Transcription
Today, we're going to talk about how to become immune to FOMO. The basic problem with FOMO is that you are chasing the lives of other people instead of figuring out what you want to do in life. What we're doing is seeing other people do cool things, and then you're chasing after them, hoping to get a fraction of their joy. Today, we're going to teach you how to switch it around. We're going to teach you how to be the inspiring person that sort of evokes FOMO in other people because you're out there living your life.
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This is something that was really hard for me to tackle as a psychiatrist. I sort of noticed that people would come to me more and more with FOMO, and that the traditional methods of psychotherapy didn't seem to be working. We talk about, okay, like what's your underlying insecurity, and tell me about your parents, and all this kind of stuff, and that despite doing all that stuff, it just didn't seem to work. And that's when I sort of realized that psychotherapy is built on our cerebral cortices; it's built on the higher-order functions of our brain. It's kind of like we talk about feelings and emotions and desires and values and even the subconscious, which manifests in dreams, but it's all part of our like human or cortical mind—the most evolved parts of our mind. And the problem is that FOMO, and especially technology, activates the deeper parts of our mind.
So, if you sort of look at something like doomscrolling, right, your cerebral cortices, your human parts of the brain, are kind of saying like, hey, like we should stop doing this, like put down the phone, go do something productive, you're going to regret this tomorrow, and your brain is kind of screaming at you, "Don't do this, don't do this, don't do this." But the problem is that technology accesses these weird, deeper, reptilian parts of our brain—uh, doomscroll, dopamine, fun, I don't feel good, cats—right? So this is what this is how technology works, and it turns out that FOMO actually accesses two really, really primitive circuits in the brain that are also present with a lot of animals.
The first is the reason why two-year-olds are brats. And what do I mean by this? If you all have ever seen a two-year-old who's playing with other two-year-olds, it's like—I was at a birthday party recently where there were two-year-olds who were eating cupcakes. Okay, so like one two-year-old has a cupcake and starts eating cupcake—cupcakes delicious—another two-year-old comes along and says, "I want that cupcake," and you're like, "No, no, these are all like there's like 30 cupcakes, they're all the same, here's your cupcake," and the two—I was like, "No, I want that one, I want that one, I want the one that other people have." And when people get developmentally stunted, we see really sordid stuff, and I've seen this in my private practice, and it's really nasty. It's like two sisters, and one sister wants everything that the other sister has, right? So if one person wins a trophy in Taekwondo, the other one starts Taekwondo. And in the worst cases, this even involves things like trying to seduce your sister's husband because you want what they have. So this is a really primitive circuit in the brain, and you may have sort of seen this when people try to outshine you, or if you do one thing, someone's like, "Hey, you can't be doing that without me doing it. I'm gonna do it better than you. I'm gonna make you feel bad about yourself. I'm gonna do it because you're doing it. I want exactly what you want. I don't want to live my life; I want to live your life, but better." So it's a really primitive circuit in the brain, and it's very like evolutionary in nature as well, because I don't know if y'all have seen these videos of like, you know, people walking down the street, and then a crowd—like a prank video—where a crowd starts running the other way, like the world is ending, and the person who's walking down the street is like, "I don't know what's going on, but I'm going to turn around; I'm going to run with the crowd." So kind of monkey see, monkey do—it's a really primitive part of our behavior.
The other primitive part that FOMO sort of accesses is this desire not to be ostracized. So the world has changed a lot, but our brain did not evolve for the world that we live in today. So, as an example, you know, in the past we lived in like communities of maybe 200 or 300 humans—these were like tribal communities or even smaller packs. We're talking about like for millions of years, this is what humans used to do. And so if you sort of think about the price of being left out, or the price of ostracization, it was really, really severe, right? If you kind of fall out with your tribe, it's not like you can just meet new people on the internet today; you can't just block one person and then find a new person tomorrow—you can now, but you didn't used to be able to. So what happens is our brains sort of realized that, okay, being ostracized from the pack—like a wolf that gets ostracized from the pack—is basically gonna die. So our brains are hyper-hypersensitive to being ostracized and left out. We sort of view this as, "Oh my God, now I'm screwed."
And so here's the problem with technology today: it activates these two primitive circuits. Logically, cortically, in a sort of human brain sense, right, our upper-level functions, we may realize that I don't actually need to do what everyone else is doing. And if you stop and think about it, they're like eight billion people on the planet. The definition of your life is that you're going to miss out on 99.9999% of experiences because eight billion people are out there; they're all eating great meals; they're all having all kinds of different problems and getting married and getting divorced and having kids and getting pets and going scuba diving and going surfing. The majority of your life is missing out on what other people are doing. The problem with things like technology and especially social media is it activates these two parts of the brain, and that's kind of hard to psychotherapize.
