What is FOMO Fear of Missing Out and how to address it with Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes

This episode was pre recorded as part of a live continuing education webinar on demand. CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs register@allceus.com counselortoolbox.

I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation.

14 tips for addressing FOMO. I couldn't come up with a 15th, I'm sorry. So we had to go with 14 and that drives me crazy. I like the zeros and fives. That's just one of my little OCD things, but whatever. Anyhow, I am your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. We are going to define FOMO or for those of you who don't know fomo, fear of missing out. We're going to explore reasons for fomo, identify consequences of FOMO and review interventions to reduce the impact of fomo.

A lot of the research out there.

I was kind of frustrated that a lot of the research out there relates FOMO to inappropriate use of technology. And FOMO isn't necessarily always about technology. So we're going to extrapolate some from the research and we're going to talk about a lot of different stuff. I don't want to get ahead of myself.

FOMO fear of missing out has been around since way before social media, but.

This persistent connectivity has exacerbated it. Think about back, I don't know how old you are, but you know, when I was in high school and middle school, we had landlines. We did not have the Internet didn't exist. So it was a whole different thing. Was there fear of missing out when you were in high school, did you wonder what your friends were doing and you know, feel like you might be being left out if you weren't at the ball game or if you weren't at the pep rally or whatever it is? Well, yeah, FOMO has existed for years, but with the advent of the Internet and especially social networking sites, FOMO has become sort of in our face 24 7, which has started to cause more problems when back in the day, I'll just say that back in the day when you had that fear of missing out or whatever, you would think about it for a second and then you would do something else.

Now a lot of times when people.

Have that FOMO experience instead of doing something else, they get on else is doing it and see if they can find pictures of it and who's and if they're having more fun and yada yada yada, and it becomes this obsessive activity. Social media both causes fomo. You know, it existed before but social media has exacerbated it because it's, you know, two in the morning, you can wonder what you're missing out on, or you can be waking up at 2 in the morning to try to see if anybody posted pictures from the holiday party that happened earlier in the evening to see who was there. And there's just way too much connectivity. But anyway, social media can cause fomo, but it's also sustained by it. If we didn't have this fear of missing out, if we didn't have this need to figure out what everybody in the Joneses were doing, then we probably wouldn't be on social media quite as much. Does it mean we wouldn't be on it at all? No. There are some really appropriate uses for social media and that's fine. I don't want social media to get a horrible rap because used in certain ways, social media can actually increase connectivity with people who live far away. I have a good friend of mine who moved to California, you know, gosh, it's been about 15 years ago, and we communicate on chat, which is wonderful. We connected on Facebook and I can.

See pictures of her kids and stuff.

And it's really awesome. So there are positive aspects to it if you are engaging in it for the right reasons, if you will. And we talked about some of that in a class. Oh, golly. A few weeks ago, about how Internet behaviors don't necessarily cause depression. They found that for a lot of people, the depression or anxiety was pre existing. And we're going to talk about that a little bit more in a minute. And people got online in order to try to mitigate it. And when they got online, it actually exacerbated it. So there's, you know, social media isn't all to blame.

Fear of missing out refers to the feeling or perception that others are happier.

Or living better lives than you are. That's the first part of it. And I want to stop with that part of the definition.

And I want you to think about.

The last time you went on Facebook or it actually seems to be more on my LinkedIn feed than on my Facebook feed where people, people are posting pictures of themselves with and name dropping. You know, I was at this conference with this person. I was here doing this. My social network feed tends to be much more chill and it's usually pictures of puppies and pounds and stuff, which is sad. But thinking about, you know, when we go to that social networking site and we see people that were invited to speak on this panel and who were, you know, with some Celebrity or whatever, how do you feel?

And remembering that a lot of people.

Probably the majority, but I will say.

A lot of people, they don't post.

Their whole life online. They post the good things, they post the highlights. They're not going to say, yeah, I got into a car crash. And, you know, well, some of them will say, I broke my foot or my dog died or something. But a lot of times what we're seeing is the best moments of somebody's day, and we're not getting all of the other minutiae in there. So we tend to think that they may be feeling happier or living better lives than we are.

