How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others: The Comparison Trap

How to stop comparing yourself to others: why the comparison trap is actually a safety problem.

If you've been stuck in unhealthy comparison and wondering why do we compare ourselves to others even when we know it's bad for us, this episode is going to change what you understand about it. 

I kept seeing this pattern in my clients, my friends, pretty much everyone around me. They can't stop comparing and they're exhausted. So I dug into it, and what I found changed how I think about all of it.

In this episode, I'm getting into:

• The hidden four-step cycle behind every destructive comparison cycle, including the one step nobody catches
• Why your brain treats comparison like a safety mechanism, and why "just stop comparing" has never worked for anyone
• Where your self-worth is actually attached and why that determines whether comparison wrecks you or rolls right off
• What you can actually do about it

Grab my TEA Chart here.

Transcript

"Comparison is the thief of joy." You've probably heard this one before, right? I know I have. The weird thing is that despite all of us knowing this, almost everyone I know compares themselves to other people.

This is true for every client I've ever worked with, and I've seen it in almost all of my friends. They all do this, and they tell me they're freakin' exhausted. And I'm like, of course you are, why wouldn't you be? But the really odd thing is that it's not like they don't know. They totally know this isn't healthy, productive behavior, and yet they still can't seem to stop.

So that's when I started to ask myself, "Well, that’s weird. Why is that?” In fact, why do we even compare? I did some research and what I found is really fascinating. Well maybe I'm just a nerd, okay, but I found that the act of comparison is actually tied to something much deeper than we think. If you’ve been on the comparison treadmill and want to get off, that's what we're getting into today.

You're listening to This Is How You Think, the show that remodels your mindset. I'm your host, Jule Kim. Let's dive in.

So I recently had a client session, and the topic turned to her feeling intimidated by other people who are successful or accomplished. And I thought, well, that's interesting. So I asked her, "Okay, well, what is it you find intimidating about them?" And she said it was because they're so accomplished, they've done all these things, and she herself hasn't. So she feels they’re better than her, and she’s below them.

What I ended up pointing out to her was, "Do you realize what's actually happening here? You're going into it saying you find them intimidating, but I think what's really going on is you're seeing certain things and you're drawing a conclusion, which then leads to you feeling intimidated. It's not like you see this person and you're just immediately intimidated. That's not how comparison works."

That's when I realized, most people think that comparison happens like this: I see someone, I compare myself to them, and I feel bad. There’s a lot of stuff to unpack here because you're not seeing what's happening under the hood.

So I thought about this, and I realized this is the actual comparison cycle: you see someone, you notice a difference between you and them. And then, this is the part that really makes comparison what it is, you evaluate yourself against them, and then you draw a conclusion about yourself. Usually the conclusion is something negative, like you're somehow not good enough. And that's what leads to you feeling bad.

The interesting thing I’ve observed is that people usually just make a leap from evaluating themselves to feeling bad, and the part that's under the hood is step three, where you draw a negative conclusion about yourself.

I bet you can think of examples where you’ve done this, right? Because I have lots of stories I could give you between my clients, my friends, and myself. Like one of my friends, one day we're hanging out and I'm like, "Hey, can you help me with my leg hair?" I pluck my leg hair, and some parts of my leg are hard for me to reach because I'm not very flexible. So I roll up my pant legs, and she looks at the hair I have and she flips out. Because she sees I have maybe all of ten hairs on one leg. And she's like, "Oh my god, this is all the hair you have?! I'm like a hairy monkey next to you!"

I know this is kind of a funny example, but this is comparison in a nutshell. She took all four steps in about five seconds. She noticed a difference between me and her, she evaluated, and then she concluded that she was like a hairy monkey. But she's the only one saying that. It’s not like I've ever thought that about her. She said it and then she felt bad…over leg hair.

Here's another story. I had a client a while back who told me about walking into a networking event. She sees all of these people in suits or dressed really nice. They're all various types of professionals, like attorneys, doctors, accountants. She's a photographer. Within minutes, she feels really small.

She looked at how they were dressed, their credentials, and she concluded that these people were so accomplished and she's not, and therefore she's not good enough. She knew she felt really small, and she never caught that her brain had already run this invisible thought under the surface. And I'm guessing a lot of you have been in a room like that where you just feel smaller than everyone else and you can't even really explain why. You try to put words to it, and maybe you're saying the same kinds of things as my clients here.

