The Psychology of your 20s - 189. 5 ways to stop comparing yourself to others

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

Social comparison is the thief of joy - it will make us question everything that we have, doubt our own abilities, steal our sense of gratitude and peace. It also sometimes feels impossible to escape, especially in our 20s when we look to others for confirmation that we are doing something right. In today's episode we break down the 5 rules you need to stop comparing yourself to others and embrace the benefits of healthy social comparison, this includes:  Don't unfollow, don't suppress, recognise and expand Keep your judgements realistic  Do things for YOU first Water your own grass  Comparison as a motivator  Listen now to learn how you can control your urge to compare yourself to others!  Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg  Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, break down the psychology of our 20s. Now, there are a lot of things that cause us, I would say, a great deal of stress and unhappiness in our 20s. And a lot of it is beyond our control. This is naturally

a decade where we feel extremely lost. Things are very much up in the air. But I would say a fair amount of our occasional misery and our self-doubt comes down to things that we can change when we kind of examine our mindset and how we trade ourselves and how we acknowledge our wins, our successes, our best attributes. What we're talking about today is self-comparsion, namely why it is that social comparison steals so much joy from us, but also how we can learn to stop tearing ourselves down by constantly measuring ourselves against others, by constantly looking at their careers, at their relationships, at their clothes, their body, their success, their financial situation, and feeling like we are lacking. I think comparison is one of those really hard

parts about being human, right? I find it so fascinating that as a species we have all the critical thinking skills in the world, we can solve some of humanity's greatest problems. Our brains quite literally contain millions of neural connections. And yet we choose to use them in ways that hurt our own feelings in ways that harm us more than they benefit us. And one of those ways is by constantly comparing ourselves to others and coming up short, it's like self-imposed psychological torture in so many ways. But on another level, sometimes we don't feel like we can stop. We just never feel good enough. And so we use social comparison to reinforce that, perhaps as a form of self-sabotage. If our self-esteem is already in the dumps, we sometimes do things that don't serve us because

we think that we deserve to feel bad. We do things like procrastinating or binge drinking or self-isolating or looking into the lives of other people and fantasizing about how much better things would be if we were more like them. I think this just perpetuates the cycle and it steals a lot of our joy. We're particularly prone to this in our 20s of course because our identity already feels quite unstable and there is a great deal of insecurity amongst people in this generation and insecurity that stems from uncertainty about the future and uncertainty about our place in this world. From an evolutionary perspective, some psychologists would also argue that we actually have an innate

tendency to compare ourselves to others because in this way we learn what we might be doing wrong, but also how to fit in. So in that way, it serves this social purpose. Now, this idea was first introduced back in the 1950s by a social psychologist known as Leon Fessinger. If you are a bit of a psychology geek or a trivia master, you'll recognize that name because he is also responsible for the term cognitive dissonance. But Leon, he assumed that back when we roamed the savannah in tribes, when we were mere hunter-gatherers, comparing ourselves to others, conferred a survival advantage by providing information about our relative position within a group. As a result, this helped us assess what kind of resources we had access to, how we were kind of like squaring up

compared to others, what other people had that we lacked. It also helped us conform because we could look and observe how others were behaving and adapt our own behavior accordingly, meaning that we were less likely to be kicked out of the group because we were doing everything right, because we were basing our behavior on the norm that we saw projected by others. So we were more likely to be accepted. We were more likely to learn from other people in the group. And we were more likely to essentially survive. In that way, I think that social comparison also acted as a form of validation and personal reassurance, both back in the day and also these days, right? Like, if, you're If Wendy from down the street is wearing double denim and I am too, well, I must be doing

something right. Or at least I have like an ally in this. We re-assure ourselves that we're not doing anything that's too ghastly or too against what people expect from us. Or, you know, if your good friend Dave, like took a gap here and still ended up with a great job, by comparing yourself to him, you feel like you can do that as well. We use others as an example to assure us that we are on the right path, that what we are doing will be accepted because somebody else is doing it, but also we use social comparison as a form of aspiration and sometimes even motivation. I think regardless of the purpose, there might be some quote unquote benefits. It can also make us feel pretty horrific when it goes untamed.