This can promote a deep sense of.

Envy and a sense of increased helplessness.

Why not me?

Why wasn't I invited? Why didn't I win that prize? Why didn't I, you know, hook this wonderful spouse? Why didn't I? Whatever. Why didn't I? Why not me?

Which reduces self esteem.

Because then people try to rectify in their minds, why is this person over here having all this awesome stuff happen to them and it's not happening to me?

Well, part of that, when we get.

Down to interventions, we're going to start.

Talking about the fact that we've got.

To look at what's going right in our lives. Too often we look for what's going right in other people's lives, and we don't think, well, what else may be going on. But in our own lives, we tend to notice the bad stuff and not give too much credence to the good stuff. It's like, you know, you go through your day if nothing bad happens. Somebody asks you how your day was, and you're like, it was fine when, you know, there could have been some good things that happened. But we tend to minimize the positive and maximize the negative. So that's one of those cognitive distortions we need to address.

FOMO is not just the sense that.

You might be missing out on something. You're at home on Saturday night and you're sitting there watching a Netflix marathon, and you think, you know, I might be missing out on something. There might be a party to go to, you know, whatever.

It's not that.

It's the feeling that you're missing out on something fundamentally important that others are experiencing right now. This is the party of the century, and if you're not there, you are not part of the in crowd. It kind of throws you back to high school a little bit.

So we do want to explore with.

Clients issues surrounding that fundamental importance. When you go online when you fear you're missing out, what do you fear you're missing out on? And how is that fundamentally important to you? Having a rich and meaningful life? How is that Christmas party, or whatever it is, having a brand new car, whatever it is, how is that fundamental to you? Having a rich and meaningful life?

Social media intensifies foma by only providing.

The highlights of other lives, leading people's sense of normal to become skewed. And we talked about that a little bit already.

We see people's good days.

We see, you know, one of my friends has a child that's about the same age as my kids, and I see her posting regularly about her child's accomplishments and successes, and she just started college and yada, yada, yada.

Well, of course she's not going to.

Post about the time the kid went out and wrecked the car or stayed out past curfew or whatever else. That's not something you generally put on social media. If I'm not thinking, okay, I'm seeing the highlights, then I might think that, oh, she has this perfect kid and my children are not perfect. Well, nobody's kids are perfect. I tend to think mine are, you know, pretty darn awesome. But just giving you an example, with that particular perspective, I see a lot more of her stuff, positive stuff about her kids.

And, okay, so there's probably some negative.

Stuff that happens, but do I really want to spend my time thinking, all right, what negative must be going on? What is she hiding? You know, that's not worth my energy either.

In the past, our friends often didn't.

Do everything with us, but with social media, it's more obvious when we're excluded or we miss out on something. If your friend says that they're, you know, going to chill this weekend and just hang out and do stuff around the house or whatever, and then you get on social media and you see that they went rock climbing with a group of people. You might feel betrayed, you might feel like you missed out. You might feel something when maybe, you know, they got all their stuff done and somebody called them and said, hey, we're going rock climbing. You want to come with us? It's as simple and as innocent as that. You weren't invited. Well, they may not have thought to invite you. You don't. Your lives don't revolve around you. You're not the son. So it's important for people to recognize that a lot of times, you know, before the Internet happened, things like that would happen and you wouldn't even realize it. So it wouldn't hurt your feelings. Now we need to use more in terms of addressing cognitive distortions and looking at alternate explanations for why things might.

Have happened or approaching it.

And seeing that post of the person on the rock wall going, gee, looks like they must have gotten an opportunity to go out and they're having a lot of fun.

Good for them.

A lot of people don't approach social media that way.

Social media creates a platform for bragging. It is where things, events, and even.

