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Tuesday Tips #6: Get Over Your FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) - You Won’t Miss Much
Okay, this tip is a little different because it is more of a mindset change or realization I want people to have.
For a lot of people - including myself - one of the biggest blockers to ditching obsessive phone use is that we believe we might miss out on some important piece of information.
Whether it be a text from a friend, an insightful tweet, or that notification from Domino’s that Hawaiian pizza is trending in your area.
Okay, maybe that last one no one is worried about missing. But you get my point.
This was one of the biggest things holding me back from leaving Twitter. I thought I got so much value out of it - how could I just give that up?
But after drastically reducing how much I used my phone, I’m here to tell you - you won’t miss much.
You’ll probably barely even miss the apps you used to spend hours on constantly refreshing.
I used to love Instagram memes. Now when I go on Instagram maybe once a month, I still find memes mildly entertaining, but I have no desire to go back to doomscrolling for them like I used to.
And this is not to say there is absolutely no value to certain apps on our phone - there definitely is, even from social media apps.
But I think we all vastly overestimate how much benefit we get from these apps. At least in my case, it was obvious once I deleted social media and stopped constantly checking my phone to see if someone texted me, that all the time I spent on my phone was a net negative vs the positive benefits I was getting.
So Tuesday Tip #6 is: get over your fear of missing out. If you think you can’t delete an app or put your phone away because you think “what if xyz happens”, you’re probably wrong. And even if you’re right, is missing one funny meme or one insightful tweet, or one Snapchat really worth the hours a day you’ll lose mindlessly consuming the remaining 99% of content that is utterly unimportant?