I think also compared to our ancestors, which is what Leon Festinger based his theory on, right, we now have so many more opportunities to compare, compared to those people back then. We are exposed to, firstly, just a lot more people in our communities and in our environment compared to the small tribes that he was operating his beliefs on. And we also have social media, which means that at any stage, you can jump online and find the perfect example of somebody who is going to make you feel. feel bad about yourself. So for the most part, it can really give rise to a lot of feelings of jealousy or competition, which ends up harming our relationships and sadly how we treat ourselves and how we

treat others. It can make us feel a lot less grateful for what we do have because someone out there in the world is always going to have more. And as a result, we never feel quite satisfied because we're in this habitual spiral of chronic comparison. It is the classic idea that the grass is always greener on the other side. That is a tailor's oldest time, but something that I think contains an equal amount of truth is that the grass is actually greener where you water it. The ultimate kind of antidote to social comparison is feeling confident enough in what you're building and what you're doing and spending more time nurturing these parts of you than being distracted by other people's progress. That is something I'm definitely working on in my own life, but I'm also learning

that when social comparison is used wisely, it can also be used to our advantage. If we switch from using social comparison as a form of like self-sabotage and trying to hurt our own feelings to an opportunity to really take stock of our lives and what we're actually grateful for, but also what we want to improve, sometimes it's rather useful. So today we're going to talk about five tips I have for controlling the temptation to compare, how to stop comparing yourself to others, or maybe more. A better way to put that is how to keep the parts of social comparison that benefit you and say goodbye to the other aspects. So we have a lot to talk about today, a lot to cover. Of course, a lot of fascinating psychology.

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alone. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The easiest way to let something control you is to ignore it and suppress it. I think any time we try too hard to not do something to, you know, keep our hands behind our back,

that just really hands over the microphone and it amplifies our insecurities. Because we feel like that if we were to set this thing free, if we were to allow ourselves to compare ourselves to others as much as we want, it would give it all the power and we are so scared of that reality that we actually end up focusing more on the possibility of that happening as a result. So what we really didn't want to happen becomes inevitable because we avoided it for too long and we gave it power over ourselves. It might sound counterintuitive, but if you want to reduce the negative effects of social

comparison, you kind of have to give yourself permission to compare yourself to others whenever you would like. So this is rule one. Don't unfollow, don't suppress, accept your need to compare and expand on your comparison. So let me explain. I'm going to admit that in a past episode

I did on social comparison, I gave some advice that I no longer believe in, particularly in regards to social media. So I think this episode came out a couple years ago and at the time my advice was to unfollow the people who made you feel bad. That woman with the better body than you, with the lavish lifestyle, the millions of followers, the person who was traveling to the places that you really wanted to go to whilst you were

busy working your 9 to 5, if they trigger your social comparison, avoid it. Avoid exposure, unfollow, there we go, you're fixed. Your social comparison is no longer there because you're not experiencing it. I think I had a rather immature viewpoint back then, and I was trying to get the science to fit what I wanted to believe when honestly all the psychology really disagrees with me on that. Yes, there are some people you don't need to engage with on social media or in real life. But if you really want to gain power over your social comparison, you need to realize that these people are not a threat.

Their brilliance, their luck, their successes and your own are not mutually exclusive just because they're doing really well for themselves doesn't mean you can't feel good about what you have. If we unfollow anyone who makes us uncomfortable or who we feel jealous of, we end up in an echo chamber of only engaging with people who we don't see as a threat. And that really comes down to a classic form of avoidance, turning away from things that make us uncomfortable, instead of engaging with them and learning how to make them. and learning how to manage our feelings towards something that make us feel bad.

I think in that space, with this perspective, we give our social comparison the power that it wants, meaning that yes, we will inevitably be exposed to someone who is doing better than us, who is making more money than us, who is absolutely crushing it. Whatever it is, it just isn't a big deal anymore. I think suppressing a bad feeling doesn't lessen its sting. It doesn't make it go away. The root cause, which is most likely your sense of insecurity, is still there. It just makes us less prepared or emotionally strong to deal with feeling unpresent when inevitably this person will come along, right?

Like we just live behind a wall. We just never challenge ourselves. Instead, when you feel like there is that siren call to compare yourself, I'm going to say the thing that you probably least expect me to say, let yourself do it, but then expand on your comparison. For example, if you see someone on LinkedIn who just had a huge promotion and she's your age, you went to university together, her career is taken off, yours has kind of stalled. Yes, you can get upset. You can let yourself feel really shitty and assume that her success says something about

yours. But you can also add on to those judgments. So I'm going to give you a new example of what this sounds like. Adding on to our judgments that come from our need to compare basically shows us that our initial thought around what this person has that we don't is not the full picture. So for example, with this woman you see on LinkedIn, right? What you can say is this person is doing so well

and so am I. We just have different paths. I'm so jealous of what they're achieving. and I'll get there one day as well. I wish I had what she had. And it's great because I already have so much, so I'm so close. Her body is like so amazing and so beautiful. And so is mine.

