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Career FOMO among women: Are LinkedIn posts fuelling work anxiety? UAE experts explain
UAE experts say social comparison can sometimes be useful, but it becomes harmful when another person’s achievement is interpreted as evidence of personal failure
- PUBLISHED: Sat 15 Aug 2026, 4:26 PM UPDATED: Sat 15 Aug 2026, 5:23 PM
The pressure to keep moving up the career ladder is leaving many ambitious women questioning whether they are progressing quickly enough, even when their careers are firmly on track.
From comparing promotions and leadership appointments on LinkedIn to feeling guilty about switching off after work, career “FOMO”, the fear of missing out professionally, can turn ambition into a constant feeling of being behind. Experts say the problem is not ambition itself, but the tendency to measure personal progress against other people’s visible milestones.
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Lule Bunjaku Karapinar, CEO of GCC Markets and Executive Education at LEORON Institute, said career FOMO often appears as the feeling that a person “should be further ahead,” whether that means having a bigger title, an international position, a board seat or the next promotion.
“For ambitious women, there can also be a sense that time is limited and every decision carries greater weight, particularly when career aspirations intersect with family, personal responsibilities and expectations around what success should look like,” she said.
The risk, she added, is making career decisions because of the feeling of falling behind rather than because an opportunity is genuinely the right fit.
Comparison vs career dissatisfaction
Feeling behind can almost become part of ambition itself, said Rehana Meghani, clinical and organisational psychologist at Connect Psychology Dubai.
“The goalposts keep moving because that’s what ambition does — it keeps generating the next target before you’ve caught your breath from the last one,” she said.
Social comparison can sometimes be useful, she explained, particularly when seeing someone else’s success inspires a person to set new goals. But it becomes harmful when another person’s achievement is interpreted as evidence of personal failure.
Social media can intensify that effect because people are generally exposed to a carefully selected version of someone else’s life.
“You’re comparing your full, messy behind-the-scenes to someone else’s edited trailer,” Meghani said.
She advises women to ask whether they would still feel dissatisfied with their career if they stopped seeing other people’s professional updates for a month.
If the answer is yes, the issue may be genuine dissatisfaction. If the feeling appears mainly after seeing another person’s promotion or milestone, it may be comparison-driven anxiety rather than a signal to change careers.
There is no perfect career timeline
Karapinar said there is no universal age or timeline for reaching a leadership position.
“Leadership is not an age or a title, and careers develop at very different speeds,” she said.
Rather than treating professional progression as a race, women should focus on developing the capabilities that will allow them to have a meaningful impact once they reach senior positions.
For those who feel their peers are progressing faster, she recommends looking at other careers for inspiration rather than using them as a measure of self-worth.
“Some of the most important career growth is invisible before it becomes visible,” she said. “A title is one milestone. Capability is what allows you to sustain the next ten.”
Karapinar, who has experienced her own career development alongside LEORON’s growth over the past 17 years, said she measures progress by asking whether she is still learning, contributing and moving in a direction that matters to her.
When ambition becomes burnout
The pressure to constantly achieve can also make ambitious professionals particularly vulnerable to burnout.
Meghani said many ambitious women carry perfectionist expectations and an internalised belief that rest must be earned.
At the same time, professional responsibilities can overlap with what she described as the “second shift” — household management, childcare or caring for aging parents.
“Recovery time gets absorbed by care work rather than actual rest,” she said.
Women in senior positions can also face additional workplace pressures, including having to repeatedly demonstrate competence while simultaneously being expected to remain warm and collaborative.
Karapinar said burnout often begins before a person reaches the point where they can no longer work.
Warning signs can include becoming less curious, becoming disproportionately irritated by small problems, struggling to switch off and finding that achievements feel more like obligations than successes.
“Ambitious people are particularly good at overriding these signals because they can continue performing for quite some time,” she said.
Is being always available really ambition?
Technology has also blurred the distinction between responsiveness and productivity.
Karapinar said being constantly connected can create the impression that committed employees should always be available, even though some of the most valuable work, including thinking, prioritising and decision-making, requires uninterrupted time.
Meghani said women can protect their boundaries by establishing expectations early.
“If you reply to emails at 11pm in your first few months, that becomes the baseline expectation,” she said.
She recommends practical measures such as switching off notifications outside working hours, turning off read receipts and clearly communicating expected response times.
The key, she said, is to view boundaries as part of ambition rather than as evidence of reduced commitment.
“Boundary-setting is a core ambition skill,” she said. “It’s what lets you sustain high performance over a career instead of burning bright for two years and flaming out.”
Success beyond the job title
Both experts said sustainable ambition requires a broader definition of success.
For Karapinar, success earlier in a career may be measured through titles, salaries, larger teams or prestigious opportunities. Over time, however, the definition can become more about influence, learning, meaningful relationships and whether the work feels worthwhile.
“As a working mother, I am always juggling between home life and work,” she said. “I don’t think you ever reach a point where everything is perfectly balanced.”
Instead, she focuses on understanding what needs her attention at a particular moment, setting priorities and accepting that those priorities can change.
Meghani said sustainable ambition should mean being judged by the quality and impact of one’s work rather than by how visibly available a person is.
For employers, she said, that requires changing what is rewarded. If promotions continue to favor employees who are visibly online at all times, individual boundary-setting will be difficult to sustain.
Leaders, she added, can help by modeling healthier behavior including logging off, delaying non-urgent messages and openly respecting boundaries.
“Sustainable ambition isn’t ambition turned down,” Meghani said. “It’s ambition without the assumption that burnout is the toll you have to pay for it.”
Arwa Almazrouei is an Arabic editor passionate about storytelling and journalism, and creating impactful content that highlights culture, society, and the inspirational.