Now, this scenario was interesting because my first thought was, that’s awesome! Here’s a whole room full of your ideal clients! When I said that to her, she was shocked - that hadn’t even crossed her mind because she was so caught up in the comparison spiral.

So the thing I really want to highlight here is that step three, that negative conclusion about yourself, is not a fact. It’s just a story you’re telling yourself that isn't even true.

But I can already anticipate the arguments coming my way about this. So let me give you an example. I've actually had this exact thing happen in real life where me and my friend meet this social media influencer and we have totally different reactions. My friend thinks this influencer is so full of themselves, has all these YouTube awards, so many followers, and she’s turned off. 

I meet the same person and I think they're lovely. I’m like, "Man, good for them. They've done so much, and I hope one day I can do something like what they’ve achieved." But I'm not sitting there thinking I'm somehow not as good. Whereas my friend totally thinks that about herself. She actually said to me that people only ever want someone like the influencer, and never someone like her.

Such different reactions.

I think this story shows that comparison is just a tool. You can use it as inspiration, or you can use it as a way to put yourself down. I looked at that same person and felt my world expand with possibility - if they can do it then maybe I can too. My friend looked at the them and used it to confirm every bad thing she already believed about herself. 

Now, what’s weird because whenever I point out behaviors like this, everyone is always like, "Okay, well then just stop." And I'm like, well, duh, if we could, we would, right? Not super helpful.

But this is where my research has an answer, which has been pretty eye-opening for me, so you might want to stick around for this next part.

See, comparison isn't just a habit. It’s true that it’s a socially conditioned habit, where we're taught to do this from pretty much every source out there. But the real force behind comparison is that it's one of the vehicles your brain uses to check if you're safe.

Your brain is constantly trying to answer, "Am I okay here? And do I matter?” And comparison is one of the main tools it uses to measure for that.

So in this regard, comparison acts as a safety mechanism. And that's why most of us can't willpower our way out of it, because it's almost hardwired into our daily functioning. That's why "stop comparing" really doesn't work for anybody, because you're telling your nervous system to stop scanning for danger, which it’s not gonna do.

And the reason why comparison feels so bad is that when you hit step three, when you reach some negative conclusion about yourself, your nervous system often reads it as a fall from your position. Your status. Your rank. 

Your brain will treat this moment like it's life or death, because from an evolutionary perspective, it actually was. Way back when, if you experienced a loss in position in your tribe, that often came with less resources and less access in your peer group. And in the worst-case scenarios, it meant you were outcast, which was almost guaranteed death.

The way I like to describe this is when comparison hits and you feel that drop in your stomach, I think of it like a smoke alarm. The act of comparing is just the smoke sensor doing its job. The bad feeling is the siren. It’s a signal that something feels threatening or out of alignment. It operates on a much more gut, visceral level, like something is actually wrong.

If you've ever wondered why it hits so hard and so fast, even over the small stuff, this is why. Our survival system doesn't know the difference between a real threat and a perceived one.

Now, the thing I’ve noticed about comparison is that we're constantly doing some level of it. We're always gauging. But the act of comparison itself isn't inherently bad. You'll notice that sometimes you compare and you don't really feel anything. It's just a fleeting moment that crosses your mind and then it's gone. You forgot you ever even had that thought.

So the cool part I realized this week is that comparison doesn't trigger the alarm equally across everything. It tends to go off wherever your self-worth is attached. And for most of us, our worth is a little too attached to achievement, which isn't our fault. This is social and cultural conditioning.

You see this in school. Schools give us grades, there's a class rank, in sports it's who gets picked first. Our families do this too. Our parents compare us to our siblings, to our cousins, or the neighbor's kid.

You have workplaces literally doing stack rankings for performance, who gets the promotion, the new job titles, and who gets fired. 

And of course you have social media, which triggers lots of comparison for people all over the world.

So basically every system we've ever been in has trained our brains to attach our worth to where we land on the ladder, or in a hierarchy. And for most of us, the story that we built around this is, "I'm not good enough."

I used to be there, too. As a Korean kid who grew up in Alabama, I was intensely jealous and envious of my best friends. Somehow I was always best friends with the pretty girl or the popular girl. And I remember feeling super not good about myself.

In elementary school, I'm just gonna say it, I was a right little shit. I was so mean to my best friend because I didn't understand the feelings I was having. I didn't understand why I was having these feelings, but I did know I was having them. I felt ugly inside so I acted ugly on the outside. And that poor girl, she put up with me.