How amazing. The reason this works is that you don't scold yourself for comparing and therefore make it feel taboo or give it power. You just make your judgments more nuanced and you don't let them only take on a negative spin. On that note of LinkedIn and career comparison, let's talk about why social comparison seems to be impacting us so much more nowadays. Social media means that we are experiencing an insane level of information overload,

whereby at any moment, you can be exposed to the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. All you have to do is open your phone and you are going to see a highlight reel of everybody's lives, all the things that they know will get them likes, all the pictures that will match their aesthetic. It really warps our sense of what is normal, especially because social media was built to be performative. And when we get so much about information about the world, about trends, about what we should be doing, about what's cool, from social media, that means that our view of what is normal becomes quite skewed. So that brings me to rule number two. Keep your judgments realistic.

I know I sound like a broken record, but truly from somebody who does this themselves, I'll admit it, everything you see online is curated. Everything I post online, I think about a million times. I'm not posting like the random screenshots of like where my Uber is. I'm not posting like the photo I took of my Wi-Fi password. on like the back of the modem or like all the rubbish that I need to get collected. Even the videos you see of people who are complaining or tired or sad or going through a breakup or a setback, whatever it is, that is still not the full picture and it's often very strategic because we know that that kind of content, that vulnerable content, draws people in,

but it's still not real. It's still not the full picture. In that way we often comparing ourselves to a reality that doesn't even exist, not even for the person who was advertising it as such. It's why I'm such a big fan of those influencers or those pages that do post the unposed gym shots, who do post their messy homes, and their unblemished skin, and they're just everyday life. I think it's so comforting to see somebody who was breaking like the fourth wall of the internet, who was literally looking at you and going, this is not real. This is not real. None of this is real. And yet, you are basing your perceptions of your own life on someone else's sugar-coded version that they post online. Even in our real lives, even in like our everyday

interactions with people, no one is coming out and saying exactly how they were feeling. No one is fessing up to half of the emotions that they're trying to manage. their insecurities, you know, the time that they spend alone, the fears, the doubts, the fights, I just think that it's good to remind yourself that it's not the truth. Keep that in mind. This brings me to rule number three, do things for you first, and sometimes for you only. Unhealthy social comparison can be a huge time-waster because it makes us doubt our own decisions and our path and therefore kind of keeps us in this loop.

us stuck because we spend so much time thinking about what other people are thinking rather than actually just doing. I think that comes from this weird realization we have that the fact that we are comparing ourselves to others means that people are comparing themselves to us and they're measuring themselves up against our actions and our lives. So we better put on a really good show, right? This makes us quite insecure, I think, because we want to impress them. So we get stuck in trying to do things perfectly or according to what we think others want or will find aesthetic or attractive or worthwhile. And a lot of that stems from a sense of self-doubt that if we were to come out and just do what we would want to do to be authentic, that that might not be accepted.

I like to use the example of choosing an outfit in the morning, right? Like not a huge risk, not a huge task, not groundbreaking. If you didn't think about what others were thinking or didn't pay much attention to, how they might be comparing themselves to you, you would wear whatever you wanted. You would pick up the first thing you saw, regardless of whether your top matched your pants, which matched your shoes. And if you were, you know, not thinking about other people's opinions, you would be ready out the door in five minutes. In contrast, if you are contemplating the judgments and the opinions of others trying to anticipate their thoughts and their feelings towards you, suddenly,

every choice takes on a whole new level of gravity. You start putting yourself in the mind of every person you walk past, the person that you're going to meet, the stranger your own age. The focus on what other people might be thinking about you makes every decision take so much longer. And it all derives from social comparison and realizing that there is this weird mind game going on between everybody where we're looking at others and they're looking at us trying to figure out what's cool, what's normal, what we should be doing. If you want to beat social comparison, go with your gut instinct. Don't fall into the game of thinking about what other people want from you. What do you want? If you want to post that photo on social media, that video, that TikTok,

don't question, just do it. You want to wear that outfit you like that you don't think is like trendy or stylish. Don't think. Just put it on. You want to buy those weird shoes because you really like them? Go ahead. You want to go to the gym in your sports bra. Even though your body doesn't look like hers or doesn't look like his or those shorts you think other people might have a problem with, feel the fear of judgment and do it anyway. People's opinions are their problem, not yours. If they want to spend their time and like, let's be honest, their finite, precious energy, making themselves feel better by looking at you and putting you down, that is their burden to bear. The antidote to social comparison is authenticity, and it's a muscle that you have to build.

