There’s fear of missing out, fear of a better option — and now there’s “FOPO,” another stress-inducing acronym that stands for “fear of people’s opinions.”
It’s human nature to care about what other people think — but letting this fear control your day-to-day can be an incredibly damaging habit that some experts believe is a constrictor of human potential.
Psychologist Michael Gervais came up with the FOPO concept — which he describes as a “hidden epidemic” — and says that people who suffer from it “lose faith and confidence in themselves and their performance suffers,” according to Forbes.
FOPO is “primarily an anticipatory mechanism that we use, and it’s a preemptive process to increase our acceptance in the eyes of others and for us to try to avoid rejection,” Gervais told HuffPost.
“And it’s characterized mostly by a hypervigilance and social readiness — and what we end up doing is we scan our world for approval.”
What he means is that more and more people are comparing themselves to others and seeking validation from the outside world — which ultimately causes someone to devalue themselves.
Of course, social media — a way people seek approval from others through likes and comments — doesn’t help either.
“And it’s not so much about what’s best for you anymore, it feels like what’s maybe best for how others will perceive you,” Aparna Sagaram, a licensed marriage and family therapist, told HuffPost.
Several examples can help you identify if you’re living life with FOPO, according to Gervais.
Pretending you watched a movie or TV show others are discussing, laughing at jokes that you don’t find humor in, feeling anxious that you’re taking too long to order at a cafe when there is a line behind you and not wanting to leave work before your boss does are just a few.
If you’re checking off the boxes, realizing you suffer from FOPO, Gervais told Forbes that the first step in combating it is to have a “clear sense of purpose.”
“With FOPO, we develop a built-in mechanism to check outside ourselves to see if everything is okay. We give an inordinate amount of weight to what someone else may or may not be thinking about us,” he said.
It’s all about rewiring your brain, so instead of wondering, ‘What does that person think of me?’ “We can rewire that mechanism to turn inward and check against our purpose. ‘Am I being true to my purpose?’ becomes the new reference point rather than ‘Am I being liked?’”
In addition to all of these damaging effects, having FOPO is also exhausting.
“FOPO burns a lot of our internal resources,” he told Forbes.
And it’s another thing — among many — that can lead to burnout.
“The more authentic you are, the easier it is to show up in a competent way,” Sagaram said in the HuffPost interview.
“And if you show up more competently, you’re less likely to care about what others think because you feel so secure with yourself.”
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