and FOMO.

Seek out real connections.: Rather than trying to connect more with people on social media, why not arrange to meet up with someone in person? Making plans with a good friend, creating a group outing, or doing anything social that gets you out with friends can be a nice change of pace, and it can help you to shake that feeling that you are missing out. Even a direct message on social media to a friend can foster a greater and more intimate connection than posting to all of your friends.

Focus on gratitude.: Studies show that engaging in gratitude-enhancing activities like gratitude journaling or simply telling others what you appreciate about them can lift your spirits as well as those of everyone around you. This is partially because it is harder to feel as if you lack the things you need in life when you are focused on the abundance you already have. The more a person is inclined to gratitude, the less likely he or she is to be depressed, anxious, lonely, envious, or neurotic. And feeling gratitude doesn’t just make you happier. It’s correlated with an objectively better life. Gratitude, controlling for materialism, uniquely predicts all outcomes considered, like a higher grade point average, life satisfaction, social integration, and absorption, as well as lower envy and depression. 

Use social media in moderation.: The negative effects of social media often occur when social media is used very frequently, or at the expense of maintaining relationships offline. Social media can be a great tool for connecting with other people. Although we can experience FOMO when we learn about fun events after-the-fact, social media can also be a great way to find out about events we are able to attend. Social media can complement a healthy, fulfilling social life when used in moderation. To reduce your social media use, try using Moment or another activity-tracking smartphone app to monitor the time you spend on social media and set realistic goals for reducing your social media time and replacing it with more fulfilling activities.

Focus on your friends more than your acquaintances.: We can use social media to keep in touch with people who live far away and to see what our friends are doing. Viewing close friends’ posts is less likely to provoke the upward social comparison that harms our well-being than viewing acquaintances’ or strangers’ posts.

Share updates from your own life in a mindful way.: Although we know our own lives aren’t perfect, it’s often tempting to portray them that way on social media. It’s natural to want to present ourselves positively, and updating our own social media accounts can boost our self-esteem. However, occasionally discussing the less-than-perfect aspects of our lives can help others feel connected to us and give them the opportunity to support us. Honesty on social media may also help mitigate the negative consequences of social media use for others.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa