QUICK ANSWER
FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out, is a pervasive apprehension that others are having rewarding experiences from which one is absent. Psychologist Andrew Przybylski’s foundational 2013 research identified it as being driven by unmet psychological needs for belonging and competence. Social media amplifies FOMO by making others’ experiences continuously visible, creating a near-constant comparison environment that prior generations never faced.
Table of Contents
There is a party somewhere that you were not invited to. A group trip that came together without you. A conversation that happened in a room you were not in. The sense that something is happening, somewhere, that you are missing, and that this absence diminishes you in some way that is difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore. This is FOMO, and it is one of the defining psychological experiences of the digital age.
Fear of Missing Out is not a new human experience. The ache of exclusion, the nagging sense that you might be making the wrong choice among competing options, and the quiet anxiety of not being where the action is have existed for as long as human beings have formed social groups. What is new is the scale, the frequency, and the visibility of that experience, amplified beyond anything previous generations encountered by the constant presence of social media in daily life.
Understanding FOMO scientifically, who experiences it, why, what it does to psychological well-being, and what actually reduces it, is increasingly important for anyone who spends time in a digitally connected world, which is to say, almost everyone.
Przybylski’s Foundational Research
Psychologist Andrew Przybylski at the University of Oxford, working with Kou Murayama, Cody DeHaan, and Valerie Gladwell, published the first rigorous psychological study of FOMO in 2013. They defined it as a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent, and developed the first validated FOMO scale to measure it.
Their research, conducted across multiple studies involving over 2,000 adults, found that FOMO was not simply a personality quirk or a social media side effect but a psychologically meaningful state rooted in unmet fundamental needs. Specifically, they found that FOMO was most strongly predicted by unmet needs for relatedness, the need to feel connected to and belonging with other people, and competence, the need to feel effective and capable in one’s activities.
People whose fundamental psychological needs were less satisfied reported higher FOMO, and higher FOMO was associated with greater engagement with social media and with lower mood, lower life satisfaction, and lower overall well-being. The finding that more social media use followed from FOMO rather than causing it suggested a bidirectional relationship: FOMO drives checking behaviour, and checking behaviour reveals content that intensifies FOMO.
RESEARCH NOTE: FOMO and Psychological Need Satisfaction
Przybylski et al. (2013) found that individuals with lower satisfaction of relatedness and competence needs reported significantly higher FOMO scores. FOMO mediated the relationship between need frustration and social media engagement: people checked social media more when FOMO was high, and checking produced a worse mood rather than satisfying the underlying need. The study established that FOMO is a genuine psychological construct with measurable effects on well-being, not merely a colloquial description of a minor annoyance.
Why Social Media Supercharges FOMO
FOMO existed before social media, but the mechanism was different. In a pre-digital world, learning that you had been excluded from something required either being told directly or encountering specific evidence. The exclusion signal was intermittent and often delayed. Social media changed this by making others’ experiences continuously and immediately visible in real time.
You can now watch a social event you were not invited to unfold, photograph by photograph, story by story, in real time, while sitting alone in your home. The visibility of others’ positive experiences has never been greater, and the reminder of your own absence from those experiences has never been more frequent or more detailed. The comparison pool has expanded from your immediate social circle to hundreds or thousands of people simultaneously.
Sherry Turkle’s research on technology and social experience describes this as always-on social awareness: a state in which you are never fully removed from the social information stream, never fully without awareness of what others are doing, and therefore never fully free from the FOMO mechanism. Previous generations could leave a social event, return home, and be genuinely disconnected from social comparison until the next direct contact. Digital connectivity removes that disconnection entirely.
RESEARCH NOTE: Social Media Use and FOMO Intensity
Riordan, Flett, Hunter, Bhullar, and Roeger (2015) found that social media use specifically predicted FOMO intensity in a diary study, with more checking associated with higher FOMO rather than lower. This counterintuitive finding reflects the self-reinforcing nature of FOMO: the checking behaviour that FOMO motivates exposes the person to more content about others’ experiences, which amplifies rather than satisfies the FOMO. Each check reveals more evidence of what you might be missing, escalating the very feeling that drove the check.
