How to compare yourself with others fairly

Need to know

The inevitability of ageing stood out to me in a series of incidents. Some friends from college were on their way over for a weekend visit, and I decided to grab a glass of water before they arrived. This seemingly ordinary task turned out to be a harsh reality check. As I walked to the kitchen, I glimpsed my greying hair in the hallway mirror. Who was that old-timer? When I reached for a glass on a high shelf, I grimaced from the back pain that comes from such an apparently Herculean feat for a man my age. And when I finished my water and went to put the empty glass in the dishwasher, I had to grab my glasses to determine whether the blurry text atop the appliance said ‘clean’. Yikes.

Most of the time, it’s easy enough to shrug off these annoyances of ageing. This day was different. For the past few days, I had been thinking about life since college, how I’d changed, and how my friends had, too. As I prepared to reminisce and catch up with everyone, I wondered: ‘Has time been as cruel to them?’

I was pleased to get a break from my woes once I saw my friends. But amid the stories of glory days and celebrating new accomplishments, my mind wandered. I was, of course, genuinely thrilled for everyone. I also wondered how I measured up. Were my friends doing better than me – not just in youthfulness, but in their personal successes and career achievements, too? And was I selfish for thinking this way? As the weekend was wrapping up, one of my friends who always seemed to have things figured out for himself took me aside and shared how bad he felt for constantly comparing himself with everyone else. I confided that I had done the same thing.

In fact, social comparison is normal, and we all do it. It can even be adaptive, particularly when we use it for aspirational purposes. Why then do so many of us struggle with certain comparisons? The answer is that our responses to these expected comparisons can be much more destructive than the comparisons themselves. For example, in each of these scenarios, there are both helpful and unhelpful ways to respond:

• Noticing your fitness-conscious neighbour ride their bike to work as you take the car each day.
• Listening to your friends talk about their international travel plans when you haven’t travelled in years.
• Getting an update about the new book your colleague just wrote, or the new job they’ve landed.

A neutral assessment of the differences between your own and others’ possessions, experiences or accomplishments could help you explore what those differences mean to you and what, if anything, you’d like to do about them. But reacting to perceived differences with self-defeating thoughts about your own worth can have destructive effects. The emotional consequences of these thoughts might include guilt for not working hard enough, irritability toward those with ‘unfair’ advantages, or despair over the seeming futility of closing the gap. The behavioural consequences could include endless striving to match or exceed others; avoiding, challenging or gossiping about people with advantages; or giving up on activities that previously led to pleasure or a sense of accomplishment.

Instead of focusing on the unavoidable tendency to compare yourself with others, considering how you respond to those comparisons offers the benefit of a greater sense of hope and personal control. Noticing destructive patterns of thinking, emotional reactivity and behaviour creates an opportunity for change and growth. It can allow you to practise more realistic and useful ways of thinking, greater understanding and acceptance of your emotions, and more effective behaviours.

As a clinical psychologist, I have seen how overwhelming social comparison can feel. Those struggling with depression, for example, share that their observations of others reinforce long-standing, damaging beliefs about themselves (‘I’m not normal’, ‘I’m a failure’, ‘I’ve never accomplished anything’) or others (‘Nobody else struggles with the problems I have’, ‘Everyone but me is having fun or advancing in their career’). In contrast, with anxiety disorders, social comparison can lead to unhelpful future-oriented thinking about possible threats (‘No matter what I do, I’ll never measure up’ or ‘If I can’t be more like other people, the social fallout will be devastating’).

Ideas like these tend to be unrealistic and biased toward the negative. I’m not suggesting that the antidote is to focus only on the positive and to tell yourself that everything will always work out fine. I am proposing that it’s helpful to recognise any biases in your thinking and to respond with more realistic, specific and useful ways of thinking. A person who believes ‘I will never have as many friends as other people do’, for example, has few options for coping or problem-solving. A more nuanced understanding (such as, ‘I haven’t connected with my friends in a while because I’ve been so busy, and I worry that they’re mad at me’) makes it easier to consider a productive response to the situation.

In this Guide, I’ll explain how you can use the principles of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to recognise and manage the damaging thoughts, feelings and behaviours that can make social comparison so difficult. The following suggestions will help you to take a step back from well-learned but unhelpful responses. With practice, you can readily catch your emotion-driven impulses to repeat old patterns and feel empowered to make more productive, compassionate and rewarding choices.

