Stop Comparing Yourself to Other People (Here's Why)

uh elephants are so much stronger than I am oh that's sag like I wish I was as strong as an elephant or do you ever feel Superior to an ant right do you ever feel like oh my God I'm so awesome I'm gonna live so long I'm so good at like playing FPS games and this ant on the sidewalk that ant sucks man I'm the best thing I'm better than every single ant in the world when it comes to playing OverWatch happiness is whatever is in the link in the description check it out so today

we're going to talk a little bit about comparison we're talking about this because I hear a lot of people will sort of say that comparison is the thief of joy and I'm noticing that more and more people nowadays are like comparing themselves a lot and it almost seems like an epidemic like there's something almost addictive about comparison right like you're kind of going throughout your day and you kind of see that someone else is doing something and you're like oh why can't I do that or you're on the internet and you're browsing slash R I

am very smart on Reddit and you see a lot of people who will compare themselves to other people so we see that there's a lot of comparison and a lot of times the more that we compare ourselves the worse we feel about ourselves and then the the issue is that as we kind of look at like science and mental health professionals and like wellness blogs and stuff like that what people will say is that oh if you want to compare yourself last like less spend less time on social media right we have all this research

that shows us that you know spending time on Facebook or spending time on Instagram or social media or whatever like worsens our mood and so that our solution should be just like spend less time on the internet and that's actually like that doesn't really work right so you can tell people to spend less time on the internet but that doesn't it's really hard to do like I think that the challenge right now is that if you find yourself making a lot of comparisons telling you that the solution is to spend less time on the Internet

is an effective solution but it's actually really hard to implement so what I'd love to do today is to talk to you a little bit about first of all why comparison feels so damn addictive secondly to try to understand hold on a second why do we compare in the first place and once we understand why the brain has evolved the capacity to compare and what comparison does then we'll gain some insight into it and try to understand a little bit about how to compare less so let's start by understanding a little bit about why we

compare in the first place so we all know that our brain has the capacity of comparison in fact that plagues us right because anytime I'm kind of doing something if I'm not careful my brain will make a comparison if I go to the gym I'll make a comparison to someone else at the gym who works out more than I do and My Success now suddenly becomes a failure so we know that we compare a lot of the time the other thing that we also know is that oftentimes we will compare ourselves to other people as

well that are below us so we compare to people above us and compared to people below us and sometimes we'll we find ourselves making comparisons like I'm so smart or I'm so great or that person is not nearly as good at League of Legends as I am or whatever we'll make different kinds of comparisons they're noobs and I'm an expert the reason that I'm stuck at this rank is because I'm surrounded by noobs but it's not like I'm bad I'm the only one who actually knows how to play the game properly I'm stuck in the

trench right it's a curse of being in the trench and there's nothing I can do about it so we make a lot of comparisons and it turns out that there's actually like a really interesting Theory from psychology called social comparison theory that actually looks into why we make comparisons and social comparison Theory basically says we make two kinds of comparisons and they each serve a different purpose the first is something called an upward comparison so this is when we sort of like look at someone who's better than us in some way and we make some

kind of comparison now when we look at Upward comparisons they actually have a very very important function the reason we do it is because it helps us in some way and generally speaking when we make an upward comparison the advantage of that is we get an opportunity to think about what we could be doing better to mimic that to improve our own lives so when we make an upward comparison we say okay this person is more in shape than I am maybe I need to start doing a little bit more of what they're doing or

if I get a B plus on a test or if I get an 85 and someone else in the class gets a 90 then I can start to think a little bit about well this person is better at studying than I am what can I do to get a 90 next time so one of the reasons that we make comparisons is to sort of look at people who are doing a little bit better than us so that we can learn techniques to improve our own life the second reason we make comparisons is something called a

downward comparison so this is when I think of myself as really awesome and I pick someone who's below me to make a comparison and if you look at that essentially what's happening there is it's an emotional coping technique so when I feel bad about myself what I can sometimes end up doing is comparing myself to someone who's beneath me and when I compare myself to someone who's beneath me I feel better about myself so downward comparisons are essentially an emotional coping strategy the problem with both of these things is that sometimes they can kind of

get out of hand right if you actually look at the way that we make comparisons that's not actually in effect what oftentimes happens I can get stuck in this situation where I find myself comparing my uh comparing to other people who are better than me all the time and sometimes that part of our brain that circuit in our brain can get hijacked and no longer be productive the goal of an upward comparison is to try to figure out okay what can I do differently but paradoxically what can happen is as I compare myself to other

