The Comparison Trap: How to Stop Feeling Behind

Do you feel anxious or “not good enough” when you compare yourself to other people? In this episode, I break down what research shows about how happy people relate to social comparison—and how you can shift from feeling threatened… to actually growing from it. I also share personal stories of when I felt completely outmatched, and the mental shifts that helped me move through it. If comparison has been fueling your anxiety, this episode will give you a different way to approach it.

What you’ll learn:
• How to stop using others as your standard
• How to turn comparison into growth
• How to protect yourself from social media comparison

⏱️ Timestamps

00:43 – Happy people and social comparison
04:30 – Real story: How to focus on your own standard
10:38 – Real story: How to stop feeling threatened by others
13:03 – How to protect your mental health on social media
15:44 – Share your story / request an episode topic

For full show notes, including resources mentioned, go to: https://www.calmyourcaveman.com/episodes/the-comparison-trap-how-to-stop-feeling-behind

🌐 https://www.calmyourcaveman.com

Transcript

How do you get better at using your own internal standards to judge yourself rather than feeling that other people's performance reflects on your performance? And also how do you get better at looking at other people's superior performance with a growth mindset and thinking, well, I can learn from that? They can teach me something from watching it, rather than feeling threatened by it and feeling like it means that they're so much better than you and you're so much worse. 

Hi everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I wanna talk today about social comparison. We haven't talked about this much, but it's something that can really give people a lot of anxiety. It's something that I have struggled a lot with throughout my life off and on. I can't say that I have totally mastered it, but I have gotten better at it. 

I wanna talk to you first though about some interesting data that has come out of the research of those who look at the thinking and behavior patterns of happy people. We've been talking about The How of Happiness, this book, the last couple of weeks by Sonya Lyubomirski, who's a researcher that really analyzes what makes people happy, what it is that they do and think about that allows them to be happy. Because as we talked about before, your circumstances only account for about 10% of your happiness levels. This is what happiness researchers have found. But that really, the huge portion of your happiness levels really has to do with your thinking and behavior patterns. What about social comparison? What do happy people do with social comparison? Well, what I thought was interesting in looking at the research on happy people and social com social comparison is that it's not that happy people don't compare themselves to other people, but happy people don't let other people's performances influence their feelings about themselves as far as their own worth. It is really interesting that it seems that happy people use their own internal standards to judge their performance. They, they ask themselves, well, how am I doing relative to how I was doing a year ago, or how far I've come overall, rather than how I'm doing in relation to all of these people around me. So that's the first interesting thing that happy people do in relation to social comparison. 

But the second interesting thing is that it's not that they don't look at other people's superior performances, but when they do look at other people performing better in some way in life than they are, they often look at it with this growth mindset. So, instead of thinking, well, this means that that person is so much better, so much more valuable than me, and I'm way down here, instead they think, oh, well that person learned how to do this particular thing or have this particular quality, and so I can learn how to do it too. So they have this growth mindset that we've talked about before, which is that abilities and capacities and even qualities are things that can be developed over time with practice. And so they look at other people's superior behavior with the idea that I could, I could learn something from watching them that could help my performance to improve.

 So that's interesting, right? That happy people tend to have these two thinking patterns in relation to social comparison. But it's easier said than done. I mean, How do you get better at using your own internal standards to judge yourself rather than feeling that other people's performance reflects on your performance? And also how do you get better at looking at other people's superior performance with a growth mindset and thinking, well, I can learn from that? They can teach me something from watching it, rather than feeling threatened by it and feeling like it means that they're so much better than you and you're so much worse. 

Well, as I said, this is something that I have struggled with off and on my whole life, but I have gotten better at it. So I'm gonna tell you a couple of things that I have learned to do that help me with this. I'm still not perfect, but I'll tell you what I do.

