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Breaking Down FOMO: Missing Out

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Breaking Down FOMO: Fear of Missing Out

Hoping to be present when there’s something important going on can be naturally expected from human beings.

The term ‘important’ also implies fun, exciting, joyful. This Hope is an innocent trait that doesn’t require too much of a deeper dig to explain it. It motions that we humans seek positive experiences with with each other.

 

But concern arises when the hope is accompanied by bouts of desire, fear and convincing tales which prove that your worthiness is determined by your social circles and the shenanigans you have together.

The latter is so common, that it has a fancy term for it, Fear Of Missing Out!

A little bit of FOMO has always existed in us, from the times of the newspaper and radio to our age of sophisticated gadgets. It’s considered to be an epidemic today, where one constantly keeps themselves updated with the occurances of the world, keep watchful tabs over people they barely know and to pick up the phone every few minutes to make sure that they aren’t missing out on the opportunity for a potential connection with someone online.

This frantic effort to keep oneself in touch with everything that’s going on stems from the clubbing of two kinds of anxiety- social anxiety and survival instincts. 

Humans are social beings and one of our biggest drives is to find belongingness. Lonliness and isolation directly links to the feeling of being unable to deal with a probable threat. This is because the rate of survival of a group has proven to be higher than the survival rates of individuals in solitude in evolutionary prospects.

One of the biggest factors creating a baseline for FOMO in adulthood is emotional neglect during the childhood.

Those who experience neglectful parenting styles are posed with high demands and low emotional warmth and report to have the highest amount of FOMO.

Children are left with a feeling of isolation and inadequacy when parents provide minimal amounts of time and attention to their care. They need to feel loved, acknowledged and secure in order to be able to build a strong sense of identity.

 

The assurance that their presence matters is extremely important for the child to develop confidence and esteem. And this in turn, helps them feel important in social settings.

Any compromise with early care can leave the child with doubts and distorted perceptions of the self. Observing their peers and comparison of parent-child dynamics can create an overwhelming sense of longingness for attention.

Most children turn to external settings in order to make up for the scarcity of parental affection.

The need to be present at every possible social event stems from the fear of losing an opportunity to make a potential connection. Not being invited to a particular occasion stirs up feelings of betrayal, incompetence and loss.

The easy accessibility of social media adds on to the baggage with people’s tendency to document their activities online, which leads to more cycles of comparison and suffering.

 

Parents need to be mindful of their interactions with their children and should adopt an authoritative style which includes high warmth and assertive to curb the social anxiety and regulate the by products of  the use of social media.

Trauma Tragedy

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Trauma Tragedy

Trauma is not something that merely exists in our head, it’s a real thing which can make a person stuck physically and mentally. One cannot say to move on from trauma, it’s not some scratch that we got by falling on the road while playing as a child.  

Trauma is something that leaves an impact on a person’s mind and his reaction to every situation. It fills the person with constant fear and anxiety. It affects our affective, somatic, sensory, and motor nodes of mental processing. Trauma sensitizes the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, the body’s central stress response system. It acts as the junction of our central nervous system and endocrine system, which makes us more reactive to stress and increases the stress hormone, cortisol crucially which can be toxic leading to health conditions such as depression or heart disease. Studies show that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is linked to greater activity in brain areas that process fear and less activation in parts of the prefrontal cortex. 

Trauma can push someone in a pit from where it’s not easy to come up without someone else throwing a rope and pulling a person. This pitfall has lots of Inhibitors(symptoms) like exhaustion, numbness, confusion, sadness, anxiety, agitation, dissociation, and physiological arousal.  People with trauma are more prone to panic attacks, worrying, and stress as they rethink and revisit the time subconsciously which gives them trauma. The more the stress, the more tense and constricted muscles are, which makes a person exhausted and ineffectual.  

Everyone reacts to their trauma and situation differently. There’s no right or wrong response. If a person is reacting in a very unexpected manner that doesn’t mean he or she faked the trauma. Response is not always exhibited by panicking only.  The effects of trauma on the body can be subtle yet dangerous, dealing with physical and emotional pain can make it hard to cope and lead to developing unhealthy coping mechanisms like smoking, drinking, or doing drugs.  These may increase the numbness of emotions and prolong the trauma’s impact on our body and mind.

The person who has been through any traumatic event or incident may develop trust issues with time. They suspect people of hurting them and start distancing them by building a wall to protect themselves. The perception of them towards the world and people changes. They sense or overestimate danger, fear and threat all around themselves.  They see themselves as weak in front of other people and blame themselves for the trauma that happened to them due to their inability to stop it even when they could. 

Through trauma therapy and time their beliefs tend to shift to feel dangerous all time to sometimes  and.sometimes safe.  Therapists dealing with traumas are extra sensitive towards their patients. They focus on not changing what happened to them but on changing their belief patients hold about themselves and the world. There are lots of comebacks of memories, flashbacks, revisiting of memories, nightmares, panic attacks but it gets better with time and therapy. Trauma is not for lifetime !