people instead of sort of creating a road map for Progress what it can actually do is destroy my motivation I can look at other people and I can say oh my God like this person is so good at this stuff like there's no way I will ever be good at that there's no way that I should even bother I go to the gym once and everyone there is so ripped like there's no chance and so it actually has the opposite effect sometimes the other thing that happens with downward comparisons is sometimes those can also get

stuck in almost like a vicious cycle where the only way that I know how to feel good about myself is is by making downward comparisons so if I'm unhappy with some aspect of my life and I make a downward comparison is an emotional coping strategy that can help me feel better emotionally in the moment but it doesn't actually improve my situation at all right so what ends up happening and we'll see this on the internet we'll see people who are stuck at low ranks and constantly [ __ ] on people around them and you'll kind

of see this a lot where these are people who are criticizing and pretending to be better than everyone around them but those people actually stay incredibly stuck in their own life they don't actually make progress so we know that there's sort of two kind of psychologically plausible reasons why we make comparisons we know that for example they can be used as a road map for our own progress in the case of upward comparisons and they can be used as an emotional coping strategy in the case of downward comparisons the challenge is that both of these

comparative models can actually get kind of out of our control and in one case what we can end up doing is making comparisons that don't actually give us a Way Forward in fact make us feel so inferior that they actually shatter our motivation or we can get sort of stuck in this cycle of using consistent downward comparisons I.E being arrogant on the internet and then when we're arrogant on the internet we don't actually improve our life in any way shape or form so this is where if we want to understand how to stop comparing we

have to understand a little bit about how these comparisons get made so a lot of times the the struggle is that when we make a comparison what we try to challenge is the comparison itself right we'll sort of like I'm comparing myself to someone else and I try to rationalize that maybe I shouldn't compare myself to this person or this is an unfair comparison or if we reach out to friends of ours they'll say oh your situation is different it's really apples and oranges but that doesn't really seem to work right so we know that

sometimes if we try to tackle these comparisons just something about it feels off something about it makes it like really really hard to actually stop making the comparison and if we really want to understand how to stop making comparisons there's one other key thing that we need to look at and that is the way our brain decides who to compare to so let me put it to you this way do you compare yourself to elephants do you say oh man I'm so weak uh elephants are so much stronger than I am oh that's sag like

I wish I was as strong as an elephant or do you ever feel Superior to an ant right do you ever feel like oh my God I'm so awesome I'm gonna live so long I'm so good at like playing FPS games and this ant on the sidewalk that ant sucks man I'm the best thing I'm better than every single ant in the world when it comes to playing OverWatch so obviously like no right we don't compare ourselves to like elephants and ants we don't compare ourselves to dinosaurs we also don't compare ourselves to a lot

of other human beings right we don't oftentimes compare ourselves to let's say heads of state like I I don't feel inferior to let's say the president of the United States or the head of state of of a different country so something weird about how our mind decides who to compare us to and if we really want to dismantle the comparison one of the things we can really understand is that process of how our mind decides who we compare ourselves to it's essentially what our brain does is kind of like puts us in a particular league

and what it does in terms of the comparisons it makes is it puts other it tries to compare us to people that we perceive in our league so we may compare ourselves to school mates for example or people who are in the same grade we may compare ourselves to siblings we may compare ourselves to friends right so these are people that in some way my mind sort of says me and this person belong in the same bucket so it'll oftentimes historically it's been things like school you know colleagues family members things like that oh my

older brother became a lawyer so now I need to become a lawyer my two older siblings both went to Harvard so now I have to go to Harvard the comparisons that we tend to make tend to be something thing related to us now this has become a problem more recently if you kind of look at why is comparison growing so much and why is it so hard to deal with and I think a lot of this actually has to do with the change in the way that we kind of utilize social media so if you

look at what social media does is it takes what used to be a distant figure right so like it takes someone like let's say the president of the United States and now using something like social media we begin to see intimate parts of their lives right we begin to see like what they eat I mean I don't know if the president does this but we get to see like you know what they're eating for dinner or like you know what they're wearing that day or in terms of like friends or content creators we know that

there's this parasocial relationship that's developing even friends of yours or people that you're connected to who may not even be friends but people you're connected to on Twitter Instagram or Facebook or whatever we suddenly have access to people's lives in a way that we never have and now that we have this increased level of access what we tend to see is that people tend to make comparisons with people they've never met right like you'll watch someone who makes like YouTube videos and at the end of like watching their YouTube video like a content creator you'll

start to feel bad about yourself you'll start to feel like oh my God like why can't my life be like this why is this person's life like this and I think this is really important to understand but I think somehow social media has tricked our brain into thinking we're sort of in the same league with them this doesn't mean that we're not in the same league in an objective sense what I mean is that as people as we start to see the inside of people's lives our brain sort of like it checks some of the

