Most young people know the feeling. A few minutes of scrolling through other people's evenings, holidays, and social lives, and something that was fine a moment ago now feels insufficient. This is, researchers have found, a fairly predictable response to environments specifically designed to produce it (1, 2).
FOMO — the fear of missing out — is the anxiety that others are having experiences one is being excluded from. Social media intensifies it by compressing the highlights of many people's lives into a single, constantly refreshing feed. For adolescents, whose sense of identity and belonging is actively forming, the effects can be particularly sharp (1).
This article explores what research tells us about how social media shapes comparison and anxiety in young people, what makes the dynamic hard to simply opt out of, and what parents and educators can do to help.
Most parentsrecognisethe moment — the teenager who puts the phone down looking quieter than before, without being able to say exactly why
Many parents describe a pattern they've noticed but struggled to name. Their child picks up their phone in a neutral mood and puts it down twenty minutes later somehow deflated — less settled, more irritable, vaguely dissatisfied with the evening, the house, themselves. Nothing specific happened. There is nothing to point to.
What tends to produce this is something more structural than a single damaging post or a particular cruelty from another person. It is the cumulative effect of seeing a compressed, curated version of other people's lives, in which everything is more exciting, more beautiful, more attended and celebrated than the ordinary Wednesday evening a young person is actually living. The comparison is a near-automatic consequence of how these environments are built (1).
Research finds that social media platforms are designed around engagement mechanisms that reliably generate comparison, urgency, and compulsive checking — in young people and adults alike
Social media platforms are built around intermittent reinforcement — the pattern of variable, unpredictable rewards that researchers have long associated with highly persistent behaviour (2). A like, a comment, a notification that arrives at an unpredictable moment keeps the checking behaviour going in ways that predictable rewards do not. The brain's reward circuitry responds to this variability in ways that can make disengagement genuinely difficult (1, 4).
FOMO — the fear of missing out — is the specific anxiety that others are having worthwhile experiences that one is excluded from. Researchers studying adolescents' relationships with social media find it consistently associated with higher levels of anxiety, social comparison, and reduced satisfaction with one's own life (1, 3). The mechanism is not complicated: social media compresses the highlights of many people's lives into a single feed, creating a comparison context that no individual life can consistently match.
The issue is that young people are being compared against a curated composite of other people's best moments — an environment that no one's actual life resembles very closely.
Researchers examining the relationship between social media use and mental wellbeing find consistent associations with elevated anxiety, disrupted sleep, and reduced self-worth in adolescents — particularly among those who use platforms in a more passive, scrolling mode rather than actively posting or communicating (2). The direction of causation is not always clear; young people who are already more anxious may also spend more time on social media. Both are likely true simultaneously.
For adolescents, whose identity is still forming, the effects of social comparison online are felt differently — and more acutely — than in adults
Adolescence is the developmental period during which identity, belonging, and social status are most actively negotiated. Young people in this stage are particularly attuned to social cues about how they are perceived, where they stand, and whether they are included or excluded. This is developmental. The concern with belonging and social evaluation that can look excessive to adults is, at this stage of life, doing real cognitive and emotional work.
Social media operates at exactly this intersection. Likes, follower counts, comments, and the visibility of social events that one was not invited to provide a continuous, quantified update on social standing. For a young person whose capacity for emotional regulation is still developing and whose sense of self is not yet consolidated, this environment tends to be more destabilising than it is for an adult with a more formed sense of who they are (1, 3).
Late-night social media use is consistently associated with delayed sleep onset and reduced sleep quality in adolescents. Sleep is one of the most significant contributors to emotional regulation, learning, and mental health in young people and adults alike. The device in the bedroom that keeps a teenager scrolling past midnight is affecting the nervous system's capacity to manage the following day (4).
The design of social media platforms is a structural issue — and cultural counterweights offer a useful frame
Understanding FOMO and social comparison as personal failures of resilience or self-discipline misses something important about the environment producing them. Social media platforms are commercial enterprises whose revenue depends on engagement. The features that generate comparison, urgency, and compulsive checking — the public metrics, the infinite scroll, the notification systems, the algorithmic amplification of content that produces strong emotional responses — are design choices, not accidents. They exist because they work (2).
This matters for how parents, educators, and young people understand the difficulty of disengagement. The teenager who cannot put the phone down is responding to an environment that has been designed by engineers and behavioural researchers to be as compelling as possible. Framing the problem as one of individual self-control tends to produce shame rather than solutions.
