What Is a FOMO Baby? Meaning, Signs, and Real Solutions for Parents

The constant barrage of couples sharing their moments of joy and togetherness can create a heightened sense of missing out on those experiences. For example, if you are constantly seeing posts of engagements, weddings, and baby announcements, you may feel like your relationship is falling behind. Aside from increased feelings of unhappiness, fear of missing out can lead to greater involvement in unhealthy behaviors. FOMO has also been linked to distracted driving, which in some cases can be deadly. The first thing you may notice is a lot of extra time on your hands. Use this to do the things you truly enjoy – things that don’t cause you stress, anxiety, sadness, and shame.

Those who enjoy spending time alone are less likely to experience FOMO. People who have FOMO might also spend a lot of time on the internet and social media. They may constantly most expensive nft refresh their apps to check for alerts or notifications. In fact, some research suggests that social media use activates a part of the brain involved in fear – a close cousin of anxiety. But social media seems to be an especially potent trigger of FOMO. Before social media, you didn’t know at any given moment whether other people were having more or less fun than you.

How to Turn FOMO into JOMO

When we become reliant on (or addicted to) something that changes our emotions, removing that something means that we’ll have to face those emotions, possibly for the first time in a while. This is very likely to result in cravings—I’ll just check my social media for a minute, what’s the harm? You might get addicted to your phone—the entertainment and the pang of positive emotions when someone clicks “Like” on your post. Just as an addict would get great pleasure from consuming their drug of choice, we too get great pleasure from using our technologies. But both are just a distraction from real life, and both have the real potential to take us out of the present moment. If you’re worried that you’re being left out, go and attend more events with people.

How you deal with FOMO depends on what exactly triggers it for you. Different preventive or relief measures might work better for different people. Spending a ton of time on your smartphone can hurt your eyesight and posture. The reality of missing out seems to have made its online debut in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people no longer had FOMO because there was nothing to “MO” on. So they accepted the reality that everyone was missing out on everything. You can embrace a lot of these management tools on your own, but sometimes, situations can be a bit more complex, especially if you’re not sure where to start.

What Is the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)?

One step in defeating FOMO is to see if a situation or event supports your short or long-term goals. If it doesn’t, focus on everything you have to be grateful for in life at this moment. This can help change your perspective when you have that fear that you are missing out on something greater.

How Does FOMO Affect People?

It’s also important to remember that most people experience FOMO to some degree and at some time. The uncomfortable emotion is normal and with the advent of social-sharing tools, increasingly common. Whether social media induces FOMO or simply makes it easier to indulge in our feelings is up for debate.

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• Comparing ourselves to people who appear better off than we are on some personal quality, experience or ability, can provide hope and inspiration to drive self-improvement.
• As one researcher put it, social media “creates distorted perceptions of edited lives of others.” Suddenly, your own life feels a bit bland.
• You make the rules for your social media break or digital detox.
• If this sounds like you, you’re certainly not alone in these habits.
• Instead, they realized that the real fear was missing out on an experience that they hadn’t even thought of or knew existed.

You start to feel anxious and restless – just because you started to think about doing another thing with friends. Jeremy Nicholson, M.S.W., Ph.D., is a doctor of social and personality psychology, with a focus on influence, persuasion, and dating. Unfortunately, modern marketing and media sometimes hack that system. It replaces competency with envy and connection with elation. This keeps us plugged in and buying but ultimately dissatisfied.

Remembering that social media is only half of the story, as well as enlisting some custom machine learning and ai solutions development coping mechanisms, can help you push back against FOMO. Cultivating a personal sense of belonging may also help you feel more in control and secure. Frequently checking social media for fear of missing out increases anxiety and emotional tension while decreasing emotion regulation (Altuwairiqi et al., 2019). The fear of missing out (FOMO) is the feeling or idea that you are missing out on something important or enjoyable that others are experiencing. Researchers surveyed social media users over the next two days about their emotional experiences and found that not surprisingly, many people were stressed by losing access to their social media. But they also found that for some people, being disconnected came with a sense of relief and even positive feelings, in other words jomo.

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology. Your self-esteem may also take a hit, especially if you feel like you don’t “belong” or are not measuring up to social expectations. And while younger people may be more likely to experience it, anyone can feel left out. Your brain is still developing as a teen, so teens may be more vulnerable to feeling peer pressure to not miss out.

She specializes in writing about mental health, healthy aging and overall wellness. For six years, how do you store bitcoins she was an editor and senior writer at Well+Good, covering everything from food trends to public health issues like the opioid epidemic. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University with a bachelor’s degree in magazine journalism. “Posting on social media and receiving positive feedback through comments, likes and follows is highly rewarding to the brain so we seek that again and again,” says Dr. Dattilo. In this way, using social media can quite literally be addictive.