4. The Psychology of FoMO

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Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the Very Unprofessional podcast, whereby I your unqualified guide talk through some of the big changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. This week, we're discussing a pretty big buzzword in social psychology at the moment and over the past ten years, FOMO, or fear of missing out. So this term, it's risen pretty steadily in popularity within the past few years, and it's become a term I'm sure we all know pretty well and a feeling I'm sure we've all felt before as well. So FOMO refers to this overwhelming feeling of anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere and you're not invited, not included. It can often be aroused by your post you see on social media or other forms of social triggers, so it's a sense that people elsewhere having fun or doing things without you. Pretty quickly we can see how this has links to social anxiety and has a huge intersection with psychology, despite being somewhat of a pop culture phrase in its current use. But we're going to discuss some of the psychological underpinnings of fomo, why it's so prominent in our twenties, possible remedies, and its origins. We're also going to discuss how fomo has been exacerbated by social media, so why social media is so harmful for our social and emotional well being, its addictive properties as well, and how fomo is part of that equation as well as being a consequence. So let's get into it. So fomo or the fear of missing out, is a feeling or a state of mild anxiety. I'm sure we've all felt at some point in our twenties. Perhaps it's been stronger at times. I think in this period of life, we are often surrounded by a lot of dense and varied social groups for muni, college to work, sports, and we have pretty large, extended social circles. So it can be pretty difficult to feel comfortable in the amount you're socializing, especially with this ability to compare to others and whether people are doing things without you or you are being excluded. Our twenties they are such a socially fast paced and chaotic time and we do feel that pressure to get the most out of our younger years and have those fun bonding moments and experiences with friends that we can hopefully look back on later in life. This is entirely a natural feeling. Wanting to be included and enjoy your life and be surrounded by people that you like and feel wanted by is normal and it's also pretty healthy. We like the company of others and we enjoy being liked as well. So that's why that feeling that you are missing out on social experiences can be so daunting for many and create pretty intense feelings of insecurity, anxiety, self doubt as well. So I've kind of mentioned this already, but fomo it's not so much a scientific fic term, but more of like a cultural one at the moment. However, since we have been able to label it, because these feelings have been around for many people in past generations, but with this label, it has kind of become a source of research, particularly it's undeniable links to social media and its ability to confront us with all the experiences we may be missing out on. Maybe I think it's probably I've kind of mentioned what it fomo is about, but it's probably good to define what it really means to begin. So a recent study on the subject came up with a definition that has become somewhat standard in psychological communities. So it described fomo as the uneasy and sometimes all consuming feeling that you're missing out, that your peers are doing, in the know about, or in possession of more or something that's better than you. So under this framing of fomo, their study concluded that nearly three quarters of young adults have experienced the phenomenas, so at least enough that they can actually recognize those nervous and anxious feelings. But I'm sure that statistic would be much higher if we also assessed people in contexts when they kept personal journals, or if they were asked more frequently, maybe once a week or even once a month, whether they had had an instance of fomo. Because this feeling of social exclusion and insecurity can be so uncomfortable, I'm sure that many others who have occasionally experienced it likely suppressing the discomfort, so probably wouldn't even realize that they have felt that unease that they're missing out. So the fear of missing out, it's closely linked to a mild form of social anxiety and might be more common in those with generalized anxiety disorder so JD FOMO. It's accompanied by feelings of self consciousness, of unease, and concern about feeling socially out of place, and these all overlap with a particular form of social anxiety. A really good episode by MPRS The Hidden Brain, which is a really good podcast if you are joying these p calast It discussed this link between FOMO and social anxiety. So in all their experiments they found that FOMO is a function of a particular anxiety that something might happen in a group experience that will shape the group history in the future, and that means you might not be a part of that group as much as you would like to be, and it will undermine your group belonging. This because of something that's happened in a situation when you're not there. This can therefore contribute to a lot of fear of future situations in which you may feel judged or isolated because you didn't participate in that previous social event. This shows, I think how anxiety and FOMO are directly related to social vulnerability about current and future social settings in which we do crave to be included and accepted. FOMO it's not in the DSM. So the DSM, we've talked about this before, it's the largest manual of all mental health disorders. Fomo isn't in there, but social anxiety is. And although I've mentioned how they could be linked, they are distinct and I don't think they should be confused. For one, FOMO concerns fear of being excluded from a social situation. It's the fear of not being in that social situation and therefore maybe involves a tendency towards hyper and excessive socialization, whereas social anxiety is more commonly involves an avoidance of social situations or a fear of being in a social situation that you can't get out of. But we can kind of see how FOMO may contribute to social anxiety. So people with social anxiety, which is a diagnosable disorder, they have an intense fear of situations where they could be watched, judged, embarrassed, or rejected by others, and the symptoms are so extreme that they interfere with the person's daily routine and prevent them from taking part in ordinary activities. In