3 ways to permanently break the habit of comparing yourself to others

Human beings are social and therefore compare. From an early age, a child lives in situations of comparison. In childhood we often hear that this boy is better behaved and this girl is already reading. At school age, we continue to be compared based on our academic performance, communication skills, and manners.

Associate Professor of the Department of Personality Psychology and Differential Psychology at the Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis

Comparison is one of the most important logical operations of thinking, providing cognition and understanding of those or other phenomena of the world, including human beings and, in particular, ourselves. The ability to compare is evolutionarily inherent in a healthy person, it allows him to relate some objects to each other, to see their similarities and differences.

From a certain age, we ourselves begin to compare people with each other. For example, one of our classmates may be closer and more valuable to us for some reason, while another may be less so.

There are more than enough reasons for comparison: we think that someone dresses better, someone is more successful in career, someone is more popular in society, someone is more charismatic, someone is luckier, etc. And that’s totally normal.

Comparing yourself to others can have many consequences, both positive and negative. Positive ones include, for example, realizing that we have room to develop and grow. Negative ones include anxiety, envy, hatred, etc.

Problems begin at the moment when we, comparing ourselves with others, lose peace and begin to suffer from inferiority complex in one way or another.

How to stop comparing yourself with others

1. It’s worth realizing that humans are not only social beings, but also unique. Each of us is valuable to ourselves, our loved ones and the world precisely because of our uniqueness and oneness. Uniqueness is created not only by our conventional advantages, but also by our “flaws”, which I would still prefer to call peculiarities.

How boring and monotonous the world would be if it were populated by equally wonderful people – even the most beautiful, intelligent, kind ones. I would never want to be in a society of equally normal people!

As the Austrian psychologist, creator of the system of individual psychology Alfred Adler said:

Normal people are only those you don’t know much.

Any closer and better acquaintance with a person allows us to see the complexity of human nature. Man is interesting precisely because of his peculiarities, his differences, his complexities.

How wonderful it is to realize that around you there are people “more” – more sympathetic, more sociable, more talented. And how bitter it is to realize that there are also people “less”, and they are definitely there. All these “more” or “less” are just our subjective and very conditional labels.

The world is a meadow on which different flowers bloom, and we need to learn to respect the life and dignity of each person, to be tolerant of the peculiarities of another person, including ourselves.

2. A person does not exist outside of contexts. His psychological qualities and features are truly revealed only in certain situations and circumstances. A person is more than he knows about himself. Neither he himself nor the people around him can fully foresee or predict how he will show himself at any given moment. Therefore, when we try to compare ourselves or someone else with someone else and make a value judgment, we need to be extremely careful and respectful.

3. Be proud of your specialness. The famous poet Osip Mandelstam once wrote a poem, the first line of which reads as follows: “Do not compare: he who lives is incomparable”. Joseph Brodsky echoed him: “…Everyone will be the same in the coffin. So let us at least be diverse in life!…”. I propose to cultivate and respect diversity!

And yet, if we can’t get rid of comparing ourselves to others, I would recommend that we all not suffer from the fact that the comparison is not in our favor, because in suffering, as Viktor Frankl wrote, there is no point unless it changes us for the better.

Thus, if we realize that the world is diverse and the people who inhabit it – all without exception – are valuable and important in their own way, we will all feel better, and our lives will be directed not to endlessly torment ourselves with the questions “who is better and who is worse”, but to how we can realize our talent and uniqueness and make our own lives and the lives of others a little kinder and better.