The City That Never Sleeps Won’t Let You Sleep
How the Fear of Missing Moments Translates into a Crisis in Urban Space Design
Imagine standing in an urban plaza surrounded by glass facades of cafés, galleries, and co-working spaces, each window framing a scene that appears more vibrant than the one you occupy. You are not physically absent from the place, yet you feel you are missing something around the next corner, on the floor above, or behind the adjacent wall. This feeling is no longer a digital phenomenon confined to phone screens and social media feeds; it has become an invisible force shaping how we move through cities, how we choose the neighborhoods we inhabit, and even how we sit in cafés. What recent psychological research reveals about the scales measuring this fear — commonly known as FOMO — opens a door for architects and urban planners to a deeper understanding of how humans interact with built space in an age of perpetual presence.
From Screen to Street: When Space Becomes a Trigger for Anxiety
When Andrew Przybylski and his colleagues defined “fear of missing out” in their foundational 2013 study as “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent,” they could not have imagined that this definition would one day read as a precise description of the experience of walking down a mixed-use commercial street. The study, published in Computers in Human Behavior and conducted on an international sample exceeding one thousand participants, produced a ten-item scale that measures this anxiety as a stable personality trait rather than a temporary state tied to a specific digital platform. This scale, which remains the most widely used in roughly 62 to 94 percent of subsequent studies according to a comprehensive review by John Elhai, Hai Yang, and Christian Montag published in the Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry in 2021, carries an essential architectural implication: the anxiety of missing out is not a reaction to a specific event but an internal disposition that causes a person to read any option-dense urban space as a persistent threat.
The contemporary city, with its intense concentration of functions, entertainment, and social interaction in adjacent spaces, amplifies this disposition. An architect who designs a complex integrating housing, retail, and leisure into a single mass may — unintentionally — be building a machine for generating spatial anxiety, where the resident feels that no matter what they do, there is always a floor, a wing, or a courtyard whose activity they are missing.
Chronic Anxiety or Fleeting Episode? What Scales Tell Us About the Human-Space Relationship
One of the most compelling developments in the literature on measuring this fear is the distinction between anxiety as an entrenched trait and anxiety as a momentary state — a distinction with direct consequences for architectural design. Elisa Wegmann and her colleagues developed in their 2017 study published in Addictive Behaviors Reports a two-factor scale that differentiates between general anxiety as a personal disposition and momentary anxiety that arises during interaction with digital communication environments. Notably, only the momentary anxiety mediated the relationship between psychological disorders and excessive use behavior, which means the environment — whether digital or built — is the actual trigger for the episode, not personality alone.
This is where the significance of the more recent study led by Andrew Holte in 2023, published in Telematics and Informatics Reports, comes into focus. Holte developed the first scale designed specifically to capture the “state” of fear of missing out in the present moment, moving beyond criticisms leveled at earlier scales that they actually measured a semi-permanent disposition disguised as a temporary state. This eight-item scale demonstrated sensitivity to experimental priming and correlated with factors such as boredom, social comparison, and attachment anxiety. For the architect, this means that certain spaces — open commercial arcades or the main atrium of a mixed-use building — may function as momentary triggers that generate transient anxiety episodes even in people who do not chronically carry this trait.
Conversely, the 2025 study by E. M. Hisham and colleagues introduced an abbreviated three-item version suitable for daily, weekly, and individual measurement alike, demonstrating strict statistical invariance across genders and across repeated time intervals. This tool opens the door to measuring the “spatial anxiety” experienced by residents of a specific building or neighborhood throughout the day, which could feed post-occupancy evaluations with precise psychological metrics instead of routine traditional questionnaires.
The Divided Self Between Walls: Personal Anxiety and Social Anxiety
Perhaps the most architecturally significant distinction is the one proposed by Zhi Zhang, Francisco Jiménez, and John Cicala in their 2020 study published in Psychology & Marketing, where they introduced a two-dimensional scale grounded in self-concept theory that separates two types of fear: personal anxiety tied to the private self — the fear of missing experiences one had wished for oneself — and social anxiety tied to the public self — the fear of exclusion from the group. The study, which included over one thousand participants across four validation studies, demonstrated that both dimensions operate even in non-digital contexts, such as predicting an individual’s willingness to pay for a missed concert ticket.
This separation translates architecturally into a fundamental design question: does the space I am designing address the private self or the public self? A quiet area designated for individual contemplation in a public library may alleviate personal anxiety by granting the visitor a sense of self-sufficiency, while it may intensify social anxiety if they feel isolated from the collective activity in the adjacent hall. The reverse is equally true: an open plaza packed with events may satisfy the social need but deepen personal anxiety for those who feel they lack the time to explore every corner. A designer aware of this split can balance both through a carefully graded progression of privacy and openness within a single project.
The Multidimensional City: Why a Single Spatial Solution Is Not Enough
Fear of missing out is no longer a one-dimensional phenomenon, and the research literature clearly reflects this complexity. The researcher Alt introduced a three-factor model distinguishing social FOMO, news FOMO, and commercial FOMO, in a scale ranging from ten to seventeen items, which stands as one of the most-cited alternatives in the field as Elhai and colleagues note. In a parallel context, Abel and colleagues developed a scale linking the phenomenon to three axes: self-esteem, social interaction and extroversion, and social anxiety, and its structure has been re-validated in different cultural contexts, including the 2020 Indonesian study by Sianipar and Kaloeti published in Jurnal Pengukuran Psikologi dan Pendidikan Indonesia.
