Comparing yourself to others: are you leaping with inspiration or twisted with envy?
6 ways to feel more positive about other people's success, and blaze your own path
Follow your own path
Ah your hopes and dreams. That vision of you in the future as a changemaker, adventurer or just plain happy. Then you go onto Instagram and see all the shining examples of people living your dream or being the future you. Does it make you feel good or bad? Do you feel inspired or defeated? Excited or jealous? Research suggests that if you are someone that has a tendency towards comparing yourself to others, you are more likely to end up feeling bad. On the other hand, if you are not someone that tends to compare yourself to others, you are more likely to feel good when you see other people’s positive posts.
Social Comparison Theory
We are social animals and according to Social Comparison Theory, looking towards others is a useful way for us to learn about ourselves. But sometimes if what we learn is that everyone else is better off than we are, that can lead to feeling bitter, anxious, envious and all sorts of bad. And research has found that using social media can be associated with the belief that others are better off than you are.
Emotion Contagion
However, there is another way that looking towards others can affect the way that we feel, and that is through emotion contagion. This is when feelings seems to spread between people. You might have heard about mirror neurons, which are neurons in the brain that are usually mentioned in relation to our ability to experience empathy. They activate the parts in our own brain that reflect what we are seeing in others, including emotions. Just as social comparison can make you feel bad in response to a stranger’s Instagram post about their success, emotion contagion can make you feel good.
Some people are more likely to compare themselves to others and pay more attention to information that can be used for social comparison in general. If this is you, or you suspect you might do it more than is helpful, read on and we’ll see if we can find a perspective that helps you manage it.
In this article I’ll share 6 ways to manage unwelcome feelings in response to someone else’s triumph so that you can move forward with your own goals.
She is a queen - she has everything on a silver spoon! Oh wait it’s her 3 year old’s plastic tiara and a bathroom selfie
1.Empathy: choose contagion
Cultivating empathy is one way to shift yourself towards contagion instead of comparison. Engage those mirror neurons, and attempt to connect with the human in all their complexity.
Being human like you they will also have stuff to deal with. So feel empathy for that: imagine what they’ve been through and applaud the fact that right now things appear to be going well for them.
Just looking at the statistics for things like mental health problems or major life stressors, the chances are that as much as things look rosy for that person, they have been through, are going through or are about to go through something challenging. Life goes through phases. There will be phases of failure and phases of success. Phases of peace and phases of drama. People and life are not static. Apart from the major drama, the normal human will also go through times where the rug is pulled out from under them - your car breaks down, you lose your phone, your child is sick, you miss out on the job offer– and probably all in the same week, because sometimes life does that.
It’s easy to forget that other people go through this too, either because they are deliberately showing you the more polished side of their life, or that in those hard times they are simply too busy dealing with the aftermath, or recovering, and they’re not thinking about posting updates on social media or arranging to meet up with you and tell you all about it. By the time you see them or they are back online, things have blown over, they’ve moved on, they’ve got perspective, they are now absorbed with their new plan, success, idea etc. You don’t necessarily know what or when people face their challenges, but rest assured, everyone has them.
Being human, it’s unlikely the person you’ve put on a pedestal feels good and confident all the time. It’s normal for confidence to fluctuate and that is true as much for the person on the pedestal as it is for you. Even if you can’t see it, make an effort to feel it. Remember Luisa in Encanto? The strong one. In her song ‘Surface Pressure’ she reveals that despite presenting herself as being together, and mentally and physically strong, she was really feeling the pressure and wanted a break. But her sense of self-worth is tied up in her ability to keep going. According to one therapist, her song is ‘relatable to many who experience high functioning anxiety.’
So try flipping it this way, by seeing others as having it all together, perfect, confident, successful, you are putting unrealistic expectations on them. I’m not suggesting you go and say to them ‘C’mon tell me the truth, it’s all just an act, you’re really miserable aren’t you?’ but just remember they are human and complex and unique like you. This brings us to my next point…
We are all human - no need to put anyone on a pedestal. Photo by Pavel Nekoranec on Unsplash
2.Appreciate uniqueness
We can learn a bit by looking at other people, but not that much because we are all unique. People and their lives are composed of an infinite number of factors: each gene, each gut bacterium, each conversation, each time they practised: everything combines to create the completely unique person, with their beliefs and values, and their current circumstances. And it could all change by tomorrow anyway. All you can do is try to understand yourself. What is the current status of your talents? What is realistic within your present circumstances? What or who supports you? How strong is your inner game? By all means have people that inspire you or that you admire, but the most you can do is become your own version of them anyway – it is literally impossible to be them! - so focus on understanding where you are and how you want to show up as the unique individual that you are.
Get to know yourself. Photo by Caroline Veronez on Unsplash
3.Practise humility
So if you’re going to focus on developing unique ‘you’, one of the first steps might be an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses. Generally humans are not very good at this and tend to badly over- and under-estimate both strengths and weaknesses. However, people with more humility are usually more accurate. If you have humility, you will also be more able to celebrate others’ success without feeling that it says anything about your lack of success. It’s about having the ability to focus on yourself AND others rather than overly focussing on one or the other. Have a look at my previous blog post about humility for more about how to cultivate humility and why it can help.