Social comparison by nature asks us to converge to the norm to prevent sticking out as an outlier, to do what others are doing so that we're never the one sticking out in the crowd, we're never the one who's going to be judged. So the way to beat that is to do the absolute opposite. If there is something you want to do, do it. And you'll soon find that as you adjust to this new mindset, your urge to compare will start to fade. Because the information that you're getting from others' lives

and whether they're better or worse than yours, whether they're judging you, their opinions, it doesn't really matter anymore. It doesn't serve you because you're coming to the table with the perspective of I'm just going to do it. I'm just going to be the person I want to be. I'm going to act the way I want to act. This is who I am.

This is what I look like. This is what I'm doing. And, you know, nobody else's opinions are going to be a factor. They just don't matter. So rule four is very similar. It kind of falls onto the same category. It's about watering your own grass. And I know we just kind of spoke about that, so I'll keep it brief.

I think a lot of the time we get stuck in the comparison spiral because there is something that we are unhappy or secure about. And so when we look at somebody else's life, the fact that they do have the thing that we don't makes us feel worse and makes us experience a level of cognitive dissidents, right? Either we can tear somebody else down and therefore elevate our own way of doing things or we can feel worse about ourselves. what option off the top of your head do you think we're most likely to take? Obviously option A, because that is what protects our ego. That is what, you know, what protects our brain from feeling rejected, from feeling less than, from feeling hurt. So it's the path that keeps us safest. But knocking somebody else down is a really unhealthy defense mechanism.

Instead, I think that we should respond as your ideal self would. by seeing somebody else's successes, seeing their beautiful, amazing life, and deciding you can also experience that joy by doing something that's good for you. You know, if you see someone at a music festival or overseas or like surrounded by all of their amazing friends on the weekend, you can be sour about it,

and that is, of course, our natural inclination, or you can go and do something that you also enjoy instead of feeling miserable or weakened. When you fixate on what you don't have, you let it shape your life and you let it have power. And it makes you feel like you're quite powerless. You don't have agency over what's happening because you're seeing this other person who has everything that you want,

who has all the friends, who has the job, who has the clothes. And you think that you can't have that as well. And so that makes you quite frustrated and insecure and it makes you resent them. But when you water your own grass, when you shift back to what is going to make you happy, when you nurture your friendships, when you build your career, when you go outside and move your body, when you prioritize doing fun things on your weekends, you no longer feel threatened by what somebody else has because you realize that you can also create that life for yourself. So this brings me to our final fifth rule using comparison as a motivator rather than as a means to tear yourself down.

So something that we haven't spoken about yet is this distinction between upward and downward social comparison. So downward social comparison involves comparing oneself to others who are perceived as less fortunate or less successful as a way of boosting our own sense of self-esteem and providing almost a sense of relief. that we're better than this person, that when we are compared, we'll come out on top. It's honestly often unconscious and very shallow, and it gives us an immediate sense of satisfaction, but at the expense of somebody else, and it's going to fade away pretty quickly. This is the kind of social comparison that we engage in for self-enhancement's sake. On the other hand, upward social comparison involves comparing ourselves to those who we think are more successful or superior, quote unquote, in a particular domain, either because they are more successful, they're more attractive, they have a greater status, they have more money. This type of comparison is often what leads to feelings of inadequacy and envy, and it's really on the rise.

Upward Social Comparison is a lot more common. There's a few reasons why. Perhaps it's this fascination with like celebrity culture, the rise in like idolization of people who are very, very successful, and increasing competitiveness in our society. But Upward Social Comparison can also be very useful. It's a very powerful source of motivation. Think about it.

If you see somebody who has something that you want, that just serves as confirmation that this goal you have, this life, this achievement is possible. And instead of feeling bitter that you don't have it yet, you now have something to strive towards. You have somebody to learn from, to replicate, you have a vision for your future self. I think that this strategy is about turning the part of you that naturally wants to be jealous into someone who wants to feel inspired, who is a cheerleader for others. So in one study they found that when people were asked to speak about someone they admire in a positive light, in the days and even weeks afterwards, they became more productive and focused. Compared to the people who were asked to criticize people that they admired, they actually became less disciplined. In another kind of domain and other study, they wanted to look at this in regards to people who are recovering from eating disorders.

and the researchers found that the comparison effect was actually quite positive when people were exposed to individuals who were further along in their recovery journey because it was kind of driving self-improvement, especially amongst people who are particularly competitive, right? Obviously, we need to proceed with caution, especially in the case of a serious mental health condition that has a very high rate of relapse. But at the core of both of these studies is this method. that you can use your desire to compare to motivate you. You can use your desire to make yourself feel bad by looking at what somebody else has. You can use that as a catalyst to change yourself

and your own life. I've seen this personally. I think about this a lot when I think about like running content that I see on Instagram. I'm really getting back into running recently. It's something I used to love doing. I just kind of fell off the bandwagon. And I've been, of course, my algorithm has adjusted to this new interest. And it keeps showing me all these videos of people who are doing like, they are sinking miles. They were doing half marathons before they go to work in the morning and full marathons on weekends. And for a while, it actually left me feeling quite disappointed in myself. I kept being like, well, why am I not at that level? Why do I not have what they have? And I could unfollow.