Happiness itself seems to be in competition at times. Well, most of the time. And again, back in the day, it's still there was a time for bragging. In your own neighborhood, for example, you know, there was always who had the biggest house, who had the best car, who had the this, who had the that, whatever was a priority in your neighborhood. And we used to talk about that as, quote, keeping up with the Joneses. Well, now our neighborhood, the Joneses are everywhere.

They're worldwide.

That is a lot to keep up with. It's hard enough to keep up with if you wanted to the people in your own, you know, cul de sac, let alone, you know, the entire United States.

Problematic social media use tends to be.

Higher among surface learners and the focus is on problematic social media use. When people go on social media and it starts causing them distress, what's different about them? And the research has shown that surface learners tend to have more difficulty with social media. What are surface learners?

Surface learners are people who just like.

It sounds, see things and take it at face value. They don't connect it to anything else. They don't try to interpret it in any deeper sense of the word. It's just they see this picture of somebody having fun and that person had said that they were going to spend time at home, but they're not, so it must be betrayal. Surface learners is very sort of what you see, what you get.

And it's important for us to be.

Able to think more deeply about things and think about alternate explanations and yada yada.

People with high rumination tend to have.

Problems on social media. They see something that upsets them and instead of going, okay, well that kind of sucks, and then moving on, it keeps coming back in their minds. Even after they turn off social media, they're perseverating on it for hours or heaven forbid, days.

And people with pre existing depression or.

Anxiety tend to have more problematic social media use. They are already going on social media looking for some sort of relief and they find themselves in a position of competition, in a position of Thinking other people are having better, easier lives than they are.

Types of social media or social networking sites commonly implicated.

Well, Facebook is one that we talk about a lot.

LinkedIn is another one.

If you have a robust LinkedIn profile and you are, it probably means you are one who is invested in your career and you want to advance. And you may see a lot of people getting promotions and advancements and you know, you may not be. So that's where again, that missing out can kick in or, you know, not being able to be at certain conventions or whatever.

Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Pinterest are other.

Places that people post things about their lives. They post highlight reels and others can go on and feel in competition or feel inadequate in comparison.

Dating and connecting apps like MeetMe, Plenty.

Of Fish, Tinder, you know, the list goes on and on and on. That's also a place where people can go on and experience a fear of missing out. They get on these sites and they may start talking to one person, but then they're like, oh, maybe there's something better out there. So then they start swiping, whatever it is, swiping left more or swiping right, I don't know, they start swiping more in order to see if there's something else out there. It's like they don't seem to be satisfied with their relationships. And YouTube, you know, you think YouTube, that's videos, that's not interactive.

What.

However you have influencers on YouTube that have a strong influence on our younger generation. What they wear, what they think, what they do, what they say. I mean there's a lot of influencers on YouTube and if someone has a low self esteem or is struggling, especially you know, if they are a surface learner, have high rumination and, or anxiety and depression when they see an influence who influencer who just gets on YouTube and makes $200,000 a year just for posting on YouTube. They may feel envious, jealous, but they want to get on and watch that influencer because they fear they're going to miss out. They fear that if they don't follow what this person's doing, then they are going to be not included in the crowd, whatever that is.

And then there are others other YouTube.

Channels out there like Van Life channels and the sailing channels and things where.

People are basically broadcasting their lives. And some of their lives seem really.

Pretty awesome if you enjoy that sort of thing. My husband watches a Van Life channel all the time because he loves to travel. That's not my thing. I'm A homebody. So. So I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. But people who do want to do something like that and they see somebody else doing it may feel resentful or jealous or something because someone else is getting to live their dream.

Consequences of FOMO addiction It can cause.

Depression and anxiety and self medication for.

Addiction, but it can also cause.

We'll call it social media addiction. And no, that is not in the dsm, but we're using that term kind of broadly right now and it's not even called addiction in the dsm. More time and when you look at.

The criteria for addiction, more time is.

Spent using or recovering from use of the Internet in this case, or planning on how to use the Internet in this case. Giving up friends and activities to engage in online behaviors.

Psychological withdrawal.

