I will be the first to admit that I am glued to my phone. If I’m not asleep, I am checking Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram. Obviously, critics would label me as the worst kind of millennial — the kind that’s missing out on real life because I’m so concerned what’s going on in the digital world.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to stay up-to-date on happenings in the world. But every now and then, and I notice a negative side effect of my love affair with social media: FOMO.

FOMO, or fear of missing out, happens to the best of us. We see a friend’s Instagram post of a brunch we weren’t invited to or a blurry Snapchat story of a party and that familiar feeling of “OK, thanks for the invite” creeps in. I noticed recently that after watching the Syracuse Campus Story, my feelings of FOMO were increasing. People were on the Quad throwing Frisbees, day drinking at Castle and playing with dogs. That’s not to say I wasn’t doing any fun things either, but I wasn’t doing all of the things I saw on the Campus Story.

Because social media is an integral part of our lives, by association, FOMO is too. Which is why it’s important to ask, it bad for us? And I don’t mean a “chocolate is bad for you” sort of thing. I mean, a “this could affect your mental health” sort of thing. Per usual when I don’t know the answer to something, I decided to look to science and previously conducted studies to find the truth.

In 2012, researchers at Utah Valley University interviewed 425 students about how they felt when they saw their friends’ lives on Facebook. After also tracking how much time the students spent on Facebook — among other personal factors — researchers found that the more time students spent on Facebook, the more they thought their friends had better lives than they did.

A study published in 2013 from the University of Michigan suggests a link between FOMO and negative emotions. The study tracked participants for two weeks and showed that the more people used Facebook, the worse and less satisfied they felt with their own lives.

Another study published in 2013 by German researchers showed similar results. After studying 600 people who logged into Facebook, the researchers discovered that one in three people felt worse after logging off, especially if they looked at other people’s vacation photos. The scientists said that users’ most cited reason for feeling worse was comparing themselves to their friends. The second most common reason was having fewer likes, comments and activity compared to their friends.

A number of studies show that Facebook use contributes to negative feelings that basically define FOMO. That research, though, had more to do with what people saw on Facebook rather than how they used it. It was seeing what others were doing without them that was a major contributing factor to feelings of social inadequacy.

There aren’t as concrete of studies about Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat, but considering we use those apps to see what our friends are doing, we can possibly assume the information applies there too — especially with apps like Snapchat, where we see posts that people might not want to put on other social media outlets. So instead of just seeing a filtered picture of a beach, we see the videos of parties we weren’t invited to as well.

FOMO is real, and it’s definitely heightened by how much time we spend on social media. But trying to stop it is sort of a catch-22 — delete your social media accounts, and you’ll miss out even more on what’s happening in everyone’s world. And let’s be real, it’s not practical to be non-existent online if you’re trying to get a job or internship. We’ll probably never get over our FOMO, but it’s comforting to know that everyone else feels it too.

Kate Beckman is a sophomore magazine journalism major. Her column appears every week in Pulp. You can reach her at kebeckma@syr.edu or follow her on Twitter at @Kate_Beckman.

Published on April 7, 2015 at 8:20 pm