What to do

There are three foundational strategies that we will cover in this Guide:

• thinking about yourself and others in more realistic and useful ways;
• relating to your emotions with greater objectivity, acceptance and self-compassion; and
• replacing damaging patterns of behaviour with actions that promote growth and boost confidence.

But first, I will encourage you to…

Normalise social comparison

When I talk with clients about their struggles with social comparison, they often begin with a self-critical take, expressed as if it were an admission of guilt:

Client: ‘I know I shouldn’t compare myself with other people so much.’

Me: ‘Why not?’

Client: ‘It’s really bad to be preoccupied with what everyone else is doing. I need to just focus on myself.’

I understand this line of thinking. It crosses my mind, too. But is it realistic or fair to believe that you ‘shouldn’t’ compare yourself with others, that it’s ‘bad’ when you do, or that you ‘need to’ focus only on yourself? If these ideas are true, then everybody else in the world who makes social comparisons deserves the same harsh judgment, including me. Should we all be ashamed of ourselves for breaking these arbitrary rules? Let’s consider some more relaxed and compassionate perspectives:

• Social comparison is inevitable in a social world.
• Comparing ourselves with others can be neutral, or even beneficial, rather than bad.
• Your responses to a comparison could be more significant than the comparison itself.
• When these responses cause distress or impairment, you can try to be more balanced in your thinking and selective in how you respond.

Consider reminding yourself of these more flexible and less judgmental perspectives if you forget to normalise social comparison and feel bad because of it.

Break down a recent comparison – and look for patterns

If you already know that you’re stuck in a frustrating habit of comparing yourself unfavourably with others, you might have an understandable urge to get down to business and do something about it. My suggestion is to, first, slow things down and check in with yourself. See if you can think holistically about the interplay of your thoughts, feelings and behaviours in these situations.

Consider the following prompts – and, to make this process more effective, write or type your responses to them:

• Write in detail about a recent time when you struggled with social comparison. Where were you? What was happening? Whom did you notice? What did you compare?
• What thoughts did you have about others? What did you think about yourself?
• How did these thoughts affect you emotionally? What did you feel? Guilty, anxious, angry, embarrassed, confused, sad or something else? How did you know you felt that way?
• What did you do or not do? Be specific. Did you try to argue with your thoughts, get down on yourself, criticise or inflate the value of others, attempt to remind yourself of your qualities, try to outdo other people, ask someone else for reassurance, distract yourself or leave the situation?
• Did this help? How? Did it make things worse? In what way?
• Was this experience unusual or consistent with a pattern? Does it happen only in certain situations or in most areas of your life?

This exercise is meant to help you both summarise unhelpful patterns and explore options for change. As you work through the exercises in this Guide, you can revisit this summary and consider your alternatives. It can also help you isolate your most problematic responses to social comparisons so you can later give more attention to those that are particularly distressing or resistant to change. You may find it helpful to repeat this exercise to explore your responses in other situations, either to bring more attention to a pervasive pattern or to see how your responses to social comparisons differ across situations.

Counter overly negative thoughts with realistic, useful ones

Now that you’ve identified in detail some recent or habitual challenges, let’s consider any biased or excessively negative ways of thinking that make comparing yourself with others so difficult. In CBT, these thoughts and deeply held beliefs are known as cognitive distortions.

One cognitive distortion is all-or-nothing thinking, or understanding experiences in overly simple, dichotomous ways. To highlight the problem with all-or-nothing thinking, consider the (fictional) case of Krista, a first-year college student, who earned a much lower grade than her roommate, Sarah, in the biochemistry course they took together. When Krista attempted to make sense of their different grades, she concluded that ‘things just come easy for Sarah’ and ‘I clearly don’t have what it takes’ to succeed in science courses. Krista settled on all-or-nothing explanations that left her feeling stuck. Embedded in her conclusions were the assumptions that schoolwork is either easy or hard for students, and that people either do or don’t have the ability to succeed in science courses. If these ideas were true, then Krista would have very little hope of raising her grades.

But what if the explanations for the different grades were more nuanced and potentially responsive to change? Realistic alternatives to Krista’s self-critical thoughts might include: ‘We spent too much time chatting in our study group’ and ‘I do better on exams when I outline textbook chapters, which I didn’t always do in this course.’ Krista might also benefit from alternative explanations for Sarah’s performance, such as ‘Sarah took a chemistry course in high school, so she probably knew some of the material already’ or ‘She went to the professor to ask questions about course material.’ These ideas suggest that the differences Krista observed may not have been as large as she originally believed, which could help to reduce the emotional impact of the situation. They also give her hope and the sense that she could change her preparations to narrow those differences even more.