Tricky Thirty

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Tricky Thirty

When we are in our teenagers and 20’s, we are so full of energy there are so many pretty great things about adventurous time, full of self-exploration and socializing like the late-night partying, the carefree hanging out, the hordes of nameless, faceless roommates, fighting with friend’s one day and being normal just the very next day. It feels like being on a roller coaster ride as you can’t predict the next move you’re going to make. There’s constant, persistent worrying and anxiety about career, relationship, family, college, studies, your social life. But in those moments we find ourselves, apart from self exploring there’s one most important aspect of not stopping by no matter what happens. And that’s the best thing about being in your 20’s. But at the end of 29’s there’s a lot of panic attacks and anxiety of our life’s fun that might end. 

Most of the people enter their 30’s with problems, questions, confusions, and a maturely sedated frightening face having so many things in mind like When is the right time to get married ? Do I really want to get married? Have some kids? Own a home one day? Lose weight? Gain weight? Expand my career/business? Am I Happy with my job right now ? Should I ask for a hike in my pay check? Is this enough according to what I planned in my younger age? Am I being enough for everyone? Should I still look for other people for dating or should I marry the current person I am dating ? Is this the right time to explore my sexuality, and sexual fantasies? Should I get a new house or should I still love my parents? Am I being a burden on my parents? Are they worried only about my marriage? Are they looking for someone I should marry ? Will I get married to an unknown person? And the list of questions is never ending. You don’t even realize when your questions of what to wear shifts to whether staying single or getting married or keeping your job or exploring more options. 

There are so many misconceptions that tell us that life in the 30’s is a full stop on your life. Why ? Do we stop aging after our 30’s? The answer is no. According to a new study, changes in the brain and nervous system doesn’t hit maturity (in cerebral terms) until they reach 30 or beyond. This is a golden time when strength, oxygen efficiency and coordination come together, meaning optimal performance for the sharp end of sport. Most of famous inventors and scientists achieved their career breakthroughs in this period. The social network, the friendships that last are typically higher-quality and more enduring which shifts our friend circle from quantity to quality. 

30s is the stage that heralds in more optimism and less stress than before (probably because we’ve learnt not to care so much). By this age innocence has been lost, but our sense of reality is mixed with a strong sense of hope, a ‘can do’ spirit, and a healthy belief in our own talents and abilities. We have yet to develop the cynicism and world-weariness that comes with later years. Your 30s is also the time when depth and quality of connection with your partner starts to pay dividends. 30-somethings do their homework, typically aiming for activities that are more off-radar, and locally orientated. 

Another study found that adventurers in their 30s are more likely to scrupulously research their trip, and stay in high-end hotels.

I might not show it, but it’s there

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I might not show it, but it's there

“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Marcus Aurelius

Not each and everyone is of the same type, not everyone is as expressive as others might be. Every person has their own voice and they have their choice to let it out or let it hurt them internally.

One can identify internal suffering when they’re losing interest in activities they loved or enjoyed a lot, feeling distant or detached, failing to access and  express their feelings and emotions, feeling flat, both physically and emotionally, not being able to fully participate in life, having difficulty with experiencing positive feelings such as happiness, preferring isolation rather than being with others, growing hesitation and stumbling while expressing themselves.

Internal feelings and emotions can also have physiological reactions in person such as activation of cardiovascular, skeletomuscular, neuroendocrine, autonomic nervous system, somatosensory feedback mechanisms as they trigger emotional experiences. Like anger can cause liver damage and pain, happiness affects heart and blood flow, thoughtfulness with heart and spleen. Sadness is also associated with heart diseases and in some cases, heart attack and also with lungs, fear is associated with kidney and heart, and anxiety with lungs and heart, surprise/shock with heart and gallbladder. 

Internal pain can cause stress, coming from grief that can flood the body with hormones, specifically cortisol, which causes that heavy-achy-feeling in the chest area. The heartache that comes with depression can increase the likelihood of a heart attack.

Feeling of being overwhelmed or feeling helpless, it’s not uncommon to turn to emotional numbness since it provides you with a protective defense. While this may provide temporary relief, learning to cope with difficult feelings this way can have long-lasting consequences. Emotional numbness results in temporary restrictions in the capacity to feel or express emotions. People might even shut down when they start to lose hope in being understood or really getting along with other people. Soon after, they potentially detach themselves from them. It’s hard for people to leave people so they slowly detach when they love someone. They never tell the other person but they suffer internally in silence.

There are basic practices like mediation, practicing thoughtfulness which innately focuses on self awareness encompassing what you know, what you don’t know, what you know you don’t know, what you don’t know you know, understanding of our position in the world, regardless of truth, sense of what our bodies are doing, what our minds are doing, what is going on in the outside world. There are at last treatment methods to deal with extreme suffering like CBT that involves learning and practicing cognitive-behavioral strategies for managing stress, traumatic experiences, depression, and anxiety can help tame negative thoughts and avoid defensive patterns of coping that are inefficient and invalidating of emotional processing and problem-solving, Psychotherapy that supports learning and use of productive coping tools such as allowing feelings to surface and processing them in the safe, nurturing environment of the therapeutic relationship.

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