The Mindset Mentor - How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

Do you ever feel like social media steals your joy? In today’s episode, I’ll break down the neuroscience behind comparison, explain why your brain is wired to do it, and share practical ways to stop letting it sabotage your happiness. The Mindset Mentor™ podcast is designed for anyone desiring motivation, direction, and focus in life.     Past guests of The Mindset Mentor include: - Tony Robbins   - Matthew McConaughey   - Jay Shetty   - Andrew Huberman   - Lewis Howes   - Gregg Braden   - Rich Roll   - Dr. Steven Gundry    

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button, so you never miss another podcast episode. If you're out there and you love this podcast, do me a quick favor. Share it with one person today. That's it, just one person. It'll pay back and allow us to be able to grow and help more people across this world, which is really all I'm trying to do.

So if you do that, I'd greatly appreciate it. Today, we're going to be talking about comparison. We're going to be talking about how to stop comparing yourself to others. And I'm also going to be teaching you the neuroscience of what actually happens inside of your brain when you compare yourself to other people and why you feel the way that you feel. And there is a reason that Theodore Roosevelt's quote, comparison is the thief of joy, is still quoted almost 100 years later. It wasn't just he was trying to be poetic in some sort of way.

is actually describing a real psychological and neurological trap that is built inside of the human circuitry. And we all fall into it. I don't think there's a person that can just completely get out of the trap of comparison to other people. And so we fall into it many different ways. We scroll through Instagram or TikTok or YouTube for 10 minutes and then suddenly you are less successful than some 25 year old dude who just sold a startup for $45 billion and now you feel like a loser. You're maybe less adventurous than that influencer that's over in Italy right now and then she's going to be in Patagonia hiking for the next two weeks after that. You're also, you know, chunky and less fit than the 48-year-old dude who has an eight-pack. And, you know, you're less

together than that couple who's posting all of their hashtag fit couple dinners and goals and all of that stuff. And so then you close the app and you don't feel inspired. You feel smaller. You feel like shit, you feel behind. You feel like you're not enough in some sort of way. And that's really the paradox of it all is, is you could be thrilled with your life before you open up that app. You can feel grateful, you can feel content, you can feel fulfilled. And then 10 minutes later, after going online, you just don't feel good. You feel like you're in this hole, this deep, dark hole of inadequacy. Why is that? Well, it comes down to basically the way that our brains are wired. I want to talk to you about the neuroscience behind comparison. So why is it this way when you look at the brain? Well,

if you dive into the actual neuroscience of comparison, you've heard me say this before, but our brains are designed to keep us alive. It doesn't care about your happiness. It doesn't care about your joy. It cares about your safety. And your brain, in order to keep you safe, is a prediction and survival machine. And so at its core, it thinks inside of your head unconsciously, where do I stand in the tribe? That's it. Where do I stand in the tribe? Because 50,000 years ago, when our ancestors were living in tribes, our ancestors' survival literally depended on if we could be at the tribe. If we were kicked out of the tribe, there is pretty much no way to survive on a room. So if you were slower than other people in the tribe, well, you might be the guy that was left

behind, the one that the wolf would get to. If you had fewer resources and everybody else, you might not get a mate. So your brain basically evolved over time to create a system that neurologists call a social comparison mechanism. It is a built-in radar that is constantly scanning your environment. Am I above this person or am I below this person? Am I safe or am I at risk? Am I going to be accepted or am I going to be kicked out of the tribe? And this radar lives in brain regions like the ventral striatum in your brain in the medium prefront medial prefrontal cortex and those parts of your brain will light up when you compare yourself to other people and so if you happen to see somebody and you're like oh I'm farther ahead than this person your brain will release dopamine

which is the feel good chemical that's like oh look at me I'm better than this person oh look at me I'm better than that person but if you see somebody else who is way further than you and you feel quote unquote behind or they make more money or they seem happier or they're traveling to more beautiful places your brain will release cortisol which is a stress hormone so in other words your brain will actually reward you for doing better than other people and it will punish you for falling short the problem though you're running software that's 50,000 years old but instead of comparing yourself to 30 people like you used to when it was like 25 530 people in your tribe, 500,000 years ago, whatever it was, you're now comparing yourself to

7 billion people on a screen. And 99.9% of them, you probably don't even know. And so no wonder why you feel like crap, because you're comparing yourself to every person alive versus the 30 people that are in your tribe. Like, I remember a couple years ago when I took a big step back from social media and I woke up one day, and this is probably three and a half years ago at this point, I woke up one day. It was quiet. It was a beautiful day. It was before we had the baby. So I had so much time to do whatever I wanted, right? And it was just beautiful morning. I remember I went out to my living room and I did a meditation and I got a cup of coffee. And I was outside drinking my cup of coffee and I was watching the sunrise. It was an amazing day. And then a little bit later,