I could say, like, well, if I was their size, if I'd been doing it for this long, I could do that as well. Oh, like they just, they're not working as hard as I am. So they have more time for this. I could say that. I could be in this kind of like sulky mindset. But what it would mean is that I would miss out on so many tips, so much inspiration, so much growth. Because they're doing the thing that I want to do. They're proof that I can get where I want to go.

So instead of looking at somebody else and feeling bad because you're not squaring up to what they have, just see it as a target. See it as confirmation that everything you want in your life is possible because they've done it. So I want to give you two final speed round tips. Firstly, despite all that we've talked about, sometimes we do still find ourselves feeling really shit about where we're at and thinking that we are behind, that we are failing, that we aren't. who we want to be, everyone else is better than us. You know, you get the picture. In those moments, I want you to immediately counteract that thought by saying five things that you're good at, or listing five things that you've accomplished this past week, this past month in your life.

You don't need to be humble. You have done amazing things. You've probably done a lot of really cool things. And when you hide them from yourself, when you spend too much time being self-deprecating or trying not to seem egotistical. Sometimes it's easy to forget. So when we see somebody else who is willing to be open about their accomplishments, we kind of forget that we might also be at that level. We're just not as willing to talk openly about it. Finally, remember that the person you're comparing yourself to

is probably doing the exact same thing to somebody else. There is somebody in their mind who is better than them. They are comparing themselves to that person. probably right now. That person may even be you. You have no idea what is going on internally in somebody else's mind. We often think we're the only person with doubts, with insecurity, when it actually is one of the most universal parts about being human. But when we get stuck in our heads and don't filter our experience through the lens of our humanity, it makes us feel more shame for something that is so normal. I want to remind you, there is not a person out there

there who does not have the same thoughts that you are having now. And if that person does exist, either they, like, came out of the womb at, like, the peak of spiritual enlightenment, or there is something very psychologically wrong with that person. Because what our social comparison stems from is an awareness of others and an awareness of where they're out in their lives, what they're doing. And that awareness is important for so many other things in our life, right? It's important for empathy.

it's important for connection, for inspiration. It's like two sides of the same coin, right? Being more socially conscious comes with a lot of perks, but it also means that we can be more self-conscious. So we have to learn how to treat it correctly. We have to learn to use it for its advantages and to not use it as a form of self-sabotage or a form of self-destruction whereby the only time we compare ourselves to others is just to make ourselves feel worse. You are a cool person. You are an interesting person. You are an intelligent, successful, beautiful person in your own right.

So don't let what somebody else has, their beauty, their achievements, their cool factor, their job, whatever it is. Remember, those things are not mutually exclusive. You can both be those things. It doesn't detract from everything that you have. I just want to finish on that reminder. So I really hope that you have enjoyed this episode. Thank you for putting up with my voice today. I'm a little bit sick. So hopefully it wasn't too grading. But, you know, I just felt that this episode needed to be done. I feel like social comparison is such a curse that we manage in our 20s. But it's like a curse that we don't need to suffer through because there are so many solutions. And it really does come down to how we think about it, right? Whether we think about it as something that is meant to harm us and something that is meant to make us feel bad or something that can really ignore. our sense of purpose and be inspirational and does come from a deep like recognition and connection

with others. So thank you so much for listening. I hope that you got something from this episode. If there is somebody who needs to hear it, please feel free to share it with them. And make sure you're following along on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you're listening so that you know when new episodes go up. As always, if you have an episode suggestion, Firstly, make sure we haven't done it. You can just search it wherever you are looking, the keywords, or shoot me a DM on Instagram, and I'll point you in the right direction. Otherwise, give us a suggestion.

We would love to hear from you. We would love to know what you want us to speak about. When it comes to our attorneys, when it comes to psychology, there is so much to be said. So thank you again for listening. Until next time, be kind to yourself. Be gentle. Stay safe. And we'll see you back next week.

Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hardway with your favorite therapist and host, Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor?

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