FOMO, or ‘Fear of Missing Out’, is very much a prevalent phenomenon within our social, digitalised, high-schooler age group, and is defined as the ‘anxiety felt by an individual when it seems that others are having rewarding experiences without us’. It’s becoming more and more challenging to be able to be autonomous in your activities, without being influenced, directly or indirectly, by peer pressure, our environment, and the media; however, is this socially orientated lifestyle forcing us into the wrong kinds of habits and putting our health (physical and mental) at risk?
Let us explore a couple scenarios. First – going out with friends. A relatable concept for teenagers, and one that should be encouraged to help develop vital social skills for future life, has begun to occur later and later into the day, preventing us from doing what we should ideally be doing at night – sleeping. Not to get all “trends and correlations” on you, but it makes sense that the older we get, the more opportunities we have to go out (due to rising levels of independence we are entrusted with). But guess what else increases as we progress through high school? That’s right, the amount of work we are set! And, as there are, unfortunately, a constant number of hours in a day, we are forced to prioritise between being productive, being social, or being (my favourite) asleep.
Here’s where the catch lies – in the consequences of the above. If we don’t comply with deadlines – we will underperform, if we decline too many outings – we will experience FOMO, and if we don’t sleep, as everyone seems to be doing anyway and therefore it can’t be that bad for us – we will… simply deplete our bank accounts on coffee the following morning. Easy win, right? Apparently not.
Now, you may think that it’s possible to at least attempt to strike a balance between socialising and sleeping (seeing as you can’t affect the length of your to-do list, so this factor can be ignored). But that’s where FOMO comes in. The longer we take to complete our work after school, the later we go out with friends. The more friends come along (as nobody wants to spend the evening at home, only to go on social media and see live footage of others having fun), the less we want to initiate going home, as you know that if you leave now, you may miss out. The later we leave, the later we fall asleep. Simple as.
Consider an alternative social situation, involving people who couldn’t, or chose not to meet up in person. More often than not, they will go on their phone before going to bed, increasing the chances of getting into a conversation due to a notification. Similar to the previous scenario, more people are active on the media in the evening, literally just because phones are our go-to way to wind down at the end of the day. These conversations, of course, get “deep”, because what better time to start discussing (ironically) the highs and lows of our society than at midnight. The same occurs – nobody wants to initiate logging off, because the disadvantages of missing out socially outweigh, in our minds, the disadvantages of missing out on sleep.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how we get into a negative feedback loop. Neuroscientists, like Matthew Walker, have obtained evidence that, the more sleep-deprived we are, the more we procrastinate, the less we are able to concentrate, and the more time it takes us to complete the same tasks, just because our brain forms simpler connections and is generally creatively stunted. You see where I’m leading to? The less we sleep, the less productive we are, and the later we finish our work. Thus, the later we go out.
To conclude, I am not blaming anyone per se, but I am making an observation that, unfortunately, we aren’t valuing all three aspects of our time (working, socialising and sleeping) as fairly as we perhaps should. A large proportion of the cause of this is FOMO, caused itself by the nature of our age group to display the ways in which we spend our time, and, more importantly, who we spend that time with, for everyone to see. A resulting chronic sleep deprivation doesn’t do wonders for our mental health, amplifying (through an under-rested amygdala, responsible for regulating emotions) any pre-existing conditions, such as anxiety, and thus reducing not only the overall quantity of sleep, but its quality too.
So, if you take anything away from this, let it be that sleep should not be undervalued, and “investing” in it can reward you much more than expected.