Let’s consider some other examples of possible comparisons, along with the cognitive distortions each one illustrates – and some more realistic and useful ‘comebacks’. As you read through these, I suggest you write down any examples of your own unhelpful thinking patterns that seem to emerge when you compare yourself with others. You can also add some comebacks that you’d like to use when social comparison gets the best of you:

• Everybody is happier than I am.

This is an example of overgeneralisation: using limited evidence to draw conclusions about all observations or experiences. A realistic comeback is to be more specific about the comparison (‘I’m really just thinking about a few of my friends, rather than everybody’) and to consider an alternative explanation that better captures what’s happening (eg, ‘they’re selectively sharing their happiest moments on social media’).

• My friend is so much more outgoing than I am – it’s just a matter of time before he rejects me.

This involves catastrophising, or predicting the worst possible outcome. Here you could consider reasons why this worst-case scenario is unlikely: eg, ‘We’ve been close friends for many years despite our differences.’ You could then follow up with a useful prompt: ‘I want to make a point of making plans with him to show how much our friendship means to me.’

• I get more anxious than my teammates, which shows how weak I am.

This is emotional reasoning, or believing that the presence of difficult emotions means something must be seriously wrong. A realistic and useful comeback to this thought could be to more kindly acknowledge this emotional experience: ‘I get energised before competition, which helps me, but I also tend to be preoccupied with how I feel. Accepting this and shifting my focus to the game will help me relate more effectively to my emotions.’

• My brother is younger than me and already bought a home. I should be able to do that by now.

This sort of should/have to/must statement establishes unrealistically rigid rules for yourself or others. An alternative take might be: ‘It would be nice if I could move faster toward buying a home. But I’ve been focused on other goals, and it’s OK to have a different timeline or priorities.’

• I can’t believe I yelled during my work meeting. I’m the only one on my team who can’t manage their emotions.

This reflects personalisation – blaming yourself for negative events you didn’t cause, or overlooking external forces. To be more balanced in your thinking, you might remind yourself that others in the meeting were interrupting and making dismissive comments, and follow up with a useful thought to talk to colleagues about improving workplace communication.

Do you find yourself thinking in some of these biased, unhelpful ways when you compare yourself with others? When this happens, explore alternative ideas that more accurately explain your experience or help you problem-solve. When you’re exploring these comebacks, be careful about trying to counter overly negative thinking with overly positive thinking that doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny. You’re likely to be understandably sceptical about ideas like ‘Everything will work out’ or ‘I can do anything I set my mind to.’ Instead, try to think more realistically. When you consider options for behaviour change (which we’ll get to shortly), your more realistic thinking will help guide you toward useful thinking about plans, problem-solving and taking action.

A final point here: many people get frustrated with themselves when they try to change their cognitive distortions, only to find that their minds keep going back to the same unhelpful thoughts. Cognitive distortions are often well-learned patterns of thinking, unintentionally rehearsed for years, and they take time to lose their strength. Keep patiently acknowledging any overly negative thoughts, without judging yourself for having them. Then, encourage yourself once more to consider alternative ideas.

Choose to relate to the difficult emotions in a different way

No matter how sophisticated your cognitive coping strategies are, the emotional impact of social comparison can still be uncomfortable. In the previous example of Krista, the reality check and thinking about how to do better in school are great initial steps toward coping more effectively. But they might not eliminate her anxiety about the prospect of never doing as well as her peers, her guilt for not trying harder, or her irritability from believing her roommate has unfair advantages. Even after disputing and revising initial beliefs, emotions can linger, and it’s hard to know what to do with them.

I previously mentioned the problem of emotional reasoning: judging an emotion to be more meaningful or deserving of engagement than it actually is. If you believe that the emotions you’re feeling exist to remind you of some very serious, problematic differences between you and other people, then you might impulsively attempt to resolve the feelings by ruminating or worrying, criticising yourself or responding in other ways that end up doing more harm than good.

Consider whether it’s possible for you to relate to these emotions in a different way: with greater objectivity, acceptance and self-compassion. This can free you up to be more productive in the choices you make when you inevitably compare yourself with others. As difficult as the emotions stemming from social comparison can be, you’re not required to prioritise them, or to let them dictate how you respond.