boxes for comparison and then what ends up happening is once these people sort of enter our league for comparison then what ends up happening is we start comparing ourselves to them and then that becomes really really unfair because what's going on is we're only comparing ourselves not to their real life but we start to compare ourselves to the version of the life that they show us which is oftentimes very very crafted which ends up resulting in sort of this very unfair comparison that ends up there's only one there's only one way that we can kind

of handle this or there's only one outcome from this which is that we're always going to be inferior and this is when we sort of see that like we can kind of see that there's like this upward comparison that our mind tries to make which is normally used to help us kind of um develop a road map forward we can't really do that when it comes to a parasocial relationship with a content creator or someone who's like you know big on social media because there's no like real Like A to Z right in terms of

like becoming or achieving what some of these like large internet personalities have so that's that's one of the things that I think has really changed and one of the reasons that I think comparison has gotten a lot worse now in terms of what to do about it there are a couple of things that we we can consider the first is that anytime you make a comparison start to ask yourself why did my brain choose this person to make the comparison to what is it about this person that makes me feel like this is a fair

comparison because we've already said it's it's not fair for you to compare yourself to an elephant right it's not fair for you to compare yourself to an ant so what is it that makes my brain think that this is a fair comparison and as you tunnel down into that you'll discover a lot of different things hopefully what you'll discover is that in a lot of ways this actually isn't a fair comparison or that the comparison that you're making is not complete in some way so you may compare yourself to let's say a content creator or

something like that but then like you have to remember that content creators I mean this is their profession they have staff right they have mods they have a lot of people to support them as you tunnel down into the fairness of the comparison that you make in terms of the selection of the person what you'll discover is that hopefully there's something about that comparison that is a little bit unfair and if you really think about it we don't critically choose who to make comparisons with right our mind automatically picks someone and how does it make

that determination it's based on kind of subconscious calculation so as you tunnel down into like okay wait why do I think that this person is even a fair comparison you'll discover a couple things one is that you tend to not compare yourself one to one with one person so you don't compare all of your attributes with all of another person's attributes what you tend to do is you compare the best attribute of five different people with yourself so what you're actually doing is not making a one-to-one comparison you're comparing that person's relationship to your relationship

this other person's financial situation to your financial situation this third person's physical fitness to your physical fitness this fourth person's ability to cook with your ability to cook and so as you make these kind of unfair comparisons you end up feeling worse about yourself and you end up sabotaging what upward comparisons are actually for which is to develop a road map to move forward the second thing to understand about comparisons and if you really want to tackle them we're going to actually take a step away from science for a second and go into yogic psychology

so what I really love about yogic psychology is that it tends to be focused on the individual so one of the basic problems with science is that we can learn a scientific principle like we know that there are upward comparisons and downward comparisons but the challenge is that knowing the scientific principle doesn't correct our Behavior automatically right like I can know that human beings do this I can know that human beings use particular defense mechanisms I can read about cognitive biases but just because I understand the science of it or I study this stuff in

a book doesn't mean that I myself change what I like about the yogic system of psychology is that it's actually not based on objective truth and science it's actually based on subjectivity so it's all about kind of application within you so the key principle that we're going to be talking about when it comes to yogic psychology is the ahamkar or the ego so the ego in the yogic model of the mind is something that makes comparisons so if we think about our ego it's our sense of self and and we don't we can't really have

a sense of self without a comparison to another person and you may say well hold on a second like how does that work like of course I can have a sense of self outside of comparison to other people well let's think about that right so if you view yourself as tall or you view yourself as short you can't be tall or short without someone else being short or tall if you view yourself as successful that has to be in comparison to a failure if you view yourself as a failure that has to be in comparison

to a success so all of the attributes that we think about is our own identity I'm a man I'm a doctor I'm a father I'm a son all of those things have a relational component right a doctor is one profession but it's not all of these other professions and if you're Indian like I am or you're East Asian or South Asian you will have found that there's a very clear comparison that gets made with a value judgment based on profession I don't know if you all kind of feel this way but a lot of times

when I'm meeting people and I kind of ask me what I do for a living one of the things I found is it's a shortcut for them to bucket me right when they ask me what I do it's it's some way to bucket me into like how much respect they're going to give me for the rest of the conversation so all of these attributes of the self are our identity are actually comparative in nature and the ego or the humgar one of the key aspects one of the things that the part of the Mind does