Who Experiences FOMO Most Intensely
FOMO affects most people who spend time on social media, but its intensity varies significantly across individuals and contexts. Przybylski’s research identified young men as showing the highest average FOMO scores, which researchers attributed to the particular importance of social status and peer inclusion during early adulthood. However, subsequent research found high FOMO across genders, with content and comparison domains varying more than overall intensity.
People in life transitions, including starting university, moving to a new city, ending a relationship, or beginning a new career, show elevated FOMO. These are periods when social networks are disrupted, and the comparison to others’ apparently more settled or enjoyable circumstances is sharpest. The FOMO in these contexts is not simply about social events but about the sense that others are further along in building the life you want.
Attachment anxiety, the tendency to worry about relationship security and fear of abandonment, is consistently associated with higher FOMO. People with anxious attachment styles are more sensitive to social exclusion signals and more likely to interpret others’ social activities as evidence of their own lower social value. For this group, FOMO carries an emotional weight that goes beyond simple envy of experiences and into deeper territory about belonging and worthiness.
EXPERIENCE NOTE
Therapists working with young adults in their 20s and early 30s consistently report FOMO presenting not as a concern about specific events but as a pervasive sense of being on the wrong path. Clients describe seeing evidence of others’ careers, relationships, and social lives and feeling that their own equivalent experiences are somehow lesser or that they are falling behind an invisible standard. The FOMO is less about individual events than about a chronic comparison that leaves them perpetually feeling inadequate regardless of their objective circumstances.
What FOMO Actually Does to Mental Health
FOMO is associated with a consistent cluster of negative mental health outcomes across research studies. Lower life satisfaction is the most consistently reported finding: people with high FOMO rate their overall satisfaction with life significantly lower than those with low FOMO, even after controlling for objective life circumstances. The subjective sense that you are missing out produces genuine dissatisfaction with what you have.
Anxiety and low mood are reliably associated with FOMO, particularly when FOMO-driven social media checking is frequent. The mechanism appears to involve a combination of upward social comparison (seeing others’ positive experiences and feeling inadequate by comparison), activation of the belonging system without genuine social connection (seeing others together without being included), and the depletion of attention and cognitive resources through continuous monitoring of the social information stream.
Sleep disruption is a specific downstream consequence that research by Przybylski and Weinstein has documented. FOMO predicts checking social media at night and at the meal table, both contexts where phone use has demonstrable negative effects on sleep quality and social connection quality, respectively. The compulsive quality of FOMO-driven checking means it overrides deliberate intentions about when and how to engage with social media.
RESEARCH NOTE: FOMO, Sleep, and Health Behaviours
Przybylski and Weinstein (2017) found that FOMO predicted problematic smartphone use patterns, including checking devices during meals and before sleep. Higher FOMO was associated with lower sleep quality and more frequent reported health complaints. The researchers proposed that FOMO creates a compulsive monitoring orientation toward social information that overrides both social etiquette and sleep hygiene intentions, producing cascading negative effects on physical and social health beyond its direct psychological impact.
FOMO vs JOMO: The Psychology of Opting Out
As awareness of FOMO has grown, a counter-concept has emerged: JOMO, the Joy of Missing Out. Coined partly as a cultural corrective to FOMO’s dominance, JOMO describes the satisfaction and contentment of consciously choosing not to participate in social activities in favour of quieter, more solitary, or more deliberate alternatives. Psychologists have examined whether JOMO represents a genuine psychological state with well-being benefits or primarily a cultural attitude.
