Original studyFrontiers in Psychology, 2026Read the paper →
For competitive gamers, the screen is the playing field, the training ground, and the place where teammates meet. Constant team chats, rankings, and game updates can make it hard to switch off, and earlier research has usually tied this kind of technology-related stress to lower well-being. A new survey of esports players in Turkey points to a more complicated picture.
Researchers at Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University, Erciyes University, and three other Turkish universities surveyed people who had trained or competed in esports within the previous year. The study appears in Frontiers in Psychology. Players were reached through a single esports centre in Kayseri Province, and 399 of the 500 people invited returned complete answers to an online questionnaire.
All were aged 18 or over, almost half were aged 18 to 22, and about 70% were men. The most common main games were League of Legends and Counter-Strike 2, followed by Valorant, PUBG, and Rainbow Six Siege. About half had four to six years of esports experience.
Digital stress here covered the strain of being constantly available, worrying about approval from others, fearing being left out, coping with too many messages, and keeping watch on what happens online. Fear of missing out is the nagging sense that others are having rewarding experiences without you, along with the urge to stay connected. Life satisfaction is a person’s general judgement of how their life is going, measured on a widely used five-item scale.
As expected, players with more digital stress reported much more fear of missing out, a strong link. The surprise was the direction of the link with life satisfaction: both digital stress and fear of missing out were weakly tied to slightly higher, not lower, life satisfaction. Much of the earlier research in other groups has found the opposite.
The team then tested whether fear of missing out could statistically account for the link between digital stress and life satisfaction. Once fear of missing out was in the model, digital stress showed no direct link of its own, and a small indirect link through fear of missing out appeared. Its significance was borderline, however: the first analysis’s interval just excluded zero, but a repeat of the same test included it.
The two questionnaires also overlap. Four of the 24 digital stress items closely match four of the 10 fear of missing out items, and further checks found the two measures closely related, though statistically distinguishable. Leaving out the shared items barely changed the size of the indirect link.
The authors suggest that for esports players, time online brings pressure but also friendship, achievement, and belonging, which may explain the unusual pattern; these explanations were not measured. The study has clear limits. It captured a single point in time, relied on self-report, drew a convenience sample from one centre, did not adjust for age, gender, or experience, and did not separate professional from casual players.
Studies of technostress and social media use have generally linked digital pressure and fear of missing out to poorer well-being. This survey suggests the pattern may differ among competitive gamers, although the effects were small and need checking in studies that follow players over time.
