Can you stop comparing yourself to others?

People often say, "Don't compare yourself to others." But I catch myself doing it all the time.

Open social media and someone my age has started a company, someone is traveling, someone runs every morning. When I close the app, I feel a little smaller.

Would life be easier if I could stop comparing? And can I even stop?

We compare because there's no yardstick

In 1954, the psychologist Leon Festinger proposed "social comparison theory" [1]. People want an accurate sense of their own abilities and opinions. But when there's no clear standard, the idea goes, people check where they stand by comparing themselves with others.

How fast you are over 100 meters, for example, is easy to judge because there are records to go by. But "Is my writing any good?" or "Am I working the right way?" have no fixed yardstick. So we look at the people around us.

Seen that way, comparison is less a bad habit and more a mechanism people use to know themselves. Maybe the reason you can't stop isn't that your willpower is weak.

Social media is a place where you mostly see people above you

Even if comparison is natural, how you feel depends on who you compare with. Comparing yourself with people who seem better off is called "upward comparison."

In a study of college students, heavier Facebook users tended to have lower self-esteem, and that link was explained by more chances to compare themselves with people who seemed better off on social media [2].

What shows up on social media is usually someone's best moments. You know every part of your own days, while all you see of them is the cut-down highlights. The match is uneven before it even starts.

That said, social media isn't uniformly bad. A review of the research found that "passive use," just scrolling through posts, tends to go with lower well-being, while "active use," interacting with people, can sometimes raise well-being through a sense of connection [3]. The problem may be less social media itself and more using it only to scroll and compare.

Don't stop. Choose who you compare with

If I can't erase comparison, I want to choose again who I compare myself with.

• Compare with yesterday's self: same yardstick, same conditions
• Compare with the self you want to become: as I wrote in "What kind of person do you want to be?", the self-image you decide on first becomes the yardstick
• If you compare with others, do it to learn how: don't stop at "they're amazing"; look at what they're actually doing

Feeling down after looking at someone ahead of you and learning from someone ahead of you are both "comparison." What's different is what you do afterward.

You can't erase comparison. But you can lower its priority

In "You don't stop caring about being disliked. It just drops in priority," I wrote that other people's opinions don't disappear, but they move back when you have a more important purpose.

Comparison is probably the same. The urge to compare doesn't go away. But when it's clear where you're headed, the gap between you and others drops down the list of things you worry about.