What is FOMO? How To Deal With Fear of Missing Out Feeling ?
FOMO, an acronym for FEAR of MISSING OUT, is a feeling of anxiety that arises because something interesting and fun is happening, often caused by uploads on social media. Fomo or 'fear of missing out' can also be defined as the feeling or perception that other people are having fun, living a better life, or experiencing better things than oneself.
Here's a little figuring out what is FOMO? And how to deal with FOMO Feeling?
Bismillahirrahmaanirrahiim, today is a productive day after such an exhausting week, you did a great job, your bones are aching in the best way possible, and you’re so sure there’s nothing that can beat the happiness of finally meeting your bed at the end of the day.
You’re now on your bed, feeling how the fatigue leach out from your shoulder and your back. And just like any other day, you unlock your phone and open your social media app. You start to scroll mindlessly on all the posts posted by your relatives, your friends, and acquaintances, and then you stumble upon a video. As soon as your finger hits the play button, you’re bombarded with the faces of your closest friends gathering in such a fun hangout session. Without you.
That’s when you feel it. A massive wave of FOMO hits you hard and leaves you miserable.
Just a couple of minutes before you were so happy to be in your bed, now you feel there’s something incomplete and you long for something that you didn’t even consider before.
Fear of missing out isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Being curious about how your friends are doing makes you take the necessary effort to keep up with them. Wanting to know something that everyone else seems to do makes you eager to learn something new.
It is also not only affecting a handful of people either. It’s the reason why gossip tabloids and sites have people drawn into it like moths to a flame: because they feel like missing out when everyone and their mom talk about a particular gossip but they don’t know anything about it. It’s the reason why people spend more time than necessary flipping through WhatsApp statuses or Instagram stories. And it is also the reason why some viral products are, well, viral. Because when enough people buy it and excitedly talk about it, people want to follow buying those products.
The question now is, why do we feel it? Can it be explained by the science behind it?
Some research found out that people are affected twice by losses than they are by gains. Thus, it feels more painful for us when we feel that we’re missing out on something rather than when we are having that exact same thing. It’s the same event, but you feel bad for missing it when you don’t even feel anything while attending it. It’s the exact same piece of item, but you feel worse for not having it even when you have many other items much better.
However, we don’t have to worry too much. Even if a good chunk of the population feels it and it seems that social media makes things worse, there are ways for us to deal with it. One of the most powerful ways to deal with it is, maybe, something that you hear over and over again: be grateful.
I know, I know that in the modern ways of solving psychological problems asking people to be grateful is something that is frowned upon. Yet I personally believe that gratitude is something that needs to be exercised regularly for the health of our minds.
FOMO is the heaviest burden on our mind when we daydream about being somewhere else, being someone else, having something else, everything that is better than what we have right now. This is why gratitude is the best weapon to fight it. And it is something that can be done by ourselves for free too! We can start by taking a look around ourselves, at our family, our friends, our home, our job, our body, is there any good thing that we subconsciously take for granted?
Now imagine that it was taken away from you, imagine that you were losing something that you have now. How would you feel? Hopefully, this exercise makes you feel grateful that you have them now. The exercise to imagine losing something may sound silly, but some research said that it works. It helps us to understand more things to appreciate and makes us happier in general.
There’s one thing you should not do when FOMO hits you hard though: post on social media to show that you’re in a good place and deliberately ignore the unhappiness you feel. Sure, it may feel elevating to do that, albeit temporarily (and deceptively). But remember that by doing so you’re participating in spreading the FOMO virus around. Good for Facebook. Good for Instagram. Good for capitalism. Bad for happiness.
FOMO or Fear of Missing Out has been around for a long time, and it is in human’s blood to show off what they have. Thus, it is entirely up to us to battle it and prevent it to affect our happiness.
Will definitely help For a while (a few hours a day), close that social media, think of something to be grateful for, and sleep well without wanting to be anywhere that isn’t here. And......
Please, feel free to share ideas how to deal with this FOMO feeling..
Note: this post was written by Luthfiana A