If you can't have your mobile device with you, feeling high levels of anxiety because you're not able to check in, you're not able to see those tweets. And for some youth, maybe even for some older people now, I forget how old I am. Even going through a meal without being able to have their mobile device face up and see those push notifications causes.

Really high levels of anxiety.

What if somebody texts me and needs me? What if somebody invites me to a party and I don't respond right away? What if, what if, what if?

And biopsychosocial impairment because of their engagement.

In social networking because of fomo, they forego sleep. A lot of times they stay, they start scrolling to see what everybody else is doing to make sure that nobody else is getting ahead of them, so to speak, they forego sleep.

It also causes a lot of stress.

Which impacts their sleep quality.

It causes relationship stress. If you are in a relationship with.

Somebody and they are constantly on their mobile device scrolling instead of paying attention to you, it can be problematic unless you're doing the same thing.

There's also relationship stress because of what.

I talked about earlier with the advent of social media and social dating sites, and Tinder, I think was probably one of the first ones. There's always the sense that, okay, what I've got is good, but maybe there's something better out there. Let me keep looking.

Which causes a lot of conflict in.

Relationships, a lot of virtual infidelity. Texting and driving is also a consequence of fomo. You can't go five minutes without checking your text messages or your phone or your social media and just reduced productivity. I've experienced it in with staff members that I've had that and even with my kids, to a certain extent, they were really good at holding the reins on it. But once they got on to. Once people get on to Facebook or.

Wherever they think they're going to go.

On and check something real quick and then all of a sudden 30 minutes or an hour, heaven forbid, three hours have gone by and they're not being as productive or every time they've got their mobile device next to their keyboard and every time they get a push notification, it distracts them. They're losing time.

FOMO can cause anxiety, depression, relationship stress and stress related health problems. When you have this constant fear of.

Missing out, fear, the operative word, that HPA axis is actually activated, you feel like you may be the last one in the herd, so to speak. If you want to go back to primitive thinking, which makes you more vulnerable to be left out to not get the things that you want or need.

FOMO impacts relationships. Being on multiple social media sites and constantly swiping left.

Okay, I was right. Swiping left to find something better out there.

One study found that 22% of Tinder.

Users were married and 44% were already in involved in a relationship. Now this study hypothesized that those numbers were because of poor relationship satisfaction. That could be. I'm not saying it's not. However, I also want to leave a certain amount of leeway in there for polyamory, consensual non monogamy and relationship anarchist type relationships. Not everybody is buying into the whole monogamy thing anymore. Now that has increased significantly since the Internet and social media.

However, you know, there's a lot of.

Conflict out there about how much polyamory and consensual non monogamy and stuff has been going on for many, many years, even back into, you know, the 60s and 70s and maybe before.

Phubbing is another thing that causes problems.

In relationships when you're on the Internet all the time. Phubbing is the habit of ignoring in real life IRL contacts in order to focus on social media so you can be at dinner with your spouse and sitting there texting, kind of ignoring everything that's going on. It's one of my little pet peeves when one of my children brings their mobile device to the dinner table and you know, is just frantically typing the entire time every once in a while. You got a friend in crisis, I get it. But every single day, not going to happen. There's a negative correlation between Facebook use and relationship satisfaction. As Facebook use goes up, relationship satisfaction goes down. Partly because we hypothesize when people are unhappy in their relationships, they may be seeking social support or seeking alternatives on Facebook.

But Facebook use also can cause relationship stress if there's not a lot of.

Trust in that relationship and the partner is feeling jealous, envious, insecure about what the person who's on Facebook is saying, doing who they're posting to, yada yada.

Social media, especially sites like Tinder, may.

Be used to regulate depressive affect in females and anxiety in males. It was interesting that there was a very clear difference in the mood motivators, if you will, for getting on social media sites. And Tinder is a meetup site, if you will, stop short of calling it a dating site.

So if you want to think about.

