Why Do I Compare Myself to Other People?

You’re scrolling through social media and see that someone you went to school with has just bought a house. A friend tells you they’ve been promoted. Someone else announces their engagement. Another person seems to be travelling constantly, building a successful career or looking particularly confident and happy. Five minutes ago, you might have felt perfectly okay about your own life. Now, somehow, you feel behind.

Maybe you start wondering whether you should be further ahead in your career, whether everyone else is settling down except you, whether you’re “successful” enough, attractive enough, confident enough, or simply enough.

Comparison can happen remarkably quickly, and sometimes the most frustrating part is that we know it isn’t particularly helpful, yet we seem to do it anyway. So, why do we compare ourselves to other people? Why can somebody else doing well make us feel worse about ourselves?

Comparing yourself is more human than you might think.

We often talk about comparison as though it is a bad habit that we need to learn to stop. Psychologically, however, comparison serves a purpose. In the 1950s, psychologist, Leon Festinger, developed what became known as Social Comparison Theory. The basic idea is that we partly understand and evaluate ourselves by looking at other people.

Think about how difficult it would be to answer questions such as: Am I successful? Am I doing well in my career? Am I attractive? Am I confident? Am I where I should be at this point in my life? There isn’t an objective measuring scale for most of these things. Instead, our brains look for reference points. This is particularly useful when we’re trying to understand something about ourselves that doesn’t have an obvious answer. In fact, social comparison can happen surprisingly automatically - sometimes without us consciously deciding to compare ourselves at all.

So, if you’ve ever thought, “why can’t I just stop comparing myself?”, it might help to recognise that you’re brain isn’t necessarily trying to make you feel bad…it’s trying to work out where you stand. The difficulty is what happens with the information it finds.

We don’t compare ourselves to everyone equally.

Imagine that you’re friend proudly tells you they have just run a marathon in three hours. If running isn’t particularly important to you, you might simply think, “wow, that’s impressive” and then carry on with your day. But, imagine you’ve been training for months to run your own marathon and you’re desperate to achieve a particular time. Suddenly, their achievement might feel very different.

This is one of the interesting things about comparison. The comparisons that hurt most often tell us something about what matters to us.

Psychologist, Abraham Tesser’s, work on self-evaluation, suggested that another person’s success can affect us differently depending on how relevant that particular area is to our own sense of self. If your friend is brilliant at something you don’t particular value in yourself, their success might be easy to celebrate. If they succeed in an area closely connected to how you measure your own worth, however, comparison can become much more uncomfortable. This may help explain why one person’s Instagram account leaves you completely unaffected, while another person’s life seems to press every insecurity you have.

Perhaps, it isn’t simply that you want their life. They represent something you already feel uncertain about in your own.

Why do I always compare myself to people doing better than me?

Psychologists often distinguish between different directions of social comparison. An upward comparison is when we compare ourselves we perceive as doing better than us in some way. A downward comparison is with someone we perceive as worse off. A lateral comparison involves somebody we see as relatively similar to ourselves.

Interestingly, research looking across more than six decades of social comparison studies found that when people were given a choice, they tended to choose upward comparisons. This sounds slightly strange. Why would we voluntarily look towards people who might make us feel worse about ourselves? Upward comparison isn’t inherently negative. Someone further ahead can provide information. They can show us what is possible. They can inspire us, give us ideas or help us understand what we might need to do to achieve something in ourselves.

Seeing someone build a successful business might motivate you to work on yours. Seeing someone confidently speak in public might encourage you to practise. Seeing someone make a significant change in their life might make you realise that change is possible for you too.

The problem comes when “I would like that too” becomes “the fact that I don’t have that means something is wrong with me”. At that point, comparison has stopped being information. It has become judgment.

When their success becomes evidence of your failure.

This is where comparison can become particularly painful.

Imagine your friend gets promoted. There are two separate pieces of information here: (1) Information about them (my friend has been promoted) and (2) A conclusion about you (I’m falling behind).

However, your friend’s promotion doesn’t actually prove the second statement. Your mind has made the connection, and what it connects to it may depend partly on the beliefs you already hold about yourself. If somewhere underneath everything you already worry that you aren’t successful enough, somebody else’s career success may seem to confirm it.

If you’re afraid that you’re unloveable, another engagement announcement might quickly become: “everyone finds someone except me”.

If you feel insecure about your appearance, seeing somebody you perceive as attractive might become: “I wish I looked like that” and then, “I don’t look good enough”.

The comparison hasn’t necessarily created the insecurity from nothing. Sometimes, it has simply found it.

The problem with using someone else’s ruler.