contrast, FOMO is not diagnosable in a professional sense. It also concerns a fear of not being present in situations, whereas social anxiety involves that fear that kicks in once we're in them. So there are some tenuous links between social anxiety and this fear of missing out. They're both directly related to relationships and the social element of our psychology. But foma seems to be its own class of anxiety and our needs. It's important to know why it occurs from a psychological perspective before we can grasp on to how to minimize it. So let's dive into the possible causes and what the literature says about this universal fear of missing out. Firstly, many theories have hypothesized that fomo emerges from a pre existing insecurity or unhappiness. Those who we are experiencing low levels of satisfaction around fundamental needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness, they tend towards higher levels of fear of missing out as to those who have lower levels of general mood and overall life satisfaction. It does appear that the root of fomo is not so much about anxiety, but it's more to do with loneliness, low self esteem, low self compassion, if you're more satisfied with your life, not just your social relationships. Researchers have found that you're less likely to have experience as a fomo, even if you are confronted by the idea that you are potentially missing out on an experience or something you'd like to be included in in that way. Kind of interpretation I have of that is that emotions associated with fomo, they're more of a proxy for deeper dissatisfaction with one's life, and the experiencing of the experience of missing out may also just serve to reinforce previous negative emotions and self perceptions, hence why it can be so overwhelmingly and overall a distressing experience. Another interesting study I looked into it discussed how humans appreciate gains versus losses as an explanation for fomo. So research suggests that people are twice as affected by losses as they are gains. So it makes sense that our instinct is to avoid the pain of missing out and dwell on those defeats when we do, and it also suggests why this feeling can be stronger than the actual gains we get when we are socializing or we are included. This also ties into a more traditional evolutionary perspective that kind of explains why we do feel a loss when we aren't enjoying the company of those we'd like to be around. Essentially, we're pack animals, and in the past, our survival was intimately linked to being surrounded by others of our species. That's why that discomfort we feel with foma. It may have actually originated from this deep root of fear of danger or threat, and that we might be less equipped to deal with those threats when we're alone or not in a group. So, if our natural tendency is towards being around others as towards being included and being in a community because of the survival mechanism, it does explain why missing out can be such a tremendous stress for some. So, if our brains are hardwired towards social interaction and a sense of belonging, and we receive a benefit or a gain from socializing, which in turn creates the idea of loss when we aren't socializing, that just creates the foundation for fomo. It's not really your fault, it's genetics, it's biology. It's that instinct in you to want to be included and want to be accepted. But let's kind of introduce the next evil that is particularly dominant amongst those in their twenties, social media. Social media has been a large focus amongst psychologists who've been investigating fomo for many obvious reasons. The rapid growth of social media over the last decade has established an entirely new medium for human interaction. So Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. They've allowed people in every corner of the world to be connected twenty four seven, and it also allows people to share, you know, the best and greatest moments of their life with essentially everyone they know for public viewing. Okay, I don't think it's just me. You know you've seen an Instagram story of people hanging out and you felt a sense of fomo despite you know, you might be busy yourself or being around you might be around others whose company you actually really enjoy. But if you're already not feeling like so hot about things, or if you're wondering if everyone else is having more fun than you, social media is not really the antidote. So researchers are finding that the fear of missing out is connected to social media use. These feelings strongly correlate to feelings of regret and social insignificance as well. As people consume large amounts of social media posts, they start to compare themselves, not only physically as we would traditionally think, but also socially. Researcher who does a lot of work on this his name's doctor Barry, and he talks a lot about FOMO and internet use, and he explains the link between the two pretty excellently. So we're not all equally prone to the fear of missing out, but for those who are, social media can exacerbate it. So if we're thinking about some of those discussions of the origins of social media or the origins of fomo, if you're already feeling insecure or insignificant, social media is kind of like the fuel on the pre existing fire, and it's because it allows you to kind of observe what other people are doing and what's going on in their lives at any time of the day. So if there is already that concern about missing out, then there will be distress it seeing that on social media because it reconfirms fears and insecurities that were pre existing. So kind of social media kind of acts like a trigger. So that's the first direction of the relationship between social media and this fear of missing out, whereby social media, like I said, acts as a trigger, but fear of missing out can exist independently of social media, and it can alternatively kind of act as that primary urge to check social media, so it creates a self fueling cycle. It doesn't just work in one direction. So in one study, FOMO amongst young adults between nineteen and twenty four was robustly associated with social media engagement, and a similar study run in parallel, so I think they were like sister studies. It found that fear of missing out played a key role in explaining social media engagement over and above any other factor that was considered. So those high in FOMO, they tended to use Facebook more often immediately after waking up, before going to sleep, during meals, at work, in the bathroom, all of those kind of habits that create a dependency on social media and make it more of a lifestyle rather