FOMO
The fear of missing something essential eats away at rest time and colonises attention.
It is 11:15 p.m. Lucas, 16, has put his phone down on his bedside table three times. Three times he has picked it back up. Not to read anything precise. To check. To make sure he is missing nothing. That movement of the wrist, almost reflex, has a name: FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out, the fear of missing something essential while we sleep, while we think, while we are simply elsewhere.
The term entered academic literature in the early 2010s thanks to the researcher Andrew Przybylski, who defined it as a diffuse apprehension that others are having rewarding experiences in our absence. It is not a frontal anxiety. It is a background noise, constant, that maintains a state of vigilance incompatible with the letting go needed for sleep.
Social media algorithms did not invent the desire not to be excluded; that desire is as old as social life. But they industrialised it. The infinite feed, the disappearing stories, the notifications calibrated to trigger worry more than information: everything is designed to keep the user in that state of permanent availability. We no longer consult the phone; we check it. The nuance matters. Consulting presupposes an intention. Checking presupposes a fear.
The biological consequences are documented. A study published in Computers in Human Behavior in 2023 establishes a direct link between the intensity of FOMO and fragmented sleep in adolescents. ANSES, in its late-2025 report on the effects of social media on adolescent health, confirms the association between nocturnal screen use, late bedtimes, reduced sleep duration and anxious-depressive symptoms.
What makes this mechanism particularly hard to fight is that it feeds on itself. The more one checks, the more the algorithm learns to offer content likely to hold attention.
"FOMO is not the fear of missing something. It is the fear of no longer existing if one disconnects."
In the same spirit: Reclaiming Silence · Digital Anomie
↑ Contents
Sleep and screens
Sleep is not a pause between two activities. It is the workshop where the brain repairs itself.
Every night, in our bedrooms, a scene plays out that cannot be seen but whose effects accumulate. Screens emit short-wavelength light, the so-called blue light, which sends the brain a precise signal: it is still daytime. The production of melatonin, the hormone that triggers sleep, is then delayed.
This is not a metaphor. It is neurobiology. Professor Sylvie Royant-Parola reminds us that the blue light of screens can delay sleep by forty-five minutes to two hours depending on the individual. In the school week, over five days, that means several hours of lost sleep, irreplaceable.
The consequences go beyond fatigue. A badly rested adolescent brain shows degraded executive functions: attention, memorisation, emotional regulation, precisely the faculties called upon in class. ANSES confirmed in 2025 that increased screen time in the evening is associated with later bedtimes, reduced sleep duration and a multiplication of night awakenings. Girls, more exposed to anxiety-provoking content and digital social interactions, are more affected.
"Sleep is not the dead time of the day. It is the workshop where the brain consolidates what it has learned and prepares to think again."
In the same spirit: Digital Anomie · Digital Metacognition
↑ Contents
Digital cognitive fatigue
Too many tabs open. In the browser. And in the brain.
Isabelle, a literature teacher, has been observing her students for three years. What she reads on their faces is not boredom. It is exhaustion. Mental exhaustion.
Digital cognitive fatigue differs from ordinary fatigue: it results not from a sustained and deep effort, but from the incessant fragmentation of attention. The brain is not tired because it has thought too much. It is exhausted because it has constantly switched from one task to another, from one notification to another, without ever having had time to enter concentrated, continuous thought.
Cal Newport documented this phenomenon: every interruption costs not only the time of the interruption itself, but also a period of attentional recovery. In a school environment where phones vibrate and platforms notify, these interruptions are counted by the dozens every day.
"Boredom used to be the warm-up time of thought. Digital cognitive fatigue is what happens when we no longer leave it that time."
In the same spirit: Digital Metacognition · Thinking Against the Algorithm
↑ Contents
Digital sedentariness
The body has stood still while the mind grows agitated. Neither comes out unscathed.
In 2020, the WHO established it: 81% of adolescents worldwide were not reaching the minimum recommendations for physical activity. Since then, digital uses have continued to grow.
Digital sedentariness names the bodily immobility induced by absorption into digital interfaces. The body is seated or lying down. The mind scrolls, reacts, gets carried away. This dissociation is new in human history.
INSERM reminds us that physical activity plays a direct role in adolescent brain development. A sedentary body is also a brain that is less well irrigated, less well regulated.
"A motionless body while the mind is agitated is not rest."
In the same spirit: Digital Anomie · Reclaiming Silence
↑ Contents
To situate the approach: A Digital Ethic.