What'S going on with this person, in females, they may feel depressed, they may feel lonely, they may feel insecure. You know something, I guess insecure is a little more anxiety, but so they go on Tinder in order to get validation. In males, if they have high anxiety, they don't feel adequate enough, they may go on Tinder again to get validation, but it tends to be a different mood state. What can we do about it?

Encourage people to focus on what they.

Have, not what they lack.

And that may be.

That may involve creating a scrapbook, doing a journal offline, adding their own pictures online if they want to. If they do that, you know, it's good to keep that private. Otherwise it ends up generally morphing into more of a competition. Okay, you posted six pictures of your kid. I'm gonna post eight pictures of mine and a trophy that they won.

Really, it's not a competition. Encourage people to decide for themselves what is important for them to have a.

Rich and meaningful life. You can get online and you can see that so and so got this brand new house that's 50 million thousand square feet.

And it's a gorgeous house.

And you can be envious and get.

All upset about it, or you can.

Look at it and go, God, I'm glad I don't have to clean that and pay the electric bills and the taxes and everything else. You see where my mind goes.

But focus on what's important for your.

Rich and meaningful life.

Yes, people are going to have stuff. People are going to have experiences.

People are going to, you know, be happy. Sometimes the question is not what makes them happy. The question is what makes you happy? What makes the client happy.

Encourage them to find inspiration instead of envy.

If somebody posts online that they got accepted into this really exclusive club or.

Graduated with their master's degree or Whatever it is, they had some sort of accomplishment.

Instead of going having some snide comment to make. I can't even think of one right now.

Find inspiration. If that's something that's important for you.

To have in your life, for it to be a rich and meaningful life.

Well, then let's set goals, you know, get inspired. Okay.

If that person can get their master's degree, then gosh darn it, so can I. If that person can get a promotion and be CEO of a company, well.

Gosh darn it, so can I.

Let me figure out what I need to do. Have people increase positive metacognitions about social media. And in the study, they really didn't define what positive metacognitions were very well. But overall, my hypothesis is that they were talking about viewing social media instead of a place to go to compete and to argue and to flame. People view it as a place where they can positively connect with meaningful people in their lives. You know, if you go online and your focus is not on the 750 people you're connected with or whatever that is, but with the 18 people who are really important in your life, you're probably going to have a different approach and a different feel and a different attitude about it.

Develop meaningful relationships with people to get the full picture instead of, you know.

If you see somebody share some interests or whatever and you're connected, you know, again, you're getting the highlight reel. But if you start getting to know them, then you're going to also start.

Hearing about the bad stuff.

And not to say that we want to hear about the bad stuff, we don't want bad stuff to happen to people. But you're going to get a more realistic picture when you're chatting with someone on messenger or wherever than just by stalking their Facebook page.

Keep an offline journal of fun things you do to shift from public approval to.

To personal satisfaction. Maybe you went on this awesome trip and it was just beautiful and yada yada.

Okay, well, you can share it, but.

The nice thing with social media is you can either have it offline completely.

Or you can share it just with.

A certain number of people. You don't have to share it with everybody. That way somebody doesn't come on and say, oh, well, that's great. You saw this wonderful place in Asheville, North North Carolina. Let me show you the pictures of the castles that I saw when I went to Ireland. Well, that's a, you know, that's a one upping again. So now it's back into Being a competition, keep it offline. You know, if you are going to feel in competition with people, use cognitive processing and reframing.

You get online and you start feeling.

Like, well, this person is ignoring me or this person lied to me, or this person lied to me is one that happens. I hear a lot.

Let's look at the facts for and against the belief.

You know, let's stay with that person who went rock climbing. You know, Jim Bob said he was gonna stay home and do stuff around the house over the weekend. Okay, that's a fact.

What other facts do you have that.

He was being intentionally deceptive or trying to leave you out? He didn't call when he got invited to go rock climbing with that other group of people.

Well, that is a fact. However, let's look at the other facts.

You don't know anybody else in that group. You know, maybe there can be a lot of other reasons that you don't know. You don't have all the facts. Facts to really fully interpret what was.

Happening and examine whether you're using extreme words.