In seventh grade it happened again. I was best friends with this pretty Vietnamese girl. She literally saw me sitting alone at lunch one day, and she was like, "Hey, over here. Come sit with us." So I went over, and we became best friends from day one. She was cute and pretty, and I remember she had this beautiful hair and everybody loved her. And sad to say, I was envious.

But I think what's really interesting is by that point, I'd started to actually see my feelings. And I decided to come clean with her. I told her I didn't like feeling that way towards her, and I didn't want to feel that way, so I was basically asking her, help me. I don't want to be this toxic bitch.

Gosh, if you think about that. How often do you see two thirteen-year-old girls and one of them decides to be honest about that she’s struggling with her feelings? And then on the flip side was my friend who was kind enough to receive that and be like, "Hey man, I'm sorry to hear that. Let me help you. I'll try my best." It was so generous - it brings tears to my eyes telling you about this because I feel like you don't even see that in adults.

So I've gone through these cycles of being eaten alive by comparison and jealousy and envy. It happened again in high school. And high school is when I decided to finally put a stop to it, because I realized that comparison was never going to be a game you could win. There’s always going to be people better than you in everything. There is no winning. So that’s when I decided I could choose not to play.

Now, just because I stopped playing the comparison game doesn't mean my alarm turned off. It just meant it was wired to a different channel. And that's actually how I found out about this next part.

My safety system isn't tuned to rank and status like it is for a lot of people. When I looked this up, there are statistics showing that 60 to 70% of people have safety tuned to rank and status. There are really five main categories, and I'm not going to go deep on all of them today, but I want you to know they exist.

In my case, I already told you I grew up Korean in Alabama. No one looked like me. As we all know, kids are little assholes and they went out of their way to make sure I knew I didn't fit. I was punished for sticking out in any way.

So for me, safety is actually tied to belonging. My smoke detector doesn't go off for "Am I good enough?" That's not really a thing I question. It's more like, "Do I belong here? Am I one of these people? Are they going to see me as an outsider?"

In addition to rank and status, and belonging, the other three categories are relationship, so "Is this person pulling away from me?" can trigger the alarm, or "Is my person becoming closer with somebody else?" You also have competence, so "Am I smart enough to handle this?" And then the last one is tied to morality, "Am I a good person? Am I a bad person?" Any combination of these can create the smoke alarm unique to each of us.

I have a lot of my safety attached to belonging, and some of my self-worth attached to competence. Most of the people I've encountered or worked with, their self-worth and safety is very closely attached to performance, which is another word for rank and status. Where do I rank against everybody else?

So why am I sharing all this? The point isn't to diagnose yourself perfectly. I want you to start noticing where and when comparison actually hits you, because that tells you where your worth or your safety is rooted. 

Telling yourself "I compare too much" isn't really specific enough. It's not going to change anything for you, because that's like trying to clear smoke from the air instead of putting out the fire, or making sure that the smoke alarm is working properly.

Speaking of recalibrating your smoke alarm, I recommend reviewing my episode on overcoming a negative mindset. If you haven't already downloaded it, I have a handout on my Thought, Emotion, Action Framework.

So if we look at the comparison cycle again: step one, you notice a difference. Step two, you evaluate yourself against them. Step three, you draw a negative conclusion about yourself. Step four, you feel bad. If you did the TEA exercise from a couple of episodes ago, this is the time to pull that chart out again, or learn it now.

Given the work I’ve done with my clients, I think where you've probably been struggling with comparison is that you've been trying to fix the emotion without catching the thought that came with it. 

So here's what I need you to do. The next time comparison hits you, and it will because it does for all of us. I need you to catch step three. Identify the conclusion you're drawing about yourself. Why is that the conclusion you always jump to? Because that story you’re telling yourself is what makes comparison hurt like a motherf-er. 

I want you to name it. Write it down if you have to. Because once you can see it, you can challenge it. You can't challenge something you don't even know is there.

All right, that's it for today. I hope this changes what you understand about the comparison trap. Let me know what you think. If you know somebody in your life right now who suffers from a little too much comparison, would you do me a favor and forward this episode to them? 

Other than that, if you have any questions or something personal you'd like me to do a deep dive on, text the link in the show notes or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Send me a message, because I would love to help, and you'd be doing me a solid on helping me figure out what to make some of my next episodes about. If I were you, I'd do it because it's like getting free coaching.

That's it for today. 

Thank you so much for listening, and remember, I believe in you. See you next time.