I felt like complete shit. And it was like my attitude was completely off track. I felt like a loser. And I was like, I don't feel good. And so I had to bring my way. I always try to become aware of what's going on when I feel something shift. And I bring my awareness and I'm like, why am I feeling this way? Like what did I just do over the past hour? And what was I just thinking? And I try to become aware and actually self-diagnose. And I realized that I was on social media for about 15 minutes. I picked up my phone while I was outside. I was having a great day. And I was scrolling through and I was watching a friend of mine who's an awesome person who's 10 years younger than I am, talk about his business, and his business was doing better than my business. And even though

my business was crushing it and we were doing amazing, I looked at him and I was like, but he's a little bit ahead of me. And he's 10 years younger than me. And I felt like shit. So I started researching like, why is this happening? Like, why can't I be happy for him and be happy for myself? Why can't I just allow myself to be grateful for where I am? And I started researching this comparison mechanism in our brain and why I felt so behind and it was like oh the reason why is because when I started comparing myself to him unconsciously my brain felt behind my brain released cortisol cortisol is a stress hormone now that's why I feel like shit that is why I'm so stressed out and this is how social media actually hijacks your joy because when you're looking at somebody's pictures and you're looking at

somebody's reels and you're looking at somebody else's stories you're looking at their highlight reels of their life. Like, I very rarely see somebody post just a random day. Like, usually they're posting the best one percent of their life. Their vacations, their winds, they're smiling selfies. And your brain interprets their highlights, their top one percent of the moments in their life as normal life for them. And then so you're comparing it to your normal life where your kids are breaking down in the middle of, you know, grocery store. And you're like, well, I'm not on vacation in Hawaii right now. Their normal is vacation in Hawaii.

My normal is my two-year-old likes throwing stuff on the floor. So you're comparing highlight reels and thinking that it's normal. Another reason why it kills your joys because there's this infinite scroll that you can just, you can, I've never gotten to the end of a scroll before. Have you? And I don't think so. And so unlike your small tribe that you would have grown up in, there's no end. You can always find somebody who is.

richer, who is fitter, who looks better than you, who's happier, who's more successful. And that's what you're going to find when you're going through this infinite scroll. Another thing is that platforms like to actually bait you and give you content that is designed to trigger envy to actually keep you scrolling. Because when you get stressed, you want to then, like when you feel cortisol and you get stressed, what do you want to do? You want to numb that stress. And what do people usually do to numb their stress? Continue to keep scrolling. So every time you scroll, your social comparison radar in your brain fires, and you're unconsciously ranking yourself.

They make more money. They travel more than I do. Their kids look better than mine do. They look happier than I am. They're further along in their business than I am. And even if you're a happy, grateful, content person, your brain recalibrates baseline, not off of what is baseline and normal in your life, but what you think is baseline. in other people's lives, which is really just their highlight reels. And this is really important

to understand because now your success, your happiness feels smaller and it makes it harder to feel joy in your life. You were meant to compare yourself to only one other person, which I'll talk about just a minute, not compare yourself to every single person that's alive. And the crazy part is that you don't even know what's real on social media. Like, I know people who I have seen the relationships in the gutter and they post about how amazing the relationship is. I know people who are making no money trying to tell people that they are doing amazing and renting Ferraris to try to sell their services to you so that you can be as quote unquote rich as them. I have a friend who is in the house. I won't name any names, but you'll probably be able to figure out out. I have a friend who is

in the house of a now very famous influencer that recorded a very famous video inside of a garage next to a Lamborghini that was not his and started selling courses about how to make money. And people bought courses like crazy from him because they saw a Lamborghini, which was not his, that they thought was his. And they went, well, he's got a Lamborghini. I'm going to buy from him. Completely fabricated. There's a couple of brothers that I've seen that are in, they have YouTube and Instagram and all that stuff. And they're these two brothers and they do these crazy trips. and they spend like $500,000 to go to F1, and their lives just look amazing and insane, right?

Super successful in their mid-20s. I was like, man, these guys are crushing it. I was thinking like, these guys are like really, really crushing it. What happened? They got arrested for drug charges. They were drug dealers. Ha, isn't that interesting? So they were selling this course on how to grow an online drop-shipping store

because they were doing so well in there supposedly, and they were showing how amazing their life was, and they all came from this drop-shipping store, but they were actually high-level drug dealers, trying to teach people how to grow their online drop-shipping stores. Almost nothing online is real. Stop letting it kill your joy. And so the problem with all of this is that we're comparing apples to oranges.