Imagine trying to measure your height using someone else’s ruler. Their ruler starts somewhere completely different from yours. The markings are different. You don’t know where they started, what happened before you picked it up or even whether you’re measuring the same thing. And yet, you use it to decide whether you’re doing well.

We can do something remarkably similar with our lives. You see where somebody is now, but you don’t see every factor that contributed to them getting there.

You might compare your career with somebody who had completely different opportunities, or your relationship with somebody whose priorities have been different from yours, or your confidence with somebody whose experiences have shaped them differently, or your finances with someone whose circumstances you know very little about, or your appearance with an image containing carefully chosen lighting, angles, editing and perhaps dozens of photographs that weren’t posted.

Comparison often gives us information without context - and our minds fill in the missing pieces.

We don’t always fill those missing pieces kindly.

We see somebody’s outcome and compare it with everything we know about ourselves: our doubts, our mistakes, our difficult days, our rejected applications, our insecurities, and our moments when things didn’t go to plan. We’re comparing their outside with our inside. There’s rarely a fair measurement.

Social media gives us a lot more rulers.

Of course, human beings compared themselves with one another long before Instagram existed. However, social media has dramatically increased the number of people available for us to compare ourselves with. Once, our reference points might largely have been family members, friends, colleagues, and people in our community. Now, within ten minutes, we can compare our appearance, career, home, relationships, social life and finances with hundreds of people.

We’re often not seeing a neutral snapshot of their lives. We’re seeing what they chose to show us.

Research examining social comparison while people browsed social media that more frequent and more extreme upward comparisons were associated with immediate declines in self-evaluation, as well as poorer self-esteem, mood and life satisfaction following browsing. People who already had lower self-esteem also appeared particularly vulnerable to making these upward comparisons.

That doesn’t mean social media is automatically bad for our confidence or that everyone responds to it in exactly the same way. The important part may be becoming aware of how you’re using it and what happens inside you while you do.

If you regularly close an app feeling as though everyone else is prettier, happier, more successful, or further ahead than you, that’s useful information, not necessarily about them, about what is happening for you.

So, how do I stop comparing myself?

Perhaps this isn’t quite the right question. If comparison is a normal psychological process, expecting yourself to never compare yourself with another person again is probably unrealistic. Telling yourself, "“stop comparing”, may not get you very far. Instead, the more interesting question might be: what happens after I compare?

Imagine seeing someone announce that they’ve bought their first home. Your mind says, “they’re younger than me and they’ve already bought a house”. Pause there. That’s the comparison. What comes next? “I should have achieved that by now. I’m terrible with money. Everyone is moving forward except me. I’ve wasted too much time. I’m failing.” Those are no longer observations about the other person. They’re beliefs and judgments about you. That’s where curiosity can become much more useful than simply telling yourself not to compare. You might instead ask: Why has this particular comparison affected me? What does this person have that feels important to me? Is that actually true? Whose definition of success am I using here? And perhaps most importantly, is this comparison showing me something I’m lacking, or something I value?

There is an important difference. Seeing someone with close friendships and feeling envious doesn’t necessarily mean you’re inadequate. Perhaps connection matters deeply to you. Feeling something when someone changes careers doesn’t automatically mean you’re behind. Perhaps part of you wants change too. Feeling jealous of somebody who seems confident doesn’t mean you’ll never feel this way. Perhaps confidence is something you’d like to develop. Sometimes comparison can be uncomfortable information about what we want. When we become curious about it rather than immediately using it against ourselves, it can tell us something useful.

You are more than your position in somebody else’s race.

There will probably always be someone who has more experience than you, earns more than you, looks different from you, reached a milestone earlier than you or appears more confident than you. There will also always be people who have less. Neither tells you very much about your worth. Other people’s lives can give us information, inspiration and perspective, but they were never designed to be measuring sticks for our own.

So, perhaps the next time you notice yourself comparing, you don’t need to immediately tell yourself to stop. Instead, notice where your mind goes next. The comparison itself might not be the most important part. The meaning you give it often is.

Exploring confidence and self-esteem with The Mind Thread.

If comparison regularly leaves you questioning yourself, feeling behind or wondering whether you’re good enough, it may be worth exploring what sits underneath those feelings.

Through psychology-informed life coaching, I offer a confidential, compassionate and non-judgemental space to explore things like confidence, self-esteem, self-doubt, comparison and the beliefs you hold about yourself.

Rather than simply telling yourself to “be more confident”, or to “stop comparing yourself”, we can get curious about where those patterns come from, what keeps them going and what might help you relate to yourself differently.

If you’d like to find out whether one-to-one support might be right for you, you can book a free 15-minute discovery call with The Mind Thread.

You don’t have to become someone else to feel better about who you are.