Attention is the glue that holds your life together… The scarcity of attentional resources means that you must consider how you can make and facilitate better decisions about what to pay attention to and in what ways. What you attend to drives your behavior and it determines your happiness. Your happiness is determined by how you allocate your attention. He explains the importance of attention in his book, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think: Paul Dolan teaches at the London School of Economics and was a visiting scholar at Princeton where he worked with Nobel-Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. “Look on the bright side” is a cliche, but it’s also scientifically valid. But they don’t bother us when we pay them no mind. We all have bad things we could think about. (Someone cue the music from “The Matrix”, please.)Īnd the key to happiness really comes down to one word: But you’re comparing yourself to fake life. This constant fear of missing out means you are not participating as a real person in your own world.”įacebook isn’t real life. “When you’re so tuned in to the ‘other,’ or the ‘better’ (in your mind), you lose your authentic sense of self. “The problem with FOMO is the individuals it impacts are looking outward instead of inward,” McLaughlin said. Sounds cliche, but the research says you need to look inside: Looking at social media for happiness is a bad idea. Read more: New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy The Problem Is Attention So this is how FOMO comes about and why it’s so awful. (To learn what Harvard research says will make you happier and more successful, click here.) Just like the highs and lows of addiction, eh?īut posting to alleviate your discomfort also has an important secondary effect: by presenting your carefully edited version of life awesomeness, you just made anyone who sees it feel worse. ![]() This pattern of relations indicated those high in FoMO were more likely to experienced mixed feelings when using social media.Ī roller coaster of emotion. To evaluate our prediction that FoMO would be associated with high levels of ambivalent emotions when using Facebook use we regressed positive affect, b=.31, p<.001, and negative affect, b =. It brings them up and slams them back down: People with FOMO have ambivalent feelings toward Facebook. Nonetheless, social comparison seems sufficiently destructive to our sense of well-being that it is worthwhile to remind ourselves to do it less.Īnd the research agrees. “Stop paying so much attention to how others around you are doing” is easy advice to give, but hard to follow, because the evidence of how others are doing is pervasive, because most of us seem to care a great deal about status, and finally, because access to some of the most important things in life (for example, the best colleges, the best jobs, the best houses in the best neighborhoods) is granted only to those who do better than their peers. If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.Īs Swarthmore professor Barry Schwartz writes in his excellent book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less: “If two women each talk to their friends the same amount of time, but one of them spends more time reading about friends on Facebook as well, the one reading tends to grow slightly more depressed,” Burke says…Īgain and again the happiness research shows comparisons to lives that seem better than yours, well, that’s some bad juju, hombre. Often it seems like if bragging and showing off were banned, some people wouldn’t post anything at all.īut despite knowing this, studies say we can’t help but compare our lives to theirs:Īfter controlling for the possibility of reverse causality, our results suggest that (Social Network Site) users have a higher probability to compare their achievements with those of others.Īnd research shows this is the happiness equivalent of taking someone with a nut allergy and putting them on an all-cashew diet:Īccording to Burke, passive consumption of Facebook also correlates to a marginal increase in depression. It’s more like the cherry-picked perfection version. We all know that Facebook doesn’t provide a very well-rounded picture of people’s lives. Read more: How To Get People To Like You: 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior Expert The Facebook Illusion Only one problem there: it actually makes you feel worse… So you’re not feeling so great - whether you realize it or not - and you turn to social media to make you feel better. (To learn the four things neuroscience says will keep your brain happy, click here.) ![]() Um, sounds uncomfortably like addiction to me… ![]() Results conceptually replicated findings from Study 2, those high in FoMO tended to use Facebook more often immediately after waking, before going to sleep, and during meals.
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