Comparison: The Thief of Joy

In basic psychology, there’s a concept that every emotion, even the uncomfortable ones, brings us some type of benefit. So for example, sadness, feeling nervous, anger and grief all serve us in some type of positive way. When sadness turns into depression, anger into wall-hitting and nerves into anxiety - that’s when it’s a problem.

What about jealousy? What about the tendency that we have as people to feel a certain kind of way about people who are succeeding in areas that we’re not?

If you break it down, you can understand that without comparison - without looking at how the people around us are doing and comparing, maybe we wouldn’t be as motivated to succeed. Additionally, imagine a world without jealousy, would we be able to identify what we want? One might even go as far as to say that taking the time to explore what you’re jealous of can be a great way to identify some goals for yourself.

However, despite some of the benefits comparison might provide, we are living in a time where it is often a major contributor to one’s mental health.

One of the first questions a therapist will often ask their client when they describe symptoms of anxiety, depression, anger issues or stress management concerns, is “How can you describe what your symptoms mean to you?” In other words, when you say that you’re feeling depressed, let’s talk about what that means to you? Is that sadness? Is that emotional fatigue? emptiness? What are we looking at?

One of the most frequently mentioned issues that is brought up in a therapy room in the context of describing a symptom like depression or anxiety is comparison.

There’s really no question why.

We live in a world where social media and technology offer people the opportunity to pick and choose what image of themselves they would like to portray to the world and the audience now has more access to observe these portrayals as frequently as they like. The conversation about the correlation between the culture of today’s society, social media, technology and jealousy is one that can fill pages. It exists and the reasons are plentiful.

Because of that, it’s important for people to be able to understand and be mindful of why comparison can be absolute poison to the human psyche (and often totally illogical to do).

1) When you don’t know the whole story, how can you compare?: Let’s say you’re looking around at other people your age who are further along in their careers. It’s very easy to tell yourself that they all have it better than you and that therefore you should feel bad about yourself.

Can we argue against the fact that a lot of people your age are actually ahead of you in their careers? No, that might be true. Can we argue that you shouldn’t want to be where they are at in their careers? Of course not! That’s a fair goal. But when the comparative thinking turns into a depressive or self-loathing thought, a couple of unfairly self-deprecating dynamics are playing out. For one, you don’t know what else anybody has going on in their lives. To build the narrative of “they’re all more successful then me” or “they’re all happier then me” is an absolutely unfair assumption to make for no other reason then you simply cannot measure an objective “success” or “happiness” and you don’t know what areas of your life they would look at and see that you’re ahead of them! Life doesn’t work on a scale of 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. It’s not linear like that. If you want to say that you wish you had something somebody else has, what’s the problem with that? We all want different things. It’s when the false narrative is developed where comparison can become poison.

2) It’s a never ending rabbit-hole: If you’re somebody whose looking at others and feeling bad that they’re at a place in life that you’re not, or they have things that you want, when does that stop? Won’t there always be somebody who has more? (check out a bit more on this topic here! https://www.dinovitzcounseling.com/blog/findingthebalancebetweenselfdevelopment)

Obviously, nobody has it all. So if the mindset you’re going to buy into is the mindset of not being happy when others are ahead of the game or achieving and obtaining things you aren’t - when will it stop?

The solution is to learn how flawed comparative thinking can be and recognize that you can be happy with where you’re at despite knowing where anybody else might be. It’s about learning how to be present in the moment and further recognizing that the time you have is the time you have. Does it make sense to undermine your self-esteem and worth because there are other people who have accomplished things you would like to?

It’s generally the people who learn how to appreciate their own process and recognize it for being exactly what it is - a process, who find themselves enjoying who they are and their lives. It’s often the one’s who spend their brain-space focusing on where they stand on the totem pole of status, prestige, family, wealth income etc. etc. who struggle to take advantage of their life experience.