You’ve heard of FOMO. But FOPO—fear of people’s opinions—might be doing even more damage to your life than any missed party ever could.
Coined by psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais, FOPO is what happens when the desire to be liked turns into a full-blown operating system. It’s not just worrying what people think of you. It’s reorganizing your entire personality around their approval. “We develop a built-in mechanism to check outside ourselves to see if everything is okay,” Gervais told Forbes. “We give an inordinate amount of weight to what someone else may or may not be thinking about us.”
According to Gervais, FOPO runs in three exhausting phases: anticipation, checking, and responding. You worry ahead of time about how you’ll be perceived. Then, in the moment, you scan for signs of disapproval—tone of voice, facial expressions, even a single “OK” in a text. Finally, you shape-shift in real time to avoid rejection: fake laughs, fake interest, fake confidence.
And it’s not just bad for your mental health—it drains your performance, too. “People who suffer from FOPO lose faith and confidence in themselves,” Gervais explained. “Their performance suffers.” That mental load builds over time like background apps draining your battery. Eventually, it leads to burnout, anxiety, and a creeping sense that you’re living someone else’s life.
Social Media Has Made ‘FOPO’ Worse
Aparna Sagaram, a licensed therapist, says social media has only made things worse. “It’s not so much about what’s best for you anymore,” she told HuffPost. “It feels like what’s maybe best for how others will perceive you.” That pressure to curate and conform makes people feel disconnected from who they actually are.
The solution is simple, in theory. Stop outsourcing your identity. Gervais suggests replacing approval-seeking with purpose. Instead of asking, “Do they like me?” ask, “Am I being true to my purpose?” That mindset shift, he says, changes everything, from how you show up at work to how you order coffee.
Sagaram recommends a simple mental exercise: Look back at your younger self and ask, “What do I wish I hadn’t cared so much about?” The answers often reveal what you’ve been giving away in the name of fitting in. It’s not about regrets; it’s about clarity.
FOPO is sneaky. It disguises itself as politeness, ambition, or self-awareness. But at its core, it’s just fear. And once you call it out, you don’t have to keep letting it run your life.
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