How to Overcome FOMO: Fear of Missing Out

As Erica Jong once said: “Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.”

Even if we logically know Facebook 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. You just can’t compete with their highly-edited topiary of lifestyle awesomeness — especially when you’re feeling a little down or anxious to begin with.

Looking at social media for happiness is a bad idea. You won’t find it out there. Sounds cliche, but the research says you need to look inside:

“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.”

Your happiness is determined by how you allocate your attention. 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 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 behavior and enhancing happiness is as much about withdrawing attention from the negative as it is about attending to the positive.

But how do you focus your attention so that you appreciate the real world and don’t turn to Facebook (which is only going to make you feel worse)? What can you pay attention to when life is, frankly, kinda sad or boring?

Well, try gratitude

Look around. What good things might you be taking for granted? Home? Family? Friends?

Research shows it works. Mentally subtracting cherished moments from your life makes you appreciate them more, makes you grateful and makes you happier.

"…we found that gratitude, controlling for materialism, uniquely predicts all outcomes considered: higher grade point average, life satisfaction, social integration, and absorption, as well as lower envy and depression."