Jane Eyre Reader

FOMO, the syndrome striking people these days

 FOMO is the acronym of  "Fear Of Missing Out", which is indeed a reconoced type of social anxiety. Right, so, in other words; it is the feeling of having an unsatisfactory life, when you believe that you are having less fun than everyone else and you feel like you are wasting your life.

This fear is , in no small way, due to social media. In fact it could be argued that it could have been the origin of FOMO.
In those social networks you see  all your friends being successful, having fun, going to parties, travelling , buying new items.. and all of that while you are staying at home. That may affect you and make you develop FOMO. However, you must keep in mind that those are the highlighted moments of that person's life and that they are not always happy  and that ,as any other human, they have their flaws and bad times- as well as you do.
 Also, I believe that it is worth mentioning that it is estimated that teenagers have spent this 2020 an average of 3 hours a day in social media -greatly affected by the quarantine-. and that is a scary amount of time scrolling through the mobile; gossiping about others' life instead of living your own.

However, there are many things you can do about FOMO, starting by getting away from your mobile.
For instance, you ought to set goals, you can focus on things that will make you happy and help you arrive where you want to be.  Furthermore, you have to realize that you don't need a lot of friends to have the life you see on the internet, what matters is having close to you the people who matter. Specially now that we are living a pandemia and we must avoid large gatherings, you should value the quality of the friendship over the quantity.


All in all, not feeling fulfilled is a problem that many people face. It is much more complex than it seems and because of that we should strengthen our emotional intelligence to identify our feelings and be able manage them.

He told me he hadn't done it.

Anxiety is an emotion which I am sure we all have experienced more times than we would have liked to. Some of its common symptoms are sweaty palms, an increase of the heart rate and more blood flowing through the vessels, besides it is caused as a response of a real or imaginary threat.

This feeling has been a true savior during evolution. "Fight or flight" is a reaction that has kept us alive, surviving dangers of predators and other dangerous situations that could have resulted in death. Furthermore, anxiety has another positive aspect applicable in nowadays' lifestyle and it's that anxiety pushes us to improve and do our best. If we didn't have this natural response we wouldn't be able to study hours and hours to do a good exam or to keep awake finishing some project. Quoting a CEO "Anxiety and a brilliant brain is the key of success".

However, anxiety is not a motivation to do things for everybody , some people find this feeling overwhelming and it disables them to do the pending tasks. Also for some people even a small decision triggers anxiety. In these cases anxiety is considered an illness and should be assisted.

Furthermore, we might be anxious for a long period of time, for instance we might be anxious due to an exam for days or even weeks, and that is not healthy at all.

To put it in a nutshell, anxiety is a natural feeling that we should be able to handle. I believe that most of it comes from school/work related matters ,so if we learn when it is worthy to worry and when it is not we will drastically reduce our likelihood to feel anxious.

Time to bite the bullet!!

I'm sure we have all heard the expression "Netflix and Chill" and yes, although it is a great plan for a lazy day or a meet up with some friends it can also turn into a problem with ease if we spend more time than we should and we become addicted.

On the one hand, Netflix is a good option to reduce our stress after a long day, when we just want to relax, get over it and maybe have a laugh with our favorite show.
Moreover, apart of its entertainment purpose you can also use it as a fun way of learning a language. Thanks to its many language option and subtitles you can improve your listening or reading skills (even both at the same time). I do really recommend it to learn some idioms and to get used to the different accents of a language.

On the other hand, being addicted to Netflix can make you waste a lot of valuable time. This problem affects mainly teenagers and it triggers difficulties of concentration when they study or in some cases a complete lack of study. Furthermore, a lack of sleep in the long run is a risk for your health. 

To sum up, I believe that Netflix is a great tool ,but you must use it carefully and have self-control.
I personally do not have an account because I don't watch series very often, but I used to have one and I enjoyed it.

Bread for today, but... (QUARANTINE: DAY 58)

One of the greatest loss of this pandemic is the one affecting education. Every kid from Spain is in this moment assisting to online courses instead of face-to-face classes which ,of course, are not the same in any sense; not the same amount of hours are being dedicated to the subjects, the themes are not being explained in the same way.. every single thing is different.

But how does it affect this generation of students forced to do on-line courses?

On the one hand, this will cause with no doubt a lack of formation to the students, due to that this way of teaching is not as efficient as the classic one (at the moment), and that the fact of having to adapt to the changes has slower the learning process. 

