5 Ways to Avoid FOMO : Fear Of Missing Out & Travel

You’re back from an amazing trip, some would say a trip of a life time. The kids have returned to school. Your savings account is starting to build up again ready for your next trip. You’re excited about all the adventures you experienced with the kids and can’t wait to share them on your blog. You have a few family excursions planned; a few short trips; maybe a fight north – nothing fancy.

But then it happens. You hop on a social media platform and you notice that your neighbours are heading to the anniversary of this or that over in some exotic country you’ve never really thought about until now. Your colleague has just secured the remaining tickets to a sellout festival up north. The latest attraction is opening at a theme park in Europe and by luck your best friends cousin will be there just at that moment. Suddenly it seems like everyone is heading off on an adventure but you and your family. You anxiety is triggered and you start second guessing everything you’re doing. Your trip to the zoo next week no longer looks that exciting. Your long weekend over the mountains seems second rate.  Heck, you’ve started analysing whether you should max out the credit card on an unplanned trip so you can feel the exhilaration of doing something right now. Welcome to FOMO, a 21st century burden that can be crippling.

FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out, is a 21st century mental health syndrome that can hit even the savviest of Family Travel Bloggers. It can spiral you into anxiety which sees you too frequently checking your social media engagement and unique hits or making unrealistic goals that you wouldn’t normally work towards if you weren’t occupied by “what everyone else is doing”. It divides your attention and takes you away from what you should be concentrating on: your family adventures, the ones you HAVE planned. Little pangs of jealousy, perhaps even hostility start to generate. For some, your travels start to become a check list of things from 100 Things to Do Before You Die.  So how do you resist FOMO when social media and all your favourite bloggers are writing about such interesting things?

Practice Mindfulness when travelling

Mindfulness is all about being in the moment, purposefully focusing on what’s happening around you, not about what could be coming up in the future or labelling things good or bad. It takes a bit of practice as you need to deliberately notice what’s around you. Typically we miss the opportunity to be in the moment as we are so focused on what could be or what was. FOMO takes over. Share the moments with your family. Share the now. The trip to the park. The game of cricket in the backyard. Those moments can have just as much impact in your child’s life as your trip to Disneyland. Truly.

Travel isn’t all about fulfilling a Bucket List

Okay, okay….I know that’s rich coming from a chick whose entire site is about a Kid Bucket List! What I mean by this statement is that you shouldn’t be cramming everything into your trip. You can never see EVERYTHING. Watch that FOMO doesn’t creep in. You will need to make decisions. You will need to choose which activities or sites don’t make your shortlist. This is okay. It is okay not to fit everything in to your trip. Especially with kids. Just because your neighbour Josie managed to visit every coffee shop in Paris and cram in a trip to Chanel and Musée du Louvre in the space of three days doesn’t mean you need to at all. In fact, you’re unlikely to actually enjoy the trip with your family if you work towards completing the same lists as everyone else you know. Relax. Take your trip slowly. Enjoy.

The Grass Isn’t Always Greener

Look, the truth is, even if you won lotto today and hit the road full time tomorrow you are likely to experience a little FOMO even if you were riding your travel dreams.  You would be checking in to your Facebook each day and noticing that back home you would be missing out on birthday celebrations, the birth of your best friend’s first baby; your kid’s first ever Student of the Week (because you would be home schooling). I’m not saying that you need to be happy with your lot in life, nor should you just roll with what comes your way. What I am advocating is working out what YOUR family priorities are when it comes to life style, travel opportunities and your weekend fulfilment outside what everyone else is doing over on social media. Get that down pat, practice a little mindfulness as I’ve mentioned above and well, life is going to be good and maybe you’ll keep FOMO at bay.

Remember that most social media platforms are highly curated.

That’s right. The world of social media is not really real life. It is often highly curated. Typically a collection of all the good aspects of travel. If you worked through the social media accounts of your favourite travel bloggers you are most likely to think that they are having the time of their lives with the most well behaved, photogenic and stylish children at their heel. For many bloggers this might be the case 80% of the time. However, with enough images from a two week trip, some travel bloggers could quite easily post content for a month or two, keeping you keen and interested until their next adventure. You’re unlikely to see those moments where the kids refused to eat anything McDonalds for lunch and you gave in; the time when a tantrum ensued after a wrong turn; or the whole family caught some tropical disease and were confined to their room, only moving from the bed to take images of the aquamarine ocean outside for their latest coverage.

Wish Less, Appreciate More

Wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’….. it’s wonderful to have dreams. I love a good vision board where I can identify what I would love to work towards, aspire to become or go to on a trip. There is no inherent problem with dreaming. It’s a good thing. I love to dream big myself. What is a problem is when you start framing everything around what could be: “if only we had more money we could….”. “I wish my kids were a little older so ….”. This can take us away from appreciating what we do have. Where we are. What we could do with the resources we have at hand.

So the next time you’re planning a trip, no matter how big it is, think about what your family would love to see not what your neighbour, or colleague or some random travel blogger has done before you. Research the destination and develop your own bucket list that meets the interests and dreams of your family. Don’t for one second indulge in what you might be missing out on if you choose x, y, or z. Live in the moment. Turn off your social media while you’re travelling. And remember, it doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing. It matters what you’re doing with your family right now because everyone is right when they say that our kids will be all grown up before we know it.