One of those real common cognitive distortions. This person always gets whatever they want. This person always succeeds. This person always da, da, da.

Okay, on Facebook it may look like.

That, or Instagram or wherever it is. However, very rarely do people always anything. So we want to take out that always and check again on the facts, the extreme words. This person always succeeds at everything that they do. Well, that's a pretty extreme statement. Let's think about that.

Let's go back and say what do we know?

Okay, the facts are we know what they have succeeded at. The other fact is we don't know what they haven't succeeded at. We don't know what they've tried and failed at. So, you know, we got to take that extreme word out of the vocabulary.

Practice self regulation skills. You're going to see things on social.

Media that trigger feelings. Feelings are normal. I don't want people to think that anger, envy, jealousy of those things are not just normal feelings. They are what they are. Practicing mindfulness, noticing. Okay, you know, that's making me feel. Even if they just say icky, you know, they may not have a word for it right now. Okay, I'm not going to get caught up in the minutiae there. They notice that it makes them feel uncomfortable or sad when they see something.

Okay, Practice that whole acceptance and commitment therapy, radical acceptance thing.

I feel angry or I feel unhappy about this. It is what it is. Okay, what can I do to improve the next moment? How can I self regulate. What can I do? Practice thought stopping. And this goes back to dialectical behavior therapy. The distress tolerance skills are really awesome here, where we encourage people to.

Engage in activities.

You know, you don't like what you saw on social media. Okay, here's a concept. Turn it off. I know that's more than a lot of our clients can actually wrap their heads around. That is too threatening to them. And so we may need to help them work towards, you know, doing that eventually. Maybe we can encourage them to go to a different site at first. Facebook stressing you out. Fine. Let's try Instagram. If you don't feel like you can put down the mobile device right now gradually. I really like to see people work to the point where they can put their mobile device away for hours and not feel like, oh, my gosh, what am I missing?

Address rumination with thought stopping, distress tolerance.

Skills and acceptance and commitment therapy.

Rumination is using a lot of energy.

It's keeping that HPA axis activated. It's keeping us in threat mode for something that thinking about it over and.

Over again isn't changing a dagum thing.

Even if you have the power to change it. Ruminating on it ain't changing it. It's just making you sick and wasting your energy. Accept that you're upset about it, and instead of ruminating, instead of stewing on it, figure out whether you're going to let it go or you're going to.

Do something about it or accept the.

Fact that you can't do anything about it.

Rumination is think about if you've ever.

Gotten your car stuck in the mud and rumination is sitting in the car and continuing to push that gas pedal.

And spin those tires and throw the mud out, and you're getting yourself progressively.

Stuck in that mud instead. You can stop.

You can figure out how to get.

Traction to get out of that situation, improve the next moment you want to unstuck yourself, enhance deep learning.

Encourage them to think about alternate possibilities.

Encourage them to connect things that they see. You know, they see somebody who just got their master's degree, who has three kids and something else, and they're like, well, I've got three kids and there's no way I can get a master's degree. And da, da, da.

Well, we want to think about deep learning.

This person got master's, Master's degree. What did it take for them to get a master's degree? Somebody didn't just walk up to them one day and go, hey, here's a master's Degree. You know, they had to make sacrifices. They had to potentially take out loans. They had to do a lot of stuff. Deep learning makes people think past the superficial of they have something that I want to. What did it take for them to get there?

Limit time on social media and address the anxiety.

And I kind of call this digital detox. Encouraging people to, you know, if they don't want to give it up completely, that's fine. You know, I'm not going to tell people what works for them.

But limiting time, setting timers.

If they're going to get on social media in the morning while they're drinking their coffee, set a timer so they're only on for 30 minutes or an hour, same thing in the evening, instead of being on there constantly. And if they can, you know, put.

Their mobile device somewhere, like in a.

Locker at work or in their purse and put their purse in their desk or something so they're not tempted to pick that mobile device up constantly and look at it.

And then they need to address the.