So first of all, how can you practice getting better at using your own internal standards to judge yourself rather than other people's external standards? Well, I mentioned before an experience on this podcast where I told about how when I was a doctoral student at a university here in Brazil and I was asked to be on a committee that was supposed to evaluate a master's student who was in the middle of writing their thesis. They're about halfway through their thesis, and they were talking about the, their project proposal and the different things that they had done and, and I was supposed to be part of this committee that was going to give them feedback about whether or not they were going in the right direction, things that they could do to improve, how to go from here, et cetera. And I felt that I was at a real disadvantage on this committee because first of all, the other two people on the committee were professors, and I was the only student, graduate student. But second of all, the other two were native Brazilian speakers and extremely eloquent in academic Portuguese. And I was not. I am not a native Portuguese speaker. I can speak Portuguese okay. I can communicate, but I'm definitely not eloquent. And so I explained before how in this experience, I, I was the last person who was going to give feedback to the student, and I was listening to the other two professors, go on and on and give so much detail and speak so fluently and eloquently and descriptively, and helpfully about everything that they were saying. And I'm just getting more and more nervous thinking about how my performance is going to compare to theirs. Basically, I'm, I'm gonna sound like about a junior high school level student in relation to these people because my Portuguese just is not that refined and amazing as theirs is. And so as I'm sitting there, I'm getting more and more anxious, more and more nervous about my time, which is rapidly approaching to speak to the student. But somehow I switched into this technique where I pictured my great-grandparents. Obviously my great-grandparents have passed away now, but I knew them when I was younger and they were big fans of mine, and they made sure that I knew that. They really always cheered for me in everything that I did and praised everything that I did. And I started to picture them sitting in the room waiting for me to get up and speak and how proud of me they would be that I could get up and speak in this foreign language, in an academic setting and communicate complicated ideas and give helpful, hopefully helpful feedback to a student who is writing an academic thesis. And as I pictured them sitting there cheering for me, it switched my brain out of that mode of comparing myself to other people who could perform so much better than I could to comparing myself to myself. And I realized, wow, it's, I've come a long way. You know, 10 years ago I was still struggling with how to conjugate verbs in Portuguese. Look at me now. I can speak fluently. I can give feedback from experience to this student who's writing a master thesis, which is something I've already done, and I can give pointers to them and I can explain what it is that I mean. My nouns and adjectives might not always agree in gender, but I can communicate the ideas that I've got in my head. And so I formulated some goals in my head as I was picturing my great grandparents watching me. And the goal that I had was just to get up and not worry about all the mistakes that I would hear myself make because I knew that I would be making a lot of mistakes. But my goal was just to focus on communicating the content of what I had for this student because I, I did really feel that I had something valuable to offer as far as feedback to the student, whether or not it would be co couched in perfect, eloquent language was beside the point. I could still focus on just communicating with the student, and so that's what I did. I got up and I took off my glasses, which is what I do when I don't want to be as aware of what people think of me because I can't see them as well. And I just started speaking my ideas and giving my feedback, and I heard myself make mistakes, but I just kept going, picturing my great grandparents watching me and cheering for me, and being so proud of me for having learned another language. And I was able to successfully communicate my ideas to this student. And so afterwards I kind of patted myself on the back. I congratulated myself for having got up and done something that was so scary, something where I was clearly gonna look so inferior in many ways to other people right around me doing the same type of thing. But something that was so much harder for me than it was for them, and how I could be proud of myself for having done that. So that's one little technique that I have used in situations where I know I'm going into something where I'm gonna be vulnerable to feeling social comparison, is to picture somebody who would be my cheerleader, somebody who I know would be able to judge myself based on my own accomplishments and my own past behavior, to help switch my brain into thinking about how far I've come and what my goals are for myself, regardless of how other people perform. And when I define those goals clearly that I want to have in this situation, then it's easier for me to judge myself in relation to those goals instead of in relation to what other people are doing. And I make sure and congratulate myself afterwards if I have accomplished those specific goals that I set for myself in relation to my own performance. And this often does help protect me against those pitfalls, pitfalls of social comparison in situations where I'm really vulner vulnerable to a lot of anxiety because other people are probably going to outperform me in some way.

