Why Does Comparing Myself to Others Make Me Feel So Bad

Why comparing yourself to others makes you feel bad

Why do we compare ourselves to other people?

It’s the most natural thing in the world to look around us to get a feel for how we’re doing in life. The people around us, whether it’s our peers, friends or colleagues, are often how we get a sense of where we fit into life, how fast we’re moving, and how we’re doing on a social and economic level.

It’s a way of sensing how we belong.

Incarnating on earth is all about love, relationships and emotions. We come here, in physical bodies, on the physical earth plane, to learn the full range of human emotions - and it’s often the people we interact with down here who become our biggest learning curves.

Comparing ourselves to others isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’d say it’s one of the most natural things we do. The problem comes when we start to look outwards at other people more than we look inwards at ourselves. It’s when we look at other people, believing we need to be more like them, that we start to run into problems.

Comparing ourselves to others is meant to be a passing gaze, something to give us a sense of grounding and an understanding of how we fit in and where we belong. It’s not meant to take all our energy, attention and focus, to the point where we’re no longer living our lives, but instead trying to live someone else's.

When comparison starts affecting how you feel about yourself

When we move from comparison as observation to comparison as judgement, that’s where we start to lose our objectivity and begin to take it more personally.

I’m sure all of us have done it, many, many times. We see someone on social media doing something that we’d love to do. Perhaps they’re on an amazing, pampering holiday, doing something wild and decadent, or travelling somewhere far-flung and beautiful.

It’s hard to stay in observation mode when what we’re seeing pulls on our desires.

And it’s at this point that we move beyond observation and begin to question ourselves, perhaps asking, ‘Why can’t I do that? I’m missing out.’ And that’s the moment when our self-judgement can start to kick in.

We might look at our own lives and feel they’re lacking - they might feel bland, boring or stale in comparison - and that’s when we start to judge our choices or blame ourselves for not being able to do these same things.

This is the subtle shift that brings us out of the neutral space of seeing and reflecting, and into a different energy of comparison that’s interwoven with wanting, judging and even criticising.

Why comparison can leave you feeling like you're falling behind

One of the biggest problems when our comparison moves from observation to judgement is that we start to question our own lives and the choices we’ve made.

This can cast great doubt over who we are, and the decisions we’ve made that have led us to this point. Without realising it, when we compare ourselves to others in a negative or critical way, we’re invalidating our own sense of worth, and we’re often not even aware we’re doing it.

Life can feel like a race, but it’s all an illusion. There’s no race track, no finish line, no goal to reach or achievement to accomplish. This is the illusion of the matrix that we live in, which makes us believe that we have to do more in order to be more. It encourages us, from an early age, to win, achieve and get as much as we can.

Yet this is the grand trick of life. It feels like the easiest thing in the world to look at the people around us, compare our lives with theirs, and feel like we’re falling behind. Whether it’s going to university, climbing the career ladder, earning money, travelling, buying property, getting married or having children, these are all traditional benchmarks of success that society has always valued and rewarded.

But these benchmarks don’t mean anything - they are part of the illusion.

We don’t win in life through achieving these things, because there is no winning. We are all born with nothing and we all die with nothing. Yet it’s so easy to get caught up in the wheel of achievement and feel as if we’re falling behind.

You’re comparing your whole life with a tiny piece of theirs

It’s impossible to truly know someone unless you have lived their life. We might think we know someone because we’re close to them, but we don’t know everything they’ve gone through, their fears, their thoughts or their experiences.

Yet through the digital age of social media and the widespread visibility of everyone online, we can begin to think we know people through what they share on their phones. But we don’t know them at all. And the problem is, even though we don’t know them, we still compare ourselves to them.

What we see online is a tiny fraction of someone’s real life - a snapshot. And what someone chooses to share online can be so carefully curated, sometimes to the point of being completely and professionally manufactured, that what we’re seeing may not reflect the truth at all.