than just something that is an addition to your life. So essentially, preliminary feelings of missing out it leads people to check social media more frequently, as it can be comforting because if you don't see people hanging out, it kind of disproves those in those internal feelings. However, when you do see an image or a post to indicate that you're not being included, it can only serve to hurt you more. But it also reconfirms that that fear you are having, You know you weren't crazy, that it was legitimate, which can also be comforting in itself. And we all know that social media it's not a balanced picture of people's lives. It is a cherry picked, edited, perfect version. And even if we recognize that in ourselves that we put filters on our photos, we only choose the best images, We only post when we're out with people and having fun. You know, we're selective. It's hard to apply that logic evenly to others. We really just can't help but compare, especially from a point of social comparison as well. So people who use social media more frequently have a higher probability of comparing their achievements and their bodies and their social lives with those of others. And that passive consumption of social media content also correlates to a marginal increase in depression and unhappiness as well, which we already know actually does predispose someone to a fear of missing out. So it all becomes more and more related the more you look into the direction of the relationship between a fear of missing out and social media. So even if we logically know that what we see on Facebook or Instagram isn't accurate, we're still confronted with a perfectly curated version of others lives, and it does create an unachievable false social reality that can exacerbate an already vulnerable self esteem. You just can't compete with someone's highly edited depiction of their life, especially when you're feeling a little bit down or anxious to begin with. So how do we overcome fomo? How do we overcome this sense that we're missing out, this sense of insidious kind of social anxiety, because it can feel, like i say, quite insidious, especially in socially claustrophobic environments that sometimes dominate our twenties, like graduate programs, uni colleges, sports teams. We can see the evident links to social media usage firstly and its origins in a more general sense of inadequacy and unhappiness, as well as the explanation that fomo is also a variant of social anxiety. So with that in mind, maybe an attentional model is the best antidote or provides the best insight into a cure, even though it's not a diagnosable illness. Yeah, just something to soothe those kind of worries. So most attentional models of mental wellbeing, and I love an attentional model of mental wellbeing. I think that kind of spot on. But they often put forward the theory that our happiness it's directly caused by how we allocate our attention. So one researcher puts it perfectly in an article they wrote about fomo in your twenties. When you attend, what you attend to drives your behavior, and it determines your happiness. Attention is the glue that holds your life together. The scarcity of attentional resources means that you must consider how you can make and facilitate better decisions about what you pay attention to and in what ways. If you're not as happy as you could be, then you must be misallocating your attention. So changing behavior and enhancing happiness is as much about withdrawing attention from the negative as it is about attending to the positive. So that might seem quite broad, and it can be applied to many other facets of our lives in our early twenties, but let's think about it in the context of this anxiety or fear of missing out. Firstly, the more time you spend consuming social media, the more of your attention is devoted to this cherry picked highlight reel of others lives, and this will control how you formulate your own vision of your life, especially your social life, and it can cause you to set up unrealistic expectations about what others are doing and how your own interactions should compare. So focus on being present in the experience you're in rather than what you might be missing out on. And since social media is the most prominent point of comparison, limiting its use is actually probably pretty useful for also minimizing feelings of POMO. Secondly, place greater attention and focus on the moments when you do feel present, when you do feel included and you're happy, and who you are around in those situations where you have those positive feelings, who really brings that out in you? This will create greater satisfaction In general, all, and it does also allow you to be less concerned about what others might be doing without you if you're surrounded by people whose company you really value. But obviously, just a big, big disclaimer, I'm not a professional. I'm just an amateur kind of applying my own interpretation of some of these psychological theories. But I think this fear of missing out is universal amongst twenty something year olds, which is kind of ironic, you know, considering we're all feeling the same way about the situations we're in, and we're currently envious of someone else who might be envious of us. So maybe that's where the greatest piece kind of comes from. If you are around people you enjoy and you're grateful for, it will become harder for those feelings of missing out to come up. And if you realize that others also have those feelings, kind of puts things in perspective that no one is having any more fun than anyone else anyhow. Finishing that up on a bit of a sappy note there, hope you've learned something and could relate to some of the experiences that we've discussed in this slightly shorter episode. It was actually super fun to look into this, especially having experienced this quite often in my first year of UNI. So it's nice actually to look back and realize I'm not in that place anymore, and those feelings of fomo for me have kind of lessened since I've gotten such better friends and valued my social interactions by their quality rather than their quantity. But thanks for tuning in. Next week, we have a lovely, lovely guest on the show for our second Let's Get Friendly episode, and after that we're going to be talking about the psychological concept of flow, which is one I'm really really looking forward to, so I'm excited. I hope you guys are as well. Remember to subscribe to us on Spotify or Apple podcast, wherever you get your podcast, give us a follow on Instagram, and yeah, stay tuned for future episodes. Thanks again for listening in and IP you have an incredible wake by