Bottom line: We are concerned that we don’t achieve enough or experience enough and, somehow, miss out on our lives. We could do, achieve, fulfill – so much more. What we’ve already done, attained, and fulfilled is negligible compared to what’s possible.
We want to be connected and updated through our smartphones because, at any moment, a small or large opportunity might arise that we might miss, or some information may not reach us, and we will be out of the know. Meanwhile, we suspect that others are more successful at this. People who are just like us or (we think) even less capable than us do better and more.
The specifics of what each of us fears missing varies from person to person. Some might primarily fear missing out on their career, power, influence, or wealth. Sometimes, it’s about academic achievements. For some, it’s about leisure, enjoyable experiences, adventures, relationships, or sexual experiences. Our values and personalities influence the content of what each of us fears missing and the intensity of the FOMO experience.
When The Fear of Missing Out drives us, and we don’t develop the necessary coping strategies, we encounter typical difficulties. On the one hand, which we call “The Frenzy Pole,” we may try to have it all, even “bite more than we can chew,” struggle to say “no,” and live crazed lives. Ultimately, we feel trapped without control in an endless race and live in constant frustration that “it’s not enough” / “it’s not it.”
On the other hand, in “The Paralysis Pole,” the need to decide and choose in every area paralyzes us. We struggle to say “yes” for fear we are missing other, perhaps better, options. We cannot commit to anything or anyone – career, partner, etc. Since there are always other attractive opportunities, real or imaginary, any commitment is seen as a waiver of all else that “might have been.” We feel overwhelmed. We are hesitant, even stuck, or change plans often.
FOMO response is triggered in us when we are exposed to an “opportunity at risk,” meaning a possibility that appears attractive to us, and for some reason, we are afraid we won’t be able to seize it. This happens to us in three types of situations that occur both at crucial junctures and during our daily lives:
Dr. Dan Herman presents a groundbreaking approach to counteract the emotional and functional challenges FOMO inflicts on individuals and organizations in a world increasingly driven by FOMO. Dr. Herman’s innovative methods, anchored in his original psychological model of FOMO, equip professionals and executives with transformative tools to cope with and harness FOMO for personal growth and organizational success. By turning FOMO from a source of distress into a positive motivational factor, these methods offer a path toward emotional well-being and business excellence.
Dr. Herman’s methodology revolutionizes how psychotherapists and personal coaches assist their clients. The approach focuses on a transformative process that empowers individuals and families to balance, control, and positively utilize their FOMO. Key application areas include self-perception, body image, life satisfaction, relationships, career, financial behavior, social life, spiritual beliefs, health, wellness, and attitudes toward aging.
The transformative process comprises:
These steps are supported by evidence-based psychotherapy techniques from CBT, ACT, Mindfulness-Based Therapies, DBT, Narrative Therapy, and personal growth approaches, all uniquely adapted for treating FOMO.
Dr. Herman’s methods arm executives, business coaches, and consultants in various fields like strategy, management, marketing, sales, service, and customer experience to successfully address organizational challenges stemming from FOMO.
These tools assist in:
Dr. Herman’s approach in organizational contexts focuses on transformative processes that align with each business’s unique needs and dynamics, ensuring a comprehensive and effective strategy to manage and leverage FOMO for sustained success.
My first encounter with FOMO – The Fear of Missing Out, was back in 1996. While conducting a series of focus groups for a client, I noted a significant shift in consumer behavior unfolding before my eyes. Brand loyalty, the “holy grail” of the marketing world, was beginning to wane, replaced by an obsessive interest in the latest novelty and a new openness to try unfamiliar brands.
This trend caught my eye, leading me to initiate a series of studies on the topic. By 1997, I’d named the phenomenon “Fear of Missing Out – FOMO.” I first presented it at an Israeli Marketing Association conference. I took the stage and showcased a slide bearing just the words: “Fear of Missing Out.” The 300 attendees smiled in recognition. At that moment, I realized I was onto something big. Even early on, it was evident that this was a pivotal development in psychology in general and, more specifically, marketing psychology. Over the next few years, I delved deep into FOMO, studying it as a socio-cultural phenomenon, a human motivator, and a personal characteristic.
After several more years of research, I published my first academic paper introducing the term “Fear of Missing Out” in the Journal of Brand Management in 2000. The article extensively discussed the marketing implications of FOMO. Peer reviewers commented, “If the author is correct, this is an earthquake.”