 Now, what about the other issue of happy people being able to use the growth mindset when they look at other people's superior performance? This is something that I also have struggled with, particularly in the area of piano performance. It used to be when I would hear somebody who was playing a lot better than me in some way that I would feel threatened by that. I would feel like that meant that I was a failure, that I was never going to succeed. And so I actually didn't even like to go to concerts where I would hear amazing pianists play because I would often feel belittled by hearing their amazing performance. But I didn't wanna feel this way, and I saw other friends of mine who had a more healthy attitude and they helped me with their example. I had other friends who had the habit of going to concerts and watching the performers and, and trying to analyze what it is that they were doing so that they could learn from it and try and gain something. Being very curious about how it is that that particular performer made this performance so effective. And as I started to switch from making other people's superior performance be a judgment on my own value, but instead of switching into looking at other people's superior performance with curiosity to see what it is that I could learn from it, what they could teach me, then it started to feel very different when I would go to performances, and I started to enjoy it a lot. And I did start to learn from other people and incorporate things from what they did that helped me to improve my performance.

And a slightly linked issue, when I was performing with other people, and sometimes I would receive requests from my fellow performers or criticisms from my fellow performers, that also felt like a comparison to me, that basically they're, they're saying, you are not as good as we wish you were. You're not as talented. You don't have this particular skill that we wish that you had. We wish that you could play this particular passage better. And I would feel very threatened. But I've just consciously tried to switch into thinking curiously, what is it that I can gain from trying what they are asking me to do? Maybe I can learn how to do it better. Maybe I can even learn from them. Maybe they're offering me something by giving me this criticism, some way that I could have room for improvement.

So these are just a couple examples of how I have tried to work on having a more healthy social comparison practice. Something that's a little bit more like happy people have. But as I said, I'm still a work in progress. There are times when I feel pretty good. And I'm able to do this without as much struggle, and there are other times when it's hard. And so since I do have vulnerability to social comparison, I find that it is really important to me to limit my social media consumption because I find when I'm on social media a lot, I just start to feel really bad about myself. The social comparison muscle that I have, that's trying to do this healthily, starts to get beaten down and I start to fall into old patterns of unhealthy social comparison and I, where I start thinking less of myself and feeling more sad and frustrated and anxious after looking at social media. So I find that, first of all, I really need to limit my time on social media. I only let myself go once a day on social media. I don't have the apps installed on my phone. I make myself have to go to the browser and look it up. I only let myself stay a maximum of five minutes. Usually I stay a lot less. But in addition to that, I also curate my feed. So I pay attention to when there's certain people that make posts that tend to make me feel that anxiety and frustration, self-deprecation after having watched their posts, then I just unfollow them or I mute them so that they don't show up in my feed. And I try and make sure that the things that do show up in my feed are people who tend to post things that help me to feel more grateful for my life or help me to feel more socially connected to them. Not people that, for one reason or another, end up making me feel like I'm so much less than them. So I limit my social media. I curate my, my feed. I pay attention to my mood after having looked at certain posts so that I know who I should unfollow and who I should follow. And occasionally I just go off social media altogether and I go on a fast and I don't look at it at all, because it, it's really helpful for me to have a break from it once in a while just to get back into that view where I can use my own internal standards to judge myself, and where I can feel safe and secure enough to look at other people's superior performance and be curious about what I could learn from it rather than feeling that it's a judgment on my own performance. 

So those are my ideas of how I've worked on it. If any of you have ideas. I'd love to hear yours as well. As I said, I'm still a work in progress. I'd love to hear what it is that you have done that has helped you with this issue. You can, if you're on the YouTube version, you can leave me comments on the YouTube video. If you're listening to the audio version, there is a link to be able to text me in the show notes where you can give me your own ideas about how you have worked on this. I'd love to hear what it is that you have done.

And I'll also just take this opportunity to say that you can, also in those comments or in that texting link, on the audio version, you can also let me know if there's any particular issue that you have struggled with in relation to anxiety that you would like me to speak on. If there's something that you want me to do an episode on that I haven't done one on yet, or that you'd like me to treat in more detail, I would love to hear your ideas. So please let me know what it is that you want help with as well. 

So that's what I have for for you today. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again next week.