It’s not just the filtered, edited images of faces and bodies. It’s what we’re not seeing too. We don’t see the mess, the tears, the behind-the-scenes reality, the fears or anything else they don’t want us to see.

Yet it’s through these tiny snapshots of someone else’s life that it becomes so easy to believe they are so much happier than we are, and we rarely stop to think that maybe that’s exactly how they want us to feel.

→ Here’s a short video below about the three ways we compare ourselves

Sometimes comparison touches a much deeper wound

When we compare ourselves to others, it’s interesting how some people trigger us much more than others. I can happily observe people travelling and not feel jealous or lacking in any way, because I’ve travelled in the past and I know I’ll have the opportunity to do so again in the future.

Yet sometimes it’s the posts from people I know who are having fun with big groups of friends, at parties or festivals, or just hanging out with each other, that affect me much more.

This is my own wound around not feeling successful in friendships, which can feel a little tender when I see things like this. I don’t have a big friendship group and I don’t see myself as a very social person, and I can really judge myself for it.

This is when comparison can make me feel like I’m not enough and that I’m failing, bringing up a hopelessness and anxiety that I’ll never have something that other people seem to have so easily.

It might be that you have a particular wound that comparison can open up too. It might be related to relationships or family, your weight and body image, where you live and your home, or what you do for work and how much you earn.

This is when comparison can feel so triggering - highlighting something we fear or believe about ourselves and bringing up the uncomfortable emotions, especially the shame, that we try so hard to hide from.

What are you really looking for when you compare yourself?

Sometimes comparison is less about the other person than we think.

We might look at someone else's relationship, career, confidence, home, appearance or lifestyle and immediately assume that what we're feeling is jealousy, inadequacy, or proof that we're somehow behind. But if we look a little more closely, comparison can sometimes show us what we're actually longing for underneath.

Do you really want their life, or do you want the feeling you imagine their life gives them?

Maybe you don't want their exact career, but you want to feel successful. Maybe you don't want their relationship, but you want to feel chosen, loved or secure. Maybe you don't want their confidence, but you want to feel more comfortable being yourself. Maybe you don't want their lifestyle at all, but you want the freedom, ease or sense of possibility you associate with it.

And sometimes what we're looking for isn't even something tangible. We may be looking for reassurance - reassurance that we're doing life properly, that we haven't fallen behind, that we've made the right choices and that we're where we're supposed to be.

This is why I think comparison can be useful to become curious about, rather than simply something we need to stop doing. Instead of immediately telling yourself off for comparing, you could ask: What is this comparison bringing up in me? What do I think this person has that I'm missing? And what do I imagine I would feel if I had it too?

The answer might point you towards something you genuinely want. Or it might reveal an old insecurity, a fear of being left behind, or a belief that your life needs to look a certain way in order for you to feel okay about yourself.

Comparison can be a gift, if we choose to let it guide us.

Your life doesn't need to look like anyone else's

This is the beautiful thing about comparison - when we begin to question it and bring all the emotional fears and beliefs out into the open, we can begin to bring our attention back to ourselves.

It’s never really about anyone else, it’s always about you. As I mentioned right at the very beginning, comparison makes us look outwards at other people, when life is really all about looking inwards. When we seek to truly know, accept and understand ourselves, life becomes so much easier and more graceful.

We are not here to live someone else’s life, nor are we here to put all of our focus, attention and energy on how someone outside of us is living theirs. We are here to be fully present in the beauty and magic of our own lives.

Your life doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s, it only needs to feel true and aligned with who you truly are. And if comparison brings up the feeling that you’re not in alignment, then you can use that as motivation to realign yourself with your own true path.

The goal of this life isn’t to use other people as a benchmark for our value - our value comes from within. And the more we can turn inwards and work through the fears, beliefs and judgements we hold about ourselves, the less affected we become by how other people are living their lives.

And when we do this, comparison once again becomes the easy, objective act it was always meant to be.

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Further Support & Resources

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Carry on exploring