Anxiety that goes along with not being able to check it, the what ifs, the anxiety. So we want to start talking to them about why are you anxious? What thoughts are you having that are triggering that anxiety response? Basic cognitive behavioral stuff. And. And have them start examining that and looking at the helpfulness of those thoughts.

Explore how social media involvement or your.

Involvement or lack of in other people's lives contributes to a rich and meaningful life for you. So how does being on social media contribute to a rich and meaningful life for you?

For a lot of us, we would.

Say, oh, you know what? It actually doesn't. You know, but for other people, that's.

Where they connect with their family and.

Their friends that are in California or whatever.

Okay, so parts of social media can be good. All right, so we're going to put that over here.

You know, we're not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. But how is my involvement in other people's lives going to their Facebook page and stalking it and getting envious that they have something that I don't, or trying to hope that something bad happened to them? Heaven forbid, you know, that's awful, but I know some people do it. How is that contributing to you, having a rich and meaningful life? How is being involved in someone else's life, you know, somebody that you're connected with on social media, if you start feeling jealous because they didn't invite you to do something, how does your relationship with them contribute to a rich and meaningful life?

If it does.

You know, that is an important social support for you. Well then we need to look at that.

But a lot of times we have.

A lot of connections that are just that they're connections and they may post funny stuff occasionally, but we are not.

Super.

Tied to them, so to speak. So involvement or no involvement in their life really doesn't affect our happiness. Unless we start feeling like we have to be involved in their life for some reason. And then again, it goes back to checking that how is involvement with this person helping me have the rich and meaningful life that I want.

Identify what the emotional reactions to other people's posts mean.

Sometimes you'll get on social media and you will have some sort of gut reaction, envy, jealousy, anger, whatever. If it makes you feel happy, then great. You don't need to analyze it, just run with it.

But if you start feeling those dysphoric.

Emotions, you need to check in with.

Yourself and go, why am I envious?

And that also goes back to gratitude and checking what you have and focusing on the things that are important in your life.

But figuring out, why does it bother.

Me so much when this person succeeds? Why does it bother me so much that this person has this thing that I don't? What do I feel that that is saying about me? And then we need to start, you know, unraveling those cognitive distortions and creating more helpful positive self statements and practice.

Random acts of kindness and gratitude.

Even online it seems sort of disjointed from what we've been talking about. But when you do nice things for people, then they tend to respond with kindness, which can make us feel more connected and like we're not missing out.

Even, you know, I have friends, a.

Lot of my friends are animal lovers. So they regularly unfortunately post when they have pets pass and that is, you know, devastating. That's very sad. And when I see those posts, I am going to post something in response. You know, I'm not going to pick up the phone and call them. Most of them, I don't even have their phone numbers.

But it is important to sometimes reach.

Out and you know, provide that empathy that you might in real life if.

Somebody does something really nice or really.

Good, you know, even private messaging them and saying, you know, that was a really awesome post or I loved what you did or congratulations, it goes a long way if you think that having.

Positivity in your feed is important and.

It doesn't mean you're necessarily going to have a create a relationship where that person is integral in your life and part of your rich and meaningful life. It means you did something nice for somebody. And a lot of times that will supersede fear of missing out because then people start feeling good about themselves for being nice. Who knew?

So fear of missing out or FOMO transcends ages, genders and socioeconomic statuses.

We see FOMO in elementary, older elementary school kids, middle school kids, high school kids, college adults, even, you know, grandparents and things. Anybody who is involved in life may experience FOMO even if they're not online.

But not everybody develops fomo. Some people don't feel like they're missing out on anything.

They feel like they have a rich and meaningful life and they don't need anything else to add to it to make it okay. They are very happy with the way things are, which is one of the reasons people don't develop fear of missing out.

We need to look at again what.

Missing out means to the person. If you missed out on this party, what does that mean? You missed out on happiness?

Okay.

You know, it could have been a really fun party. Does it mean you missed out on making connections and, you know, trying to get an in with the boss or something?

Okay, you know, whatever it means, encourage.