The Scandinavian concept of hygge — the cultivation of simple, present-moment comfort in real-world settings, without the performance that social media requires — offers a useful counter-frame. As a reminder that there are other ways of organising social and domestic life that do not centre on visibility and comparison. Many cultures have their own equivalents: traditions of unhurried togetherness that social media has no way to replicate and no particular interest in representing fairly.
The difficulty is that for many young people, social media is also where belonging happens — and simply using it less can feel like social exclusion
There is a genuine tension at the heart of conversations about young people and social media that very often get glossed over in advice about digital limits. For many adolescents, social media is not merely an entertainment platform that could be replaced by reading or outdoor play. It is the medium through which social life is actually organised — where events are announced, friendships maintained, social inclusion signalled, and absence noticed. A young person who is not on the relevant platforms may genuinely be out of the conversation in ways that have real social consequences (1).
This complicates the standard advice to simply reduce screen time or implement digital boundaries. Those recommendations are not wrong — there is consistent evidence that more intentional and less passive social media use is associated with better outcomes [5]. The difficulty is that they can be experienced by young people as a removal of social access rather than a protective measure, which tends to produce conflict rather than cooperation.
Schools occupy a particularly important structural position here. The social dynamics that play out on social media are continuous with the social dynamics of the school day. Teachers who understand this tend to be better positioned to have conversations with students about comparison, belonging, and self-worth that land in a way that parental limits alone rarely do. Digital literacy — the capacity to understand how these platforms work and what they are designed to produce — is a basic life skill.
What tends to help —directionsthat address both the individual relationship and the structural conditions
Families and schools that navigate social media most effectively with young people usually share a common approach: they treat it as a topic worth understanding together rather than a behaviour to be managed. The conversations that open something up tend to be different from those that set a rule.
Some patterns that many families and educators have found useful to support young people’s relationship with social media:
Name the mechanism. Young people respond better to understanding why the scroll makes them feel worse than to being told to put the phone down. Explaining — without lecturing — how these platforms use intermittent reinforcement and social comparison to hold attention tends to give young people a frame for their own experience that feels accurate rather than dismissive (2).
Design the environment rather than rely on willpower. Structural adjustments tend to be more durable than personal resolve. Devices charging outside the bedroom, mealtimes without phones, established windows of the day when social media isn't available — these reduce the low-level compulsive checking without requiring a young person to resist actively each time. They work for adults in the family too.
Counter FOMO with what researchers sometimes call JOMO — the joy of missing out. The reframe is simple but useful: missing a particular online experience is not the same as missing out on life. Young people who have genuinely absorbing offline experiences — activities, relationships, and interests that engage them — have a different relationship with social media than those for whom it fills a vacuum (3).
Build media literacy alongside digital limits. Understanding that social media shows a curated highlight reel — that the holiday looks that way because fifty photos were taken and forty-nine discarded — is obvious once stated and genuinely useful for reducing its automatic emotional impact. Media literacy education in schools can make this understanding available at scale (2).
Keep the conversation open. Young people who feel their online experiences can be discussed without immediate criticism or consequence tend to bring more of what they are navigating into conversation. The parent who asks what they see online with genuine curiosity tends to get more honest answers than the one who asks in order to respond with a limit.
Social media is not going away — the question is what conditions help young people use it without being used by it
The comparison that a teenager feels scrolling through other people's evenings is a predictable response to an environment specifically designed to generate it. Understanding that does not make the feeling go away. It does change what the feeling means — which tends to change how heavily it lands.
What helps most, consistently, is the combination of understanding, structural design, and a genuine relationship with offline life that social media cannot replace. Young people who know how these platforms work, who have absorbing things to do that don't require a screen, and who feel they can talk about what they encounter online without fear of judgment — these young people navigate digital environments considerably better than those for whom social media fills a gap that nothing else reaches.
The scroll will keep scrolling. The question is what a young person — and the adults around them — bring to it, and what they build outside of it.
References:
[1] Dam VAT, et al. Quality of life and mental health of adolescents: relationships with social media addiction, fear of missing out and stress associated with neglect and negative reactions by online peers. PLoS One. 2023;18(6):e0286766. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0286766
[2] Plackett R, Blyth A, Schartau P. The impact of social media interventions on mental wellbeing: a systematic review. Eur J Public Health. 2023;33. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckad160.1577
[3] Rahmania FA, Ramadhayanti JS, Andini TAD, Nugraha SP. Fear of missing out (FOMO) as a mediator of anxiety on social media fatigue in early adulthood. Psympathica. 2023;10(1):85–92. https://doi.org/10.15575/psy.v10i1.20956