The rising prominence of FOMO brought about a new marketing reality. By 1998, I began to develop a new marketing and branding methodology designed to cater to consumers driven by FOMO. I termed it “Think Short Marketing,” a short-term marketing approach, contrasting the then-dominant “Think Long Marketing.” A cornerstone of this methodology was the creation and management of Short-Term Brands (STB).
Subsequent articles I wrote were featured on various marketing and branding websites, some even translated into several languages. In 2002, I released a report titled “Think Short: Short-Term Brands Revolutionize Branding,” elaborating extensively on FOMO. By 2004, I penned a chapter on FOMO for the academic anthology “Consumer Behavior: Implications for Marketing Strategies,” edited by G. Radha Krishna, published by ICFAI University Press. I also dedicated a chapter to FOMO in my book (in Hebrew) “Unfair Advantage – Winning Strategic Management in a World of MBA Clones,” published in 2005 and translated into English in 2008 (“Outsmart the MBA Clones,” Paramount Market Publishing).
Around the same time, venture capitalist Patrick J. McGinnis, then a student, wrote about FOMO in a 2004 Harvard Business School student newspaper article. He claims to have identified the phenomena and coined the acronym FOMO, unaware of my prior publications. McGinnis certainly contributed enormously to popularizing the term.
Back then, FOMO was still in its infancy. The launch of Facebook in 2004 and the iPhone in 2007 amplified FOMO into the colossal phenomenon we recognize today.
Smartphones and social networks expose us to a constant stream of up-to-date information, albeit filtered, about the lives of our acquaintances and friends. We learn about their successes, joys, pleasures, the places they visit, the restaurants where they eat, including selected menu items, the shows they watch, what they wear, and so on. In addition, through smartphones, we are flooded with information about products and services that might interest us. We can be present in multiple places simultaneously. Everything becomes accessible 24/7, all year round, and we begin to get used to the idea that purchasing options and other opportunities are available all the time and everywhere.
In 2011, an MIT researcher named Sherry Turkle wrote an influential book titled “Alone Together,” a broader exploration of how technology is changing how we interact, addressing the FOMO phenomenon. Her book triggered a new wave of studies. One was conducted by the international advertising network J. Walter Thompson – JWT. They approached me, and I collaborated with them and other researchers in universities and research institutes worldwide to understand the phenomenon’s growing power.
In 2013, the term “FOMO” was recognized in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, and this act was essentially a stamp of approval on the importance of the term to our culture. In recent years, The Fear of Missing Out has gained momentum and has become one of the most discussed and researched concepts in social psychology, personal psychology, and marketing psychology. I am credited in many sources as the one who identified the fear of missing out, among others, in the “Fear of Missing Out” Wikipedia entry.
Despite the extensive nature of the phenomenon, many studies, articles, and books written on The Fear of Missing Out and the related discourse treat it as a relatively minor phenomenon related mainly to social networks and the feeling that others are enjoying without us.
Andrew Przybylski from Oxford University was the first to formulate a definition of FOMO for research purposes. In 2013, Przybylski and colleagues published an article in Computers in Human Behavior titled “The Motivational, Emotional, and Behavioral Implications of Fear of Missing Out.” They defined FOMO as “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.” This definition has been widely cited and laid the foundation for many subsequent FOMO studies. Various studies have used different definitions of FOMO. Still, they generally focus on the anxiety and discomfort people feel when they believe they are missing out on positive experiences that others are having.
Andrew Przybylski, Jenna Clark, and Ana Radovic developed and validated questionnaires to measure FOMO in different groups, such as adolescents, students, and adults. These questionnaires typically assess the extent to which people experience thoughts and feelings related to positive experiences others have without them and how much they exhibit behaviors resulting from these thoughts and feelings.
It’s challenging to estimate the exact number of academic studies on FOMO worldwide since new research papers are published yearly, and there needs to be a central database or registry tracking all of them. However, a search in the academic database Google Scholar for the term “Fear of Missing Out” yields over 27,000 results. This means FOMO is the subject of many academic studies in various fields, including psychology, sociology, communications studies, marketing, and more. Regrettably, this extensive research only addresses a narrow part of the phenomenon’s scope.
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