How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others
Do you find yourself constantly comparing yourself or your life to that of other people? You are certainly not alone.
It is incredibly easy to see the privileges, successes, and blessings that those around us are receiving then become envious and upset with ourselves. It has happened to all of us.
Admitting these tough feelings is the first step towards getting better and learning to be secure with your life. So, you are already off to a great start just by checking out this article.
Why do I compare myself to others?
Before we jump into all the different ways that you can learn to stop comparing yourself to others, let’s begin by asking ourselves why we even compare ourselves to others in the first place.
This is the first question I asked myself when I began to notice how often I was comparing my life, body, career, personality, etc. to someone else’s. By looking further into why we compare ourselves in the first place, we can better understand how to prevent doing so and form better habits.
Comparing ourselves to others is a natural human instinct that has been greatly heightened by our societal norms as well as social media. Part of it comes from wanting to know we are on the right track in our lives. Since the “right track” is subjective and not written in stone, we tend to look to others as a base line.
Insecurity also plays a huge part in automatically comparing ourselves to other people. The specific parts of our body or life that we are not proud of are the first things we begin comparing to other people, this only makes insecurity worse over time.
What is important to remember is that everyone has something that they are insecure about in their lives, you are far from alone.
How is my life affected when I compare myself to others?
Constantly comparing aspects of your life to other people’s can diminish your confidence and fill your mind up with negative, anxious, and stressful thoughts.
Creating a bad habit of questioning why you don’t have something in your life or why you were given a certain disadvantage that someone else wasn’t will keep you from seeing the blessings in your life leading to frequent feelings of depression.
How can I stop comparing myself to others?
Now that we have gone over common reasons why we compare ourselves to others and how it impacts our life, let’s discuss some ways to stop ourselves from doing so.
Below, I have gathered 10 super helpful ways that you can kick the habit of comparing yourself to others that have worked incredibly well for me.
1. Stop comparing your worst days to other people’s best days
What tends to happen when we compare our lives to other people is we put our worst days up against someone else’s best. We do not have the full picture of that other person’s life, so we begin to automatically assume the grass is greener on the other side.
The next time you see something in someone else’s life that triggers you to begin thinking this way, take a second to think about all the best things in your life instead of whatever you lack. Training your brain to switch to the positive instead of lingering on the negative can help you to stop making this unfair comparison.
Remember that everyone is going through something you know nothing about and it is pointless to put yourself down over something you do not actually even know.
2. Practice gratitude daily
The best way to keep yourself from automatically comparing yourself to others is by focusing on what you have going on in your own life.
These days with everything going on around us, it is easy to forget all that we are blessed with in our lives and this is when we begin comparing every aspect of our life to other people.
Pick yourself up a new notebook dedicated only to jotting down all that you are grateful for every morning when you wake up or right before you go to bed at night. Take this time to yourself to write down, acknowledge, and truly appreciate everything in your life.
Developing a habit of doing this everyday will not only help keep you from comparing your life to others, but will increase your overall mood over time as you will slowly learn the power of contentment.
3. Compete with yourself
Instead of competing with others where you don’t know their entire journey, start comparing your life at this moment with that of your past self. Take a second to think about yourself just a few years ago and ask yourself the following questions:
How does this past version of yourself make you feel?
Have you improved on yourself since then?
What else can you improve on to be the best version of yourself?
4. Limit your time on social media
Social media plays a significant role in what causes us to compare ourselves to other people.
When scrolling through any platform of social media, we often forget that people will always be more inclined to show the positive sides of their lives than the negative.
After a few hours of consistently scrolling through everyone’s best days, outfits, photo angles, meals, etc. we are left thinking about our insecurities and lack of fulfillment in our own lives and assume these other people don’t have their own list of insecurities.
5. Learn to celebrate others
When we are so caught up with all the insecurities of our life, sometimes celebrating others can be challenging. Instead of being happy for that person, we are often bitter or upset that it wasn’t us.
Learn to put aside these feelings and celebrate other people’s achievements. Over time you will get into the habit of celebrating the people in your life instead of competing with them.
6. Pay attention to what causes these feelings & avoid them
It is important that you are paying attention to what are known as “triggers” that you have in your life that cause this need to compare yourself with others.
For example, do you have a friend who is always bragging about their life around you or does too much time on instagram and twitter cause these feelings?
Start keeping a list of all the habits in your life that trigger these insecure feelings so that you can work on getting better.
7. Accept your past and all the decisions you have met that led you to this moment
Oftentimes, we look at people who make certain achievements in their life and we begin to question the decisions we have made up to this moment.
We start to think “well if I had done this instead, I would have achieved more in my life” or “If i had started working out earlier I would have looked like this.”
While the what ifs in our life can be a source of motivation at times, it is one of the worst things you can do while comparing yourself to others. Doing so only ignites more anger towards yourself and the decisions you have made.
Learn to accept your past and the decisions you make, you cannot go back and you’ll only hurt yourself thinking about it. Part of shedding insecurities is becoming more sure of yourself.
8. Use the comparison as motivation
No matter how hard we try, sometimes it is just impossible to keep your brain from filling with these thoughts especially on a bad day. Work on morphing this insecurity into motivation instead.
Ask yourself what you can do to be more like a person who truly inspires you. Comparing yourself to others does not always have to be a bad thing as long as you know your limits and you are confident with yourself.
9. Focus on you and only you
Stop living to please others and trying to “catch up” with other people. Your life is unique to you, life is not the same exact journey for each and every person.
For every “norm” you see in society, there are plenty of people who ignore it and do their own thing. Learning to focus on you and your own goals only will always keep you on the path that is right for you.
10. Quit striving for perfection
One of the most important things you can do for your own peace of mind is to stop striving for perfection and to focus on doing your best instead. You’ll never be perfect but you can always do your best in life.