Also it could create a gap between students who come from a wealthier and poorer families, specially in large families, where not every kid has his own device to attend to class correctly ,or maybe the device is not modern enough to access to some programs. This creates a difference between kids with a lot of facilities and other without them.

On the other hand, it is helping some students to set up routines of study, they are becoming more independent, organized and also they are realizing what study methods work the best for them. All those are essential skills for students, but apparently, most of the students are not used to do those stuffs.

Moreover, they are acquiring a much higher sense of responsibility and sensibility about their futures.

Furthermore, students and teachers are improving their technological skills, they use programs such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which are really important.

All in all, this extreme situation is producing extreme cases. Some students are benefiting from the situation meanwhile others are ending up adversely affected. Hopefully next year things will calm down and we will be prepare for any circumstance.

Is the CORONA VIRUS really the solution to CLIMATE CHANGE?(QUARANTINE: DAY 11)

COVID-19 is being devastating against us, especially for elderly people. It is killing many persons not just in Spain but in the whole world, the cypher of deaths is too high and we don´t even know the real world ´s cypher due that the misinformation of some governments and the inability to know the effect in underdeveloped countries. A measure that has been taken is the quarantine, which has reduced the number of infected people and it´s helping to slow down and decrease the curve of the pandemic.

This quarantine is key for the solution of this problem and we have to respect it and be solidary, and if we are given freedom to go outside we must be sensible and be aware of the risk that it is for us and for other people.

This quarantine is being as I said good for ourself, but also for our planet. While we are being quarantined the global pollution has decreased dramatically due that people are not using cars and staying at home. Not using the car has reduce a lot the amount of CO2 that is released to the atmosphere and has made the air quality in the cities much better, it has also cleared the sky of big cities providing photographs that show a shocking difference.  Also, the factories have slowed down their production because of the people staying at home and most flyings have been cancelled.
Many animals have returned to their habitats now that human action has stoped and we can even see them in urbane areas. Furthermore, water quality has improved.


This improvement on  our environment in just one month has made a big difference. And we are hoping some of these new habits will remain when COVID-19´s quarantine finishes. We must learn something from this tough experience and maybe some people will keep in mind this progress and use less their cars, recycle and do the shopping conscientiously.

To put it in a nut shell, the quarantine is helping us and our planet. We mustn´t be childish and respect it staying at home. Moreover we should use this time to think about the planet and how can we stop climate change.

Too skinny for the catwalk

Fashion industry is everywhere; social media, magazines, tv or on the streets. And it is represented by their models, that over the years have set the trends and have been the image of the perfect body. So this obviously has influenced people,  making them want to have those bodies and look like those models. But, is the fashion industry realistic?

On the one hand, the fashion industry has settle a canon of beauty where not everyone can fit in. Bodies very exercised and other factors that depend of the complexion and cannot be changed with exercise such as being tall, the color of your eyes, etc..
 For women it is even more specific than for men because it also talks about facial features such as having a small nose, full lips, feminine face,  and sometimes make girls think they need plastic surgery or botox.
Another thing is the amount of people that trying to fit put at risk their own health, by starving themselves in order to loose weight, doing extreme diets or diets they find on the internet that are not validated by any expert and could cause a deficit of some nutrients.
Also mental health is  affected, people are too hard with themselves and think they are not enough, also it can lead them to suffer from anorexia or body dysmorphia.
Models also struggle with this cannon, and very often they are told by their agencies to loose a little more of weigh for some jobs even when they are perfectly fine. This is dangerous thinking that the normal age for starting modeling is between 13 and 16 (18 is considered very late) and at those ages they are not aware of what they are asked and they don´t know how to say no.

On the other hand fashion industry is slowly changing. They are diversifying their models, introducing more plus sized models and more colored people to the industry. Last year the "Angels of Vectoria´s secret" catwalk was cancelled for this reason, it wasn´t "diverse" enough and the public complained a lot on social media and stopped watching it ,so at the end the company lost money and had to cancel the catwalk.
People are talking about those issues on social media and making changes, because they want to be represented too and see more types of body with which they can relate. For example, the movement of "body positivity"wants to demonstrate that plus sized models are equally beautiful.

To sum up, fashion industry should be more open and diversify their models so everybody feels included.