think that many of us have experienced FOMO before.

You see your friends enjoying themselves without you. Your friend buys something that everybody is talking about. You log into Instagram and all of a sudden everyone seems to be travelling, accomplishing something, earning money, or just leading a more successful life than yours.

For a brief second, you feel that you are missing out on something.

FOMO stands for Fear of Missing Out, but it is not limited to missing a party or any sort of event. It is more about the uneasy feeling of something important going down somewhere and you being left out of it.

The phenomenon of FOMO has been investigated by psychologists too. In a research study done in 2013 by Przybylski et al., it was defined as the fear of others having better experiences than yours.

Social media did not invent this emotion.

But indeed, they have made it very difficult to escape from.

Just think about how everything was different before social media took over our daily routine.

If your friend went out without you, you'd know it eventually. Today, you will see the pictures, videos, updates, and even comments on what is going on almost immediately.

Sometimes, you do not really care about any of that, but you look anyway.

That's where FOMO gets fascinating in my opinion.

It is not restricted to social activities only.

One can experience FOMO when going shopping, studying, following trends, watching TV shows, or even analyzing financial markets. You see everyone excited about something and all of a sudden you feel pressured to participate in it yourself.

Crypto is possibly a perfect illustration of that.

When a coin starts rising and everybody looks like they're getting rich from it, one may get pressurized to invest into it, as he or she doesn't want to be left behind.

The only thing I try not to forget about:

Everybody else doing something doesn't necessarily mean it should be done by me.

Social media provides us with fragments of other people's lives, not the whole life picture.

I’ve started realizing that the way to handle FOMO is not to avoid all of those things at once.

I need to pause before acting on impulses.

Every time I feel I’m losing out on something, I could just question myself:

“Would I actually be interested in this if I never saw other people do it?”

Sometimes the answer would be positive.

However, sometimes, much to my surprise, it is negative.

This, I think, distinguishes true interest from mere following.

Of course, we may discover amazing opportunities and things through other people. Nothing is wrong about it – we should explore new possibilities because we were suggested by someone else.

However, the issue appears when the fear of falling behind makes us constantly pursue things we’re not really interested in.

FOMO will most likely always stay with us. It’s human nature to belong somewhere and to know what happens around.

But we don’t necessarily have to react to all emotions.

Sometimes, it’s quite okay to miss out on things.

Not all of the things happening in our environment should turn into our own experience.