4.Cultivate a Growth Mindset
So I said that people are not good at accurately assessing their own strengths and weaknesses. Actually, research shows that when you look closer at the data, most of that poor ability is accounted for by people with a fixed mindset, and people with a growth mindset are actually remarkably accurate. Growth mindset essentially means that you believe growth is possible, that you don’t have set qualities or talents from birth to death. So with this mindset, you can accurately and non-judgementally assess your strengths and weaknesses so you that you can develop, harness and grow.
If someone thinks they have already arrived at a place of enlightenment and achieved the pinnacle of success, or if they have managed to portray that to you, you can pretty safely take that with a pinch of salt. Learning, self-development and personal growth is the lifelong mission of someone with a true growth mindset.
If you are comparing yourself to others and getting disappointed about your lack of success, it suggests that you want something that you don’t have right now. So whether it’s about making a change, stepping up, reaching out, making a difference or having an adventure, to get somewhere new you will probably have to go through times of self-doubt and not feeling confident. Developing new skills, having new experiences, facing new challenges, means there will be times where you don’t have a clue what you’re doing, you will make mistakes, you will feel unconfident, you will look and feel stupid. You will not look or feel like you’ve ‘got it all together’. That’s the point. Those successful people have been through the same curve. Then when you finally work it out, you can rest and enjoy the security and comfort of mastery for a while, but at some point it will be time to push yourself again. One of the 5 ways to wellbeing is keep learning. And in order to learn, you have to come face to face with things you can’t yet do and don’t yet know.
Learning something new. Photo by Danilo Batista on Unsplash
5. Develop grit
In her book Grit, psychologist Angela Duckworth recounts the findings from years of research about the importance of ‘grit’. She defines this as passion plus perseverance and argues that this, not talent or luck or anything else is the combination that makes high achievers so special. Part of what enables this is having a very clear idea of what they want and direction, which brings us back to the idea of knowing yourself and what you want. The other part is simply not seeing failure as a reason to stop.
So when you see someone who is as successful as you want to be, you are probably looking at someone who has had more failures than you.
Coming back again to growth mindset, Carol Dweck, the scientist behind the concept, recalls working with children on some really challenging puzzles and noticed that when they couldn’t yet solve the problems, “Not only weren’t they discouraged by failure, they didn’t even think they were failing. They thought they were learning.” I recently heard the idea that when developing projects, the ideas are seeds and if they don’t grow they are metaphorically put into the compost, with the idea that they are not wasted, but might fertilise future projects. Failure is a loaded word, that immediately brands an outcome with a negative perspective. Considering all the research these days about how useful failure is for learning and growth, as well as being a key ingredient in creativity, perhaps we should come up with a new word that doesn’t immediately put us in a negative frame of mind. It’s hard to say 'don’t see your failure as negative' when the word itself has a negative connotation. So I don’t know, when things don’t work out as we expect do we call them vegetable peelings instead of failures and compost them?
Failure or fertiliser? Photo by Gabriel Jimenez on Unsplash
6. Practise gratitude
Practicing gratitude will help retrain your brain to notice positive things. This means you are more likely to have a positive response when you see the success of those around you, perhaps being more open to positive emotion contagion. With more positive feeling, you are also more likely to see opportunities and be creative enough to know how to use them. You might be more likely to use the positive examples you are seeing as a source of inspiration to learn from and apply to your life.
When I say practice gratitude I am not saying that at that moment when you see someone on Instagram celebrating the incredibly successful launch of their new programme at a time where yours has just flopped, you should start feverishly murmuring ‘I’m grateful for the sky, the errr water, my…self…’ That probably won’t work (but if it does, go for it). This is about every day while you’re brushing your teeth or whichever way helps you to make it a habit, practicing scanning for things you are genuinely grateful for in that moment (which of course could well be the sky, water and yourself!). The more you do it, the more it will become your natural way of operating and processing what you experience.
Don’t go down the judgement spiral
Whilst this post is about managing the social comparison, envy, bitterness, despondent, pit-of-despair response, I’m not suggesting that you expect to reduce it all down to zero. All of these are perfectly normal human behaviours and emotions. So if you notice yourself feeling sad at someone’s happy news, and reminded of your own lack, just notice it. It’s normal. No judgement. Meta emotions (emotions about emotions) can be worse than the ones you started with. Being despondent about being despondent can set you off on a spiral to unhelpful places. Aside from being normal, like with many of our ‘negative’ emotions, the comparison /envy etc can even be a useful response if it spurs you on to make the changes you seek. But comparing and negativity is not helpful if it is your most frequent and default response to someone else’s positivity, or if it holds you back and brings you too far down.
So if you want to be able to celebrate other people's success, avoid the self-criticism and make progress towards your own success, try cultivating whichever of these 6 most resonates with you:
Empathy
A better understanding of your unique self
Humility
A growth mindset
Grit
Gratitude
Let me know your thoughts in the comments and share with us which of these you're starting with. And if you want help, get in touch with me.
A few references
Dian A. de Vries, A. Marthe Möller, Marieke S. Wieringa, Anniek W.
Eigenraam & Kirsten Hamelink (2018) Social Comparison as the Thief of Joy: Emotional
Consequences of Viewing Strangers’ Instagram Posts, Media Psychology, 21:2, 222-245, DOI:
10.1080/15213269.2016.1267647
Duckworth, A. (2017) Grit, Penguin Random House: UK
Dweck, C. (2017) Mindset, Robinson: UK (updated ed.)