We're comparing your behind-the-scenes, your bills, your stress, your messy kitchen, to someone else's highlight. real. You're comparing your chapter five in life to somebody else's chapter 20. You're comparing your business to a friend's business forgetting that they've been doing it longer than you. Their goals are different. Their industry might be different. Their timeline might be completely different. Neurologically, though, your brain does not care. It just sees there ahead, I'm behind danger, release cortisol. And that danger signals the amygdala, the brain's threat detector, to raise your cortisol levels and hijacked logical thinking, and that's why comparison doesn't

just feel bad, but it also clouds your judgment and also kills your gratitude as well. And so when you look at this, it's really important to understand there's two different types of comparison, okay? Number one is upward comparison and number two is downward comparison. This was originally brought in by the, it's called the social comparison theory in 1954 by a social psychologist named Leon Festinger. And humans evaluate themselves by comparing themselves to others. Upward comparison, downward comparison. Upward comparison is looking people who are quote unquote above you, more successful, more attractive, more wealthy. And that can motivate you to be better or it can crush you because you make yourself not feel as good. Then there's also downward

comparison, which is looking at people who are quote unquote below you, which can boost your ego, but it can also lead to guilt because of the fact that you're like, why I might compare myself to these other people. So neither one of them is good. And we'll talk about downward comparison in a minute. But the real danger, the one that will really kind of throw you off track is upward comparison. Because it can't, it can motivate you in some sort of way. But most people, it doesn't motivate them. It makes them feel like complete shit. And then it starts to erode their own identity. Because you start comparing yourself to someone else instead of asking yourself like, am I fulfilled? Am I happy with my life? Do I have a good life? And try and

to build a happy and fulfilled life, and now you start asking yourself instead, am I as good as them? And that shift is what is killing your joy. It takes your North Star out of it, which should be your own personal goals and what you're building and trying to build your own personal, fulfilling life. And instead of being my goals, my fulfilling life, it's like, am I better than this person? That's not how we want to be running our lives. So the only real fair comparison is that that you have to compare yourself to who you were yesterday. That's the only one that you could do. That's the only apples to apples measurement that's available

because you share the same genetics and background and experiences and circumstances as your old self. That's it. That is the only fair comparison. So are you kinder to yourself than you were yesterday? Did you grow 1% in patience or skill or discipline or business? did you face some sort of fear that you were trying to avoid? If the answer is yes to any of those, you're winning, period, you're getting better.

And from a neurological perspective, this shift rewires your reward system. So instead of dopamine only spiking when you beat somebody else or when you're better than somebody else, it spikes over and over and over again when you beat your past self, which is awesome because now you're competing with your past self. And that's sustainable joy. So when you beat yourself and you're better than you were yesterday, you become happier. Tony Robbins always says it, progress equals happiness. Humans want to grow.

They want to continue to get better. And so when you can compare yourself to yourself yesterday, a week ago, 30 days ago, and you see that you're a little bit happier, a little bit clearer skin, a little bit fitter, a little bit better, a little bit better, your relationship is a little bit better. Oh my gosh, you're going to start feeling amazing when you're comparing yourself to your old self. And so let's talk about real quickly, like how to, rewire your brain against comparison against other people. The first thing, I don't know how many times

I need to say this in the podcast, but you got to practice some sort of digital hygiene, some sort of digital detox, like unfollow the accounts that make you feel like crap, like that trigger your envy, not your inspiration. And set timers for app limits to protect your attention. If you're really over it, just delete them for 30 days and see how your life feels after 30 days. So that's the first thing. The second thing, is I want you to journal two things every single day. The first one is some daily gratitude. Just jot down three things that you're grateful for in the morning. This gratitude practice will actually

literally strengthen the neural pathways in your brain for joy. Just write down three things that you love about your life in the morning. The next thing is you want to journal through is micro wins from yesterday. Track tiny daily improvements like more patience, another workout, a small business win, patience when your child was yelling, maybe showing up in a loving way versus a judgmental way, that will reward your brain for growth over comparison to other people. So that's the second thing. The third thing is to start to compare yourself, if you do compare yourself to other people who are further ahead, compare yourself with, not against. So instead of

thinking like this person is ahead of me, start thinking they show me what's possible. like the mirror neurons in your brain will treat their success as potential fuel for you. You'll say they can do it, I can do it. They're showing me what's possible in my industry. So compare with versus against them. And then try to anchor yourself in enoughness. Like ask yourself if I had nobody compared to. Would I be satisfied in my life right now?

And if the answer is yes, that's amazing. That's joy speaking before your comparison hijacks it. And so your joy isn't scarce. It's not a scarce resource. Your happiness doesn't need to shrink because somebody else is happy. Your success doesn't, your success in life doesn't dim because somebody else has succeeded. Our comparison is a thief of joy because it tells you that life is a race. Life is not a race. It is a art project. And the only project that you'd be working on is one canvas. And the only canvas that you can work on is your own life. So the only measurement that you can look at is, okay, is my canvas more beautiful than it was yesterday? And if the answer is yes, you're winning

and that's the only thing that counts. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on the Instagram stories, tag me in at Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And if you're out there and you want to learn more about working with me outside of the podcast, I have other ways of coaching with me. You can go to coach with rob.com once you can coach with rob.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. make it your mission to make somebody else's day better i appreciate you and i hope that you have an amazing day