This multiplicity of dimensions poses a genuine architectural challenge. A mixed-use city that integrates commercial spaces, news outlets, and social cafés into a single fabric does not address one dimension of anxiety but triggers all of them simultaneously. A visitor entering a massive retail complex faces commercial anxiety through time-limited offers, social anxiety through seeing others interacting in interior plazas, and news anxiety through digital screens scattered at every corner. An architect who recognizes this multiplicity can spatially separate these triggers, giving each dimension its own “room” rather than mixing them into a single crucible that overwhelms the senses.
Is Spatial Anxiety a Labyrinth or a Straight Line? The Internal Structure Debate
Even the foundational scale developed by Przybylski has not escaped debate over its internal structure. The Italian study conducted by Silvia Casale and Giulia Fioravanti in 2020, published in Addictive Behaviors, revealed that the scale decomposes into two factors: one reflecting the fear that others are living better experiences, and the other reflecting the need to control what is happening in social relationships. This two-factor structure demonstrated stability across genders and across age groups from adolescents to emerging adults. By contrast, the Iranian study led by Aydın and colleagues in 2023 supported the single-factor structure, while the Arabic version produced two different factors.
This cultural variation in internal structure carries an urban implication of considerable importance: spatial anxiety is not a uniform universal phenomenon but is shaped by the urban fabric and local culture. The Arab city with its narrow alleys and interior courtyards may produce patterns of spatial anxiety that differ fundamentally from those generated by the European city with its wide streets and open plazas. An architect who transfers an urban model from one cultural context to another without accounting for this difference may intensify anxiety rather than alleviate it.
From Measurement to Design: What Can the Architect Do?
Ultimately, the utility of these scales is not confined to psychology researchers. The architect and the urban planner can draw on this accumulated knowledge as a diagnostic tool for existing spaces and a design tool for future ones. If chronic anxiety prevails among the residents of a particular neighborhood, the solution may lie in reducing the density of visual options and creating quiet spaces that satisfy the private self. If momentary anxiety is the problem — as occurs in massive shopping centers — the solution may involve breaking the visual continuity between storefronts and introducing green pauses that return the visitor to the present.
If commercial anxiety is dominant, as the OnlineAdFOMO index developed in 2025 and published in the Journal of Promotion Management suggests, the designer can regulate the flow of advertising stimuli within the built space rather than allowing them to dominate every available surface. The unifying principle is that built space is not a neutral container but an active participant in shaping the psychological state of those who occupy it, and understanding FOMO measurement scales gives the architect a precise language to transform this space from a source of anxiety into a setting for mindful presence.
References
Przybylski, Andrew; Murayama, Kai; DeHaan, Christopher; Gladwell, Valerie. “Motivational, Emotional, and Behavioral Correlates of Fear of Missing Out.” Computers in Human Behavior, 2013.
Elhai, John; Yang, Hai; Montag, Christian. “Fear of Missing Out: Overview, Theoretical Underpinnings, and Literature Review on Relations with Severity of Negative Affectivity and Problematic Technology Use.” Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry, 2021.
Wegmann, Elisa; Oberst, Ulrike; Stodt, Benjamin; Brand, Matthias. “Online-Specific Fear of Missing Out and Internet-Use Expectancies Contribute to Symptoms of Internet-Communication Disorder.” Addictive Behaviors Reports, 2017.
Holte, Andrew. “The State Fear of Missing Out Inventory: Development and Validation.” Telematics and Informatics Reports, 2023.
Zhang, Zhi; Jiménez, Francisco; Cicala, John. “Fear of Missing Out Scale: A Self-Concept Perspective.” Psychology & Marketing, 2020.
Hisham, E. M. et al. “A Three-Item Short Version of the Fear of Missing Out Scale for Time-Intensive Designs: Measurement Invariance and Psychometric Properties.” Telematics and Informatics Reports, 2025.
Casale, Silvia; Fioravanti, Giulia. “Factor Structure and Psychometric Properties of the Italian Version of the Fear of Missing Out Scale in Emerging Adults and Adolescents.” Addictive Behaviors, 2020.
Aydın, O. et al. “Psychometric Properties of the Fear of Missing Out Scale in Iranian Students: Reliability, Validity, Factor Structure, and Measurement Invariance.” Telematics and Informatics Reports, 2023.
Beyens, Ingrid; Frison, Eline; Eggermont, Steven. “‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’: Adolescents’ Fear of Missing Out and Its Relationship to Social Needs, Facebook Use, and Facebook-Related Stress.” Computers in Human Behavior, 2016.
Sianipar, N. A.; Kaloeti, D. V. S. “The Indonesian Version of the Fear of Missing Out Scale: An Internal Structure Analysis.” Jurnal Pengukuran Psikologi dan Pendidikan Indonesia, 2020.
“OnlineAdFOMO as a New Avenue for Digital Promotion: Index Development and Validation.” Journal of Promotion Management, 2025.
