FOMO and how it drives cravings

Human beings have a built-in self-evaluating mechanism that causes us to compare ourselves to others, in ways that non-human animals don’t appear to do. We compare our physical attractiveness; our intelligence; our level of skill at sporting and work activities; our income; the value of our possessions such as houses and cars; our children’s abilities; and all manner of attributes to those of other people.

Research psychologists have confirmed that people’s self-esteem rises and falls based on whether they perceive themselves as coming out favourably or unfavourably in these comparisons.

We also compare ourselves in terms of how much pleasure or enjoyment we think we’re getting, and often feel driven to emulate those who appear to be getting more than us. This kind of comparison was brought to hilarious cinematic life in the famous restaurant orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. After witnessing Sally noisily faking orgasm, an older woman summons the waiter and says, “I’ll have what she’s having!”

I call this aspect of the comparison mechanism FOMO – the Fear Of Missing Out. It often pops up when I’m working with clients, and participants in The LEAN Program. To understand FOMO and how to work with it, you first need to understand The Pleasure Trap – a concept first described by psychologist Doug Lisle, and chiropractor Alan Goldhamer, in their book of the same name.

Lisle and Goldhamer describe several components of The Pleasure Trap, but the relevant part for our discussion is that when you habitually eat highly processed foods, your nervous system adapts over time to the excessively high stimulation level provided by all that sugar, salt and fat, causing you to perceive less and less pleasure over time – the same ‘tolerance’ process that happens in drug and alcohol addiction. You are driven to consume more and more sweet, salty and fatty food in order to wring a response out of your unresponsive pleasure centre.

Eventually, you become unable to elicit a pleasure response no matter how much cheesecake, chips or chocolate you eat – but you feel BAD when you stop eating such foods. BANG! – the trapdoor slams shut, and you’re locked inside the Pleasure Trap.

Of course, most people are utterly oblivious to the Pleasure Trap and the impact that it has on their ability to perceive pleasure. So when they commit to eating a healthy diet in order to lose weight and improve their health, a little voice in the back of their head whispers “But you’ll be missing out on all those yummy foods!”

The Fear of Missing Out drives food cravings like football grand finals drive beer sales. Watching other people eat food that you perceive (whether correctly or incorrectly) as more pleasure-giving than what you’re eating, can cause all those resolutions you made to stick to a healthy eating plan, to crumble into dust.

So how do you deal with FOMO? Yet again, it’s EFT to the rescue! During a webinar, I worked with a participant, Sandy, whose FOMO had been triggered by watching family members hoeing into Christmas dinner. Sandy is vegan while her family members are not, so most of the food on offer did not meet her dietary needs. Her intensity level about the feeling of being ‘all left out’ was close to 10/10 when we began. After a few minutes of EFT tapping, which you can listen to below, it was down to 2.2.

Very interestingly, during this initial tapping her feeling shifted from ‘left out’ and wanting what they were having, to being disgusted by their mindless eating.

By the end of the tapping session Sandy's FOMO had collapsed, replaced by a keen desire to earn a sense of genuine accomplishment by ticking off some of the many items on her to-do list, instead of heading zombie-like to the freezer after dinner, to stuff herself on sweet treats. That's the power of EFT!

The LEAN Program is a self-paced online program for people who are fed up with struggling with their weight and their eating habits, and ready to complete redefine their relationships with their body, food and eating. Click here for details.