So now the question becomes, how do we fix this, right? If these primitive parts of our brain are being active, what is the antidote to those primitive parts of the brain? And this is where we're going to talk about basically being satisfied. So if you look at like people who don't have FOMO, why do they not have FOMO? There's two groups of people, right? People who are able to just live their own life, and when other people are doing things, they're like, "Wow, that's really cool, that's really good for you, like I hope you had a great time." And these guys are actually genuine, right? They're like genuinely like they don't feel like they're missing out on anything. And why is that? It's because their cup is full. If we sort of think about, okay, if I'm starving and I see someone else eat like a really, really juicy burger, it's like, "Man, I really want to eat that burger," but if I'm—if my stomach is full, I actually don't covet the food of other people. So the key antidote to FOMO is to actually be content yourself, and that may sound really hard, but we're going to talk a little bit—a really simple way that I actually found worked for a lot of my patients—to actually kind of be content, specifically with FOMO.
So what I want you all to do is the next time you have FOMO, what you're going to do is you're going to want to do what other people do—"I want that one"—but instead of just jumping to do that one, because if you do, you're gonna end up—you may feel good today, but tomorrow will roll around, and you're not really content with your life, so you're going to get FOMO again. So instead of just jumping in and doing what other people are doing, I want you to stop and think a little bit about, okay, what is it about this activity that I am missing in my life? Because it's not the activity itself; there's going to be some kind of internal value that you recognize as not being satisfied. So it may be something like exploration—like people are going on a trip somewhere, and that sounds really cool, "I wish I could go on a trip"—so what I want you to really do is think about the underlying value that you want to sort of have in your life. And as you sort of figure out what that underlying value is—it could be exploration, it could be a sense of growth, it could be a sense of connectedness, or you know, doing things with other people—so figure out what's that like deeper value that you care about, that deeper psychological need.
So once you figure out what that is, the next thing to do is to start to think about, okay, systematically, how can I start to build this into my life? Because I know it sounds kind of weird—if people are going on a trip, like you can go on a trip too; you don't have to go on a trip with other people. You can take the weekend and maybe go travel somewhere for like a weekend, maybe get a nice Airbnb or get a hotel for a couple of days, or maybe get pitch a tent and go camping. And then what I want you all to really do is think about, okay, how can I satisfy this value in the simplest way possible? So we're not talking about duplicating a trip that other people are taking—what's one thing that I can do to feel a little bit more connected? What's one thing that I can do to explore? Hell, go to a museum in your city that you've never been to, because we all always go to museums when we travel somewhere else, but we actually don't take advantage of the touristy kind of things in our own city. And something cool will happen when you start to do that, because when you set a goal for yourself, when you think a little bit about your values, and you start to move towards them, that's what leads to contentment. And I know it sounds kind of weird—contentment isn't fulfilling your fantasies; contentment is progress towards your values. And that's what's really cool is once you start doing this, you're going to start doing cool stuff, and you'll start to feel better about yourself.
I know it sounds kind of weird; you may think, "But if I want this desire and don't have to fulfill the desire to be content," actually, no, because if we sort of think about the nature of desire, fulfilling a desire doesn't make it go away long-term; it actually increases it over time. So instead, what we want to do is progress towards our values. So take a look at what someone's doing, figure out what you care about in terms of what they're doing, and try to build it into your own life in a very small way. And what I'd recommend is over the course of three to seven days, try to take one step forward towards what that value is. And then once you start to do that a little bit, by all means, post on social media, right? And this is where we sort of get to the really fun part, which is that you get to induce FOMO in other people. And so let's say two of your friends are going to France for a week, and you're like, "That's super cool, but I'm gonna go camping for three days," and then you post about it, right? And you're gonna be like, "Yeah, I'm gonna go camping," or you come back and you kind of say, "Hey, I went camping for three days by myself; it was really awesome; I got to hang out; I got to, you know, go on a hike; I got to make a fire; I got to see some wildlife; it was really cool." And like camping and stuff like that is actually really fun, and then you're gonna come back, and you're going to be healthier because you inhaled all these plant aerosols, you got fresh air, you were disconnected from the internet, which has its own advantages, and then you're gonna post about it, and then you're gonna start inducing FOMO in other people.
So the real antidote to FOMO, the real way to become immune to FOMO, is to feel like there's nothing missing on the inside—the fear of missing out. And when we are unfulfilled internally, that makes our minds very, very vulnerable to FOMO because we've got these two really critical circuits—these primitive circuits in the brain—of wanting what other people want and fear of ostracization, and FOMO tackles both of those. And the real challenge is that our cortical structures of the brain—logic and all this other kind of stuff—doesn't really work in kind of fixing those problems. So I encourage y'all to really lean towards your values, start to take a couple of small steps, and you don't have to go all the way, and as you do that, you'll start to build contentment, and you will start to induce FOMO in others. So good luck, and keep us posted on what y'all ended up doing and whether it worked or not. [Music] foreign [Music]