Health & Environment

FOMO: It’s Your Life You’re Missing Out On

Are greener pastures really on the other side of your iPhone screen?
By Lauren Thompson, Texas A&M Health Science Center March 30, 2016

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Living our lives through a virtual filter isn’t really living at all—it only fuels an anxious mindset that we must be ‘missing out.’

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“You missed out.” Is there another sentence that could strike such anxiety in the hearts of young people? Other than “We need to talk,” of course. It’s true, though, and we need to talk about fear of missing out. Known as FOMO in millennial-speak, fear of missing out is quickly taking a toll on Generation Y—and it’s probably causing damage to your own life.

Do you have trouble sitting through a movie without obsessively checking your phone? Does your family complain about your constant social media habit? If you panic at the thought of not having a window to the world, you may be experiencing FOMO—which was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013. Living our lives through this virtual filter isn’t really living at all—it only fuels an anxious mindset that we must be ‘missing out.’

With at least 24 percent of teenagers online ‘almost constantly,’ it’s no surprise that fear of missing out is an epidemic among millennials. “FOMO is especially rampant in the millennial community because they see a peer achieving something they want, and somehow in their mind, that achievement means something is being ‘taken away’ from them,” said Darlene McLaughlin, M.D., assistant professor at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine and a psychiatry and behavioral health specialist with Texas A&M Physicians.

It’s easy to define our lives based on the virtual crowd watching, critiquing, and applauding our every move. It’s even easier to conform to the crowd’s mold—constantly measuring our lives against a celebrity’s Instagram post or a friend’s life event.

This ‘give me more’ and ‘I want that’ attitude can be detrimental to us both physically and mentally. In fact, recent studies have shown that FOMO is linked to feelings of dissatisfaction. “The problem with FOMO is the individuals it impacts are looking outward instead of inward,” McLaughlin said. “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.”

Continue reading on Vital Record.


This article by Lauren Thompson originally appeared in Vital Record.

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