is actually make comparisons now how is that useful for us the key thing to remember is that since the ahamkar or the ego is the part that makes the comparison the more active our ego is the more comparisons we're going to make and if we go back to the upward comparisons and downward comparisons we'll kind of see that right because the more egotistical I am the more downward comparisons I make the more egotistical I am and the more upward or unhealthy upward comparisons I make once again that's going to be a lot that has to

do with ego in this case though it'll be low self-worth right so when we make upward comparisons that make us feel bad about ourselves instead of using them productively that all has to do with my self-esteem and my sense of self-worth so the key thing here is that the yogis actually give us a very very useful way to disarm the ahamkar or disable the ego and the key thing about the ego is it's actually a defense mechanism so the reason that we make and this is based on yogic psychology okay so this is correlated by

science but you all will see what I mean in a second so the reason we make comparisons is actually to protect ourselves from negative emotion anytime our mind feels negative emotion it actually activates the ego to protect us against it and we sort of see this with a downward comparison because if I'm feeling bad about myself Research into psychology shows us that we make downward comparisons as emotional coping strategies and the yogis would say the same thing so they'd say that if you want to stop making comparisons what you actually need to do is forget

about trying to make the comparison what you need to focus on is your internal emotional state and specifically your negative emotions and there's a really really good example of this if you look at people who go through a breakup one of the things that you'll find is that you feel really really bad about yourself right and then some sometimes you do something that's kind of weird which is that you'll go and you'll stalk your ex's social media and you'll see all the things that your ex is doing and you'll see all of the potential mates

that they're with all the potential Partners they have you'll see them out there having fun and then what you'll do is you'll make a thousand different comparisons with those people and if you kind of think about it like why on Earth are you doing this right is there something almost addictive about it because when you start doing it you feel worse about yourself but you can't stop and this actually has to do with the ego because one of the key things about the ego is it's looking for Conformity it's looking for consistency oftentimes it's looking

for justification so if you're feeling bad about yourself one of the things that your ego will actually do is go out and find some kind of information to confirm the way that you feel about yourself it's almost incredibly validating if you stop and think about it right if I feel like a piece of crap and then I go look at my ex's social media and I see how they're out there having lots of fun it reinforces the idea that I'm a piece of crap it's actually incredibly validating even though it's painful which is exactly why

we do it so if you want to stop making these comparisons what you really need to do is focus on that negative emotion and try to understand okay what can I do to like process that negative emotion what can I do to let go of that negative emotion what can I do to accept that negative emotion because if I let the emotion activate my ego then that'll change my behavior and cause me to make a lot of comparisons so at the end of the day comparisons are something that is are oftentimes uncontrollable we tend to

find that we make them kind of very very addictively we tend to find that when we make comparisons it tends to Rob us of a lot of Joy right so like even when I make make a success when I do something well a comparison can turn a success into a failure by comparing it to someone else so if I get an A minus on a test and someone else gets an A plus suddenly my achievement becomes a failure which is really bizarre and it turns out that people seem to be making more and more comparisons

and I think a big reason for that is social media as we use a lot of social media it sort of activates the part of our brains that allow our brains to make comparisons with these people it tricks our brain into thinking hey this is a fair comparison for me to make and as we start making these comparisons what we tend to find is that they don't actually do what they're originally supposed to do upward comparisons were designed to give us a road map to improve our lives downward comparisons were actually designed to help us

develop an emotional coping strategy that helps us in the short term but as these comparisons get out of control we tend to find that rather than giving us spurring us forward upward comparisons actually decrease our motivation and make us feel stuck and downward comparisons can become sort of a vicious cycle of making comparing myself and feeling Superior to lots of noobs on the internet but not actually changing my life if we want to disarm this we have to understand a little bit about why our mind thinks that this is an appropriate comparison and as we

tunnel down as we're critical of why our mind chooses this person something cool will happen will actually stop to make the we'll stop making the comparison so as we kind of dismantle the justification that I deserve to be compared to this person that we're in the same league I'm not saying that you're better or worse I'm just saying that at the end of the day comparison really isn't appropriate almost really ever and so as we sort of Target why do I think this is an appropriate comparison it'll actually decrease the comparison the second thing to

remember is that comparison is a function of the ahamkar or the ego and that the humgar and ego essentially activate when we experience negative emotion so if we actually Target the negative emotion that's fueling the comparison that'll actually cause the the comparison itself to lose steam because if you kind of think about it when you're happy and content and chilling you're not really making any comparisons at all right if you really stop and think about it what you'll find is you make more comparisons when you yourself are feeling upset so hopefully that's been a little

bit helpful I know that comparisons feel incredibly addictive nowadays I think part of the reason that they're kind of getting out of control is because we don't really understand where they come from what they're designed to do and specifically how they work and if you can understand those things hopefully you can start to overcome them