People to figure out where that fear comes from. They can't be everywhere all the time. We can't.

We need to figure out what is.

Important in our lives for us to feel like we have a rich and meaningful life and then figure out how.

To let the rest of it go.

And be happy for people who have whatever they have. You know, if they have that bazillion square foot house again, more power to them. Can you imagine how much time it takes to clean a house that's, you know, a bazillion square feet or how much, how much it costs to heat and air condition it. I don't want to be bothered with that. I have got other things to spend my time on. I will be thrilled for them if they've got a house that they love and they are super invested in. People who use more deep learning don't develop fomo. And people who tend to, you know, already have good self esteem and not anxiety and depression tend to be protected from fear of missing out.

So there's a lot of protective stuff.

We can do going into.

Or leading.

Up to when people start using the Internet.

FOMO is more common in those with low self concept, anxiety, depression, or engage.

In surface learning approaches to life.

Reducing FOMO involves identifying the cognitions, maintaining the fears. Keeps coming back.

We say FOMO a lot, but remember.

The first word is fear.

We need to address that fear, whatever it is, and help people figure out what missing out means. You know, if you didn't get invited to something, maybe it means to that person, you know, they didn't invite me, so they must not like me. If they don't like me, then I'm not good enough and I don't. I shouldn't be breathing the air. We can get there with people, especially with people who rely on others for constant validation. They don't have good solid ego strength. If they rely on others for validation and they're not getting it, they're not getting invited to these things, then they may feel rejected, isolated, lonely and worthless.

We want to help people develop distress tolerance skills and enhance their resources.

What things do they need in order to have a rich and meaningful life? Most of us are not going to find that we have a rich and meaningful life by spending five hours on Facebook every day. So how could they be spending their time in order to get those things that they want instead of being envious about it? How can they use their energy and their time to do it?

And reducing FOMO also involves purposefully using.

Social media in a way that helps move the person toward a rich and meaningful life.

Like I said, social media allows me.

To connect with a lot of my friends from Florida and who've moved hither and yon in ways that I wouldn't before. I've never been a big phone person. I kind of hate the phone.

And I think it's cool that social.

Media allows me to see the pictures when in real life we would bring in pictures and show each other pictures of our kids or our dogs or whatever.

Well, we can do the same thing.

On social media now, even from a distance. So that does enable a lot of sort of multimedia sharing and create sort of a richer relationship. If you use social media to nurture particular relationships instead of trying to be the most popular person to everyone out there.

Alrighty. As promised, we finished up a little bit early today. Are there questions, comments? What are you seeing in terms of.

FOMO with your clients?

I really wish there was more actual research.

I can tell you anecdotally from clients.

That I've worked with about a lot.

Of the problems that some of the dating sites and stuff cause and that whole swiping left and always looking for something better, but there's actually not a whole lot of research. There's. I only found two articles that really started addressing that. So for marriage and family therapists, I think especially. But you know, Any therapists, I think that might be something that you might want to look at or even start talking to your clients about. And when, when you're talking about relationship satisfaction, what level are they involved on the Internet? Have they engaged in, you know, dabbling in other social media site?

And George, even with adult clients, my.

Husband'S best friend actually met his wife online and they chatted back and forth for about nine months. They met one time, they chatted back and forth again for a while and then he proposed and they got married. And so for some people, you know, that is an avenue to a relationship. And it's kind of interesting because on especially text based social media, but even with video to a certain extent, we actually have to work harder at communication sometimes because we want to make sure that we're communicating empathy and warmth and effectively communicating our feelings and stuff. And because of disinhibition, a lot of people will say things in text to a somebody they're dating that they wouldn't.

Necessarily say in person. So, you know, there is an interesting.

Dynamic that in a committed relationship, monogamous or otherwise, in a committed relationship, a certain amount of online interaction might actually improve communication in some ways. But that's just kind of a hypothesis there.

Alrighty everybody, have an awesome weekend and.

I will see you next week. Between writing notes, filing insurance claims and.

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