Since many of us try to align our actions with our emotions, the concept of separating them might seem counterintuitive. Practise acknowledging and accepting these emotions, just as they are, without judgment (eg, ‘I’m feeling ____ right now, and that’s OK’), before you redirect your attention to how best to respond. This is an empowering way to demonstrate to yourself that you can be patient and supportive with yourself when social comparison drives difficult feelings – and you can respond with a choice that prioritises understanding, problem-solving and growth.

Pinpoint the behavioural problem

Now that you’ve considered the cognitive and emotional aspects of social comparison, let’s give more attention to behaviour.

First, consider the example of Paul, who was promoted to a coveted position at work but had trouble embracing it. He became resentful when Sam, who was hired after he was, got a similar promotion. Paul felt that it was much easier for Sam to get promoted. He responded by making critical comments and jokes about Sam to his friends at work. Although he got a brief sense of satisfaction when his friends laughed or agreed with him, he always felt awful about it shortly afterwards. He privately recognised that his gossiping was petty and unprofessional. Unfortunately, the pattern persisted, which led to a formal reprimand from his boss. Feeling even worse about his position at work, he started to avoid work-sponsored events, particularly if he knew Sam would be there.

I hope it’s evident that, if Paul wanted to address this destructive pattern, his most productive response would be to change his behaviour. Gossiping and avoiding have done nothing but make his situation worse.

In a different situation, you might react with behaviours that are similarly unhelpful, such as:

• taking your feelings out on others by disparaging or avoiding them;
• trying to escape the emotions by distracting yourself;
• unfairly criticising yourself; or
• withdrawing from activities that typically bring pleasure or accomplishment.

The temporary sense of relief you might experience from these responses can trick you into believing that what you’re doing is at least somewhat helpful. You run the risk of dependency – making these same unhelpful choices again and again whenever you struggle with social comparison.

Earlier in this Guide, I asked you to note the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that reliably emerge in situations where you unfavourably compare yourself with others. Revisit the behavioural responses that you listed and distinguish those that seem helpful or unhelpful. As you review the unhelpful behaviours, give some thought to what’s behind them. Are there certain triggers that move you toward unhelpful choices? Do you experience temporary emotional benefits like pleasure or relief from these actions? What are some reasons to change these responses? What do you think would happen if you stopped acting on the impulse to turn to these behaviours?

Trying to change these behavioural responses – our next step – might seem inauthentic or unrealistic, particularly when the thoughts and feelings linked to them feel so powerful. That reaction is fair and understandable. But rather than encouraging ‘fake’ behaviour, I’m suggesting a more helpful pattern of behaviour that can be implemented gradually, modified as needed, and used to promote new, more realistic and useful ways of thinking.

Commit to small, specific and meaningful changes

Many people combat problem behaviours by attempting to simply reduce or eliminate them. The trouble with this approach is that success depends primarily on willpower or self-control, which is quite difficult to maintain when your impulse to revisit unhelpful habits is strong.

Instead, focus on increasing the frequency of alternative, desirable responses to social comparison. This strategy will allow you to experience more rewarding outcomes from the choices you make, and those outcomes will reinforce your commitment to the new behaviours.

Go back to the unhelpful responses to social comparison that you identified earlier. Then ask yourself: ‘What will I do instead?’ To answer this question, consider these three principles:

1. Choose an adaptive behaviour that satisfies the intended purpose of the unhelpful behaviour.
2. Prioritise what therapists call ‘opposite action’ by choosing a new behaviour that contradicts the difficult emotion or destructive impulse.
3. Make small, specific changes, and do so consistently.

Here’s an example to help you put these ideas into practice. Suppose you regularly start your day by scrolling through social media to see what your friends are up to. The posts and stories about exciting vacations and career achievements leave you feeling sad about the comparative absence of excitement in your life. You also feel annoyed by the frequency of these updates. Consequently, you start to distance yourself from these friends by declining their invitations to hang out, which you hope will minimise the emotional impact of what you see online. But soon you’re dealing with a new problem, a sense of isolation and despair, that you try to minimise by once again going to your apps for updates.

To find suitable replacement behaviours, you could start by thinking about 1) the intended purpose of the unhelpful behaviours. If you keep returning to social media first thing each morning because you’re feeling alone and curious about your friends’ activities, you could address that need by getting out of bed and, once you’re up and moving, texting or calling to connect with them directly.

