A shared universe › Blog › When you compare yourself with others · Español
To stop comparing yourself so much with others, it helps first to notice when you are doing it and then to change the yardstick: looking at yourself a while ago instead of at someone else today. Comparing is so automatic that we hardly notice we are doing it. You see someone else’s life and yours seems less: less accomplished, less happy, less of everything.
The psychologist Leon Festinger explained it in his theory of social comparison, published in 1954: we compare ourselves with other people to find out how we are doing and how good we are at things. It is not a flaw. It is the way we get our bearings.
The problem starts when comparison stops helping us get our bearings and becomes a way of judging ourselves.
Later studies distinguish two directions. Comparing yourself with someone who seems to be doing better can spur you on, but it often leaves you feeling you fall short. Comparing yourself with someone who is doing worse brings relief for a moment, but changes nothing about your own life. Both have the same drawback: they put the yardstick outside you.
A large 2018 meta-analysis covering more than sixty years of research found two things that help to make sense of this. First, when nothing threatens us, we tend to look upwards, at people who are doing better. Second, the most common reaction is contrast. If the other person seems better, we see ourselves as worse; if they seem worse, we see ourselves as better. That is why always looking upwards, which is what we do most, tends to leave us feeling below.
On social media we compare our whole life, bad days included, with other people’s best moments, chosen and touched up. It is a comparison you cannot win.
In a 2017 study of almost seven hundred young people, those who spent more time scrolling without taking part made more upward comparisons, and those comparisons went with lower self-esteem and lower well-being. The authors point out that an earlier study found something similar. The data come from a single point in time, so they do not prove that social media is the cause, but they do suggest where the unease creeps in.
A simple way to check this for yourself is to notice how you feel after a while of scrolling. If you come away feeling worse, you could try cutting that time short, or writing and replying more than just looking.
If it is hard to see when you compare yourself, you could try writing it down every time for a week: with whom, about what and how you felt afterwards. A pattern often appears, a few people and a few topics, and knowing that lets you choose where to put less attention.
Behind a lot of comparison there is a very harsh inner voice that never finds what you do good enough. It helps to notice the tone you use with yourself when you compare, and to ask whether you would speak like that to someone you love.
Treating yourself with the same kindness you show others is studied under the name of self-compassion, and it has nothing to do with feeling sorry for yourself.
If the feeling of being worth less than others is with you almost every day, takes away your wish to do things or comes with a sadness that won’t lift, it is worth talking to your GP or a psychologist. Asking for help with something like this is not an overreaction.
In A shared universe nobody shows their best photo. Each star is what a person is really carrying, and reading them you see that almost all of us are carrying something.
If you like, you can light your own with “What weighs on me”, without names and without anyone knowing who you are, and let other people keep it company with a tap or a few words.