How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others (and Should You)

“Know thyself” and “Everything is known in comparison” – from these two popular philosophical statements it is not difficult to conclude that a good way to learn something about yourself is to compare yourself with others. The first – according to legend, the inscription on the wall of the temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. The second is attributed to René Descartes and Friedrich Nietzsche, but apparently does not belong to either of them.

The difficulty is that most often we do not just compare – we evaluate and decide who is better. And the very posing of such a question gives rise to anxiety. “How is she better than me?” – yearns for a woman who was abandoned for another. “Why is Pelevin more successful than me?” worries the writer, who sees that sales of his book are not growing …

Most psychotherapists agree that comparing yourself to others is not a healthy activity. And yet we continue. This is partly the fault of modern society, greedy for competition and evaluation. But it didn’t start yesterday.

Instinct or reflex?

It is possible that the instinct of comparison is inherent in the human race – like, for example, the instinct that makes us avoid danger or fear snakes.

“Since ancient times, a person could only survive in his pack, so it was important for him to see who was around and whether they were like him, just like he was like them,” says Gestalt therapist Marina Baskakova. – In addition, with the help of comparison, he determined his place in society. The social hierarchy is also observed in our primate ancestors: in a flock of dominants, it makes louder noise, sits higher, is the first to eat, it has more access to females … We all the time check where our place is, looking around and comparing ourselves with them.

But it is also possible that the habit of relating oneself to someone is a educated reflex. After all, already in early childhood, we begin to compare with others (and often not in our favor). “Look at your brother, he obeys his elders, take an example from him.” “I already knew how to swim when I was your age.” “Masha gets straight A’s, and you?”

Concerned about children, French psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto urged parents to realize that each person is unique from birth, and to abandon comparison, allowing the child to create a positive image of himself. Even earlier, Maria Montessori, an Italian doctor and teacher, the creator of the early education system, according to which each child does what interests him, spoke about the same thing.

Accordingly, either children do something all together and get a common result, or they do different things and the results are not comparable. Thus, comparison becomes simply impossible.

But despite these appeals, in everyday life we ​​seem to be unable to refuse comparisons and assessments: more or less, better or worse … Perhaps the parents are not so to blame. To build our “I”, our personality, we measure ourselves with others, choose role models. Even the life ideals dear to us are borrowed from people whom we respect. And choice inevitably involves comparison.

Necessary for progress

Who you are? Imagine that someone unexpectedly asked you this question. What is the first answer that comes to your mind? With a high probability, it will be associated with the role that you play in the lives of others.

“The whole world is a theater,” said William Shakespeare, and four centuries later this idea was developed by the Canadian-American social psychologist Irving Hoffman. Society, he believed, is a vast theater limited by norms, values, and goals, the achievement of which is considered laudable. In it, we are endowed with multiple identities: husband, wife, parent, lover, employee. We are preoccupied with pleasing others, impressing, letting them know that we are happy, we succeed, or, on the contrary, that we are victims of a cruel fate.

We cannot help but compare ourselves with others, because we need this to understand in which camp we are – successful or unsuccessful. We accept as our own the values ​​of our environment in order to become “ours” in it and advance. At the same time, we often have to hide everything that does not correspond to these values. If I want to be taken seriously by the intellectual community, I can hardly admit that my favorite TV show is “Shop on the Couch.”

It is necessary to compare oneself with others in order to develop, said the American sociologist Leon Festinger, the author of the theory of social comparison. Trying to match up with someone we think is superior to us (upward comparison) maintains our ambition, and success in doing so feeds self-respect. But downward comparison—that is, comparing oneself with the less fortunate members of society—is not useful: it reduces our own failures, because “it can be worse,” and sometimes brings satisfaction, not without gloating.

Today’s social media experts report that we are overwhelmed by the successes of our “friends” posted on Facebook (the perfect vacation, the perfect marriage, the news that their kids passed a tough exam…). Quite possibly, Leon Festinger would have countered that this news can also be encouraging if we are capable of empathy and altruism.

Signs and reality

However, it is useful to think about what we are actually comparing. As a rule, we do not know the real state of affairs, and sometimes we do not even know the people we think about. Only traces of their life are available to our observation: photographs, stories. And in any case, they do not reflect the entire sequence of moments, but only the brightest of them.

In the feed, many personal stories form a shared meta-narrative, and as a result, we have the illusion that something extraordinary happens to others literally every day. Signs replace reality in our perception. But they can affect our sense of self.

“Here we can recall the experiment with roosters conducted by ethologists,” says Marina Baskakova. – Kochet, who occupied the lowest place in the hierarchy, was wearing a large artificial comb. He immediately gained self-confidence and began to peck at other roosters, which he had been afraid of before, and they began to yield to him. When the artificial comb was removed, everything returned to the original situation. And we humans do the same thing. We check our social status all the time by looking at those around us. Our chagrin seems to be in keeping with the fact that we are claiming a higher status in the social hierarchy than we reveal. The need to dominate is a very powerful motivation.”

A lot of things work for this need: expensive watches and cars, branded clothes, and even such not quite material accessories as youthfulness and optimism. It doesn’t look like we’ll be able to stop comparing ourselves to others anytime soon.

But in itself, this habit is not so harmful – “the neurotic belief that if we are not at the top, then we are an empty place is harmful,” emphasizes the Gestalt therapist. If the happiness of others really drives us into depression, perhaps the fact is that we have not yet completely said goodbye to the period when we envied brothers or sisters whom we thought our parents, relatives or teachers treated better than us. Be that as it may, no one on this earth, unless he is a superman, can boast of being completely protected from envy and jealousy.