Another option is to 2) do the opposite of what your emotions seem to demand. In this example, the sadness you feel about missing out leads you to ruminate about your regrets and avoid your friends. To employ ‘opposite action’, you could instead reach out to your friends to schedule exciting activities to do together. And to counter the sense of annoyance about their posts, you could actively show a polite interest in what your friends have been doing, and also make a point of keeping them up to date when something is new or interesting in your own life. Opposite actions like these tend to yield a sense of agency, more meaningful social connections, and involvement in activities that boost your mood.

Finally, employ the strategy of 3) making small, specific and consistent changes. To help you refine your plan for new behaviours, ask yourself: ‘What’s the smallest, clearly defined change I know I can commit to that I’d still consider to be meaningful?’ and make that your priority. If we apply this to the social media scenario, just a few options for replacement behaviours include: texting one or two friends while drinking coffee in the morning; making a list of local restaurants, concerts or other activities that would be fun to experience with friends; or taking 10 minutes after dinner each night to journal about recent successes, interests or other things that could be shared with friends.

Choose behavioural changes to fit your own situation, taking action in areas of your life that are personally significant to you. Suppose, for example, that your neighbours participate in charitable volunteering, and you think of yourself as ‘selfish’ for not joining them. Committing to action in the domain of community service would not only be a meaningful response, it would also run counter to your critical self-judgment. In other words, it’s hard to maintain the view that you’re selfish when you engage in selfless acts.

Here are some of the domains in which you might compare yourself with others, and examples of specific responses that could be personally relevant, aspirational and productive:

• Social: following through on commitments to others; building social skills by asking questions, showing interest or sharing details about your life; being assertive about your preferences, feelings and limits; acknowledging others’ accomplishments; or attending meetings for an organisation or hobby.
• Personal growth: building a skill by completing online tutorials, watching videos, getting lessons, playing a sport or taking a class.
• Conscientiousness: prioritising unpleasant but important work, school or household responsibilities that you’d normally procrastinate on.
• Health: engaging in dietary, fitness, medical or other self-care activities.
• Community service: seeking local opportunities for volunteering, activism, sharing knowledge or mentoring.
• Vocational: developing your résumé, looking for work, seeking a promotion, networking, asking for feedback, giving a presentation or taking steps to start a small business.

Begin by identifying one or two small changes in one or two of these domains that you believe will help to counter the cognitive and emotional effects of previous, unhelpful responses to social comparison. Remember that commitment and practice are more important than making big changes. Behaviour change is like building a muscle, and you have to do your ‘reps’ to see the results of your efforts. Try to engage in these behaviours several times a week for at least a few weeks to see for yourself whether your changes make a difference.

To demonstrate your commitment to change, I recommend taking the time to write or type clear descriptions of your behavioural goals. Then, add them to a calendar, noting days, times and durations for when you intend to practise them. This will eliminate the need to remember, worry or overthink, so you can direct your attention toward the behaviours themselves.

Finally, remember that behaviour drives cognition and emotion. Putting serious effort toward acquiring more useful patterns of behaviour will only enhance the benefits of the exercises I shared earlier in this Guide – and contribute to longer-lasting improvements in how you respond to social comparison.

Links & books

In this episode of the No Stupid Questions podcast, Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth discuss staying mindful, not judgmental, when comparing yourself with others, and the importance of motivational responses.

The psychologist Leon Festinger developed a theory of social comparison in 1954 that has been widely discussed and studied. This video from Benjamin K’s Personal Power channel on YouTube provides an accessible summary of Festinger’s theory.

Kristin Neff’s self-compassion website includes exercises and suggestions to help you change your critical self-talk, treat yourself the way you would a close friend, and otherwise go easy on yourself when you get stuck in unhelpful social comparison patterns.

Behavioural activation is an evidence-based treatment for depression that involves systematically increasing involvement in activities that lead to pleasure and accomplishment. This overview of behavioural activation from the University of Michigan includes examples of values, goals and activities that you can use when you want to turn demotivating social comparisons into aspirational action.

Envy is one of the powerful emotions that people sometimes experience when comparing their own lives with someone else’s. If you know that you struggle with this emotion or want to learn more about it, check out this previous Psyche Guide by Josh Gressel, ‘How to Put Your Envy to Good Use’ (2023).