Research suggests that JOMO is most psychologically beneficial when it reflects genuinely autonomous choice rather than rationalised avoidance. Deliberately opting out of activities that do not align with your values or current needs, with genuine contentment rather than suppressed FOMO, is associated with the kind of autonomy satisfaction that self-determination theory predicts will support well-being. Rationalised avoidance, telling yourself you chose to stay home when you actually wanted to attend but felt too anxious, does not produce the same benefits and may mask rather than resolve the underlying FOMO.
The distinction matters practically. Developing JOMO as a genuine orientation involves building authentic enjoyment of solitude and chosen activities, and cultivating the ability to be fully present in chosen experiences rather than monitoring what else might be happening elsewhere. This is a skill rather than an attitude and requires deliberate development.
Evidence-Based Ways to Reduce FOMO
The research converges on several approaches that genuinely reduce FOMO rather than simply suppressing its surface expression. Addressing the underlying needs that drive FOMO is the most fundamental approach: investing in actual social connection, building genuine competence in activities that matter to you, and creating real sources of belonging reduce the need-deficit that FOMO symptoms signal. Checking social media more to manage FOMO addresses the symptom while intensifying the cause.
Practising mindfulness specifically applied to social media use, including approaching content with deliberate awareness rather than automatic consumption, reduces the automatic upward comparison mechanism. Research by Hoge and colleagues found that mindfulness-based interventions reduced anxiety-related social media behaviours. The mechanism is not abstinence but awareness: engaging with content deliberately rather than compulsively changes the psychological relationship with the information.
Gratitude practices oriented toward present experience rather than comparative assessment consistently buffer FOMO’s effects in research. Robert Emmons’ research programme found that people who regularly attended to what they currently had and were currently experiencing, rather than what they were missing, showed significantly higher life satisfaction over time. The gratitude orientation is the psychological opposite of the FOMO orientation: one attends to what is present, the other to what is absent.
KEY TAKEAWAY
FOMO is driven by unmet needs for belonging and competence, amplified by a social media environment that makes others’ positive experiences continuously visible. Checking social media to manage FOMO intensifies it rather than resolving it. The most effective approaches address the underlying needs directly through genuine social investment, build autonomous contentment through deliberate present-focus, and reduce the compulsive monitoring orientation through structural changes to social media use.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is FOMO a clinical condition?
FOMO is not a clinical diagnosis, but it is a psychologically validated construct with measurable effects on well-being. When severe and persistent, it overlaps with social anxiety, anxiety disorders more broadly, and in some presentations with OCD-adjacent compulsive checking behaviour. For most people, it is a normal response to a specific environmental condition rather than a clinical disorder, but it can significantly impair quality of life and benefit from deliberate intervention.
Does FOMO decrease with age?
Research generally shows FOMO decreasing through adulthood, with the highest levels in adolescence and early adulthood and declining through middle and later life. This likely reflects increasing identity security, the narrowing and deepening of social networks with age, and a general developmental shift toward what psychologist Laura Carstensen calls socioemotional selectivity, preferring depth over breadth in social experience.
Can introversion cause FOMO?
Introversion and FOMO are not directly linked. Introverts may experience less FOMO about large social events but similar or higher FOMO about small, intimate connections they perceive themselves as missing. FOMO is fundamentally about unmet belonging needs, which are present across personality types, not about a preference for social quantity.
Why does FOMO feel worse after scrolling than before?
Because FOMO-driven checking exposes you to more content about others’ positive experiences, which amplifies the sense of missing out rather than satisfying it. The information reveals what you are absent from rather than creating presence. This is the FOMO loop: unmet belonging need drives checking; checking reveals more evidence of absence; absence signals intensify the belonging need, which drives more checking.
What is the difference between FOMO and envy?
FOMO is primarily about absence from experiences, the anxiety of not being where something is happening. Envy is about wanting what another person has. They overlap significantly in social media contexts but are distinct: you can experience FOMO about an event you would not even enjoy if present (the signal is about inclusion, not the experience itself), and you can experience envy about achievements or possessions without the temporal missing-out quality.
