How to regain control over your time and decisions

"Of course I'll be there!" "Miss your party?" "Never!", "Wait for me, I'll be there around 8 p.m." That's me in front of the growing stack of invites and offers to go on trips.

I hold on to my phone like it's my life because I can't say no and I can't move or make more of myself.

Thanks to hyper-connectivity, I feel like I'm at every event (or bad, based on your point of view). Some people would compare me to a weather vane because I'm always on one leg and short of breath. To be more specific, I have FOMO syndrome, which stands for "Fear of Missing Out." This is the well-known fear of losing out on something.

Because I'm trying to be everywhere at once, I'm not at ease anywhere. When I go to bed at night, I feel torn. My heart is broken, and I'm tired from all the excitement. Should I have gone to the party for my coworker instead of the usual cousins' get-together? Was it the right choice for me to spend New Year's Eve with a friend instead of my family? Should I go to both?

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is not a new thing; it's just getting worse because of how fast-paced our lives are becoming.

These changes in how we relate to time have made us less stable and more always changing, says Christine Lemaire, author of La surchauffe de nos agendas: vivre le temps autrement (Fides) and doctoral student at the Université de Montréal whose research was about... how we relate to time.

A program that makes you feel tired and full of worries, questions, guilt, and disappointments! "We always think about the choices and expectations we made." "We can't be sure if we are up to date because our experiences and knowledge are always about to expire," the expert says.

We don't trust our choices as much when we're uncertain, and we're always unhappy. What's more, not being in the loop makes us more afraid of being left out. We say "yes" to everything because of this.

Chris Lemaire says, "We never shut any doors on ourselves." We sleep with our phones on the nightstand, check our emails when we wake up, 'catch up' on TV shows by recording three at a time, split up our evenings to do more and so on. These are all signs of FOMO.

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