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Most people have no idea how tiring it is to constantly compare themselves to the people around them. It’s something that happens by accident. It’s scrolling through social media and feeling like you don’t measure up. It’s watching a colleague receive recognition at work and wondering why you can’t do anything right. It’s seeing someone in a happy relationship and wondering what’s wrong with yours. Comparing yourself to the people around you and the lives you think they’re living is so ingrained in society it feels like a natural part of life. But it’s one of the best ways to rob yourself of the confidence that comes naturally.
Comparison robs you of more than just the joy of the moment. It shifts your reference of self in fundamental ways. When your gauge of self-worth becomes how you compare to every other person you come in contact with, you’re bound to be on shaky ground when it comes to your worth. Someone will always have more: more achievements, more ease about themselves, more gifts. And when that’s what you base your confidence on, you’re unlikely to feel confident.
Why Comparison Ruins What You’re Trying to Build
There’s a unique kind of tiredness that comes with always comparing yourself to others. It’s the tiredness that comes with feeling like you’re always playing catch-up, and no matter what you achieve or how well you do something, it’ll never be enough because someone else did it more glamorously and earlier. You could have an incredible day. You could even receive compliments that are pure gold or achieve something meaningful. Yet you could scroll through Instagram and witness someone having a “better” day, receiving different compliments, or completing an achievement that feels twice as beautiful as yours. All of a sudden, your mood deflates.
But this does something much worse than rob you of the joy of your happiest moments. It conditions you to stop trusting your evaluation of what constitutes a significant achievement in your life. When you constantly look at what everyone around you has, thinks, does, and achieves, you start losing touch with your value system and what you think is important. You start creating goals that will help you catch up instead of focusing on something meaningful to you. You start making decisions based on how other people looking in will perceive them instead of making choices to make your life meaningful in the long run.
Professional help can make a massive impact on how to stop comparing yourself to others and, in doing so, help you lay a solid foundation for your confidence and self-esteem levels. Engaging in self esteem counseling denver co helps people identify these types of behaviors and work on a better evaluation system for their achievements instead of constantly looking at what everyone else is doing.
What Changes When You Stop Trying to Beat Everyone Else
Moving away from comparing yourself to others doesn’t mean finding a way to ignore all the people around you achieving incredible things and doing even mundane activities perfectly. It means learning how to build a foundation for your confidence levels that don’t focus on how other people are doing compared to where you are in your life. When people achieve the seemingly impossible goal of stopping comparing themselves to others, they often report an unexpected side effect: suddenly being able to see progress in their own lives.
People who stop comparing themselves to others often report a sense of relief and relaxation. They speak of being able finally to celebrate their achievements without feeling that someone else has achieved something more beautiful than them. They talk about making decisions that make sense to them but not to anyone else. They speak of having energy because they aren’t constantly comparing themselves to other people. What was once energy spent on comparing your achievements to others is now energy you can use to create meaningful progress in your life instead of sitting on the sidelines in envious observation.
Another side effect of letting go of the need to compare yourself to others is that relationships often improve. When you are no longer in competition with everyone around you and your achievements feel diminished when someone around you achieves something more glamorous, your relationships have nowhere to go but to improve. You can genuinely be happy for someone who achieved something without it feeling like a personal failure. You can use someone achieving something you didn’t as a learning opportunity instead of a disaster marking just how far behind you might feel. Other people are no longer threats to your self-esteem but fellow humans also trying their best to navigate life.
Confidence Built on Internal Measures
The kind of confidence people build when they stop comparing themselves to others is built on measuring themselves internally instead of looking externally for validation. It builds on a solid foundation based on the measure of achieving something meaningful instead of achieving something based on someone else’s idea of an achievement or perceived failure. This doesn’t mean that you’ll achieve less or lower expectations. This means that you learn to focus on celebrating your progress instead of focusing on how behind you might feel compared to someone living their best life.
Do you have confidence when you ask yourself if you’re making progress based on where you were before instead of focusing on who’s ahead of you on this journey called life?
Building confidence this way takes time and discipline. It means catching yourself when you fall into comparing yourself to others, even in irrational instances. It means redirecting your thoughts and getting back on track to ensure that you’re comparing the progress you’ve made instead of looking at how someone else is winning at life despite their perfectly imperfect mistakes.
This process can feel long but it’s worthwhile when done with commitment and tenacity. People who commit to this process say it’s the best thing they’ve ever done for their sense of self-esteem.
When you stop comparing yourself to others, your sense of self doesn’t become arrogant or a dismissal of those around you who still seem to achieve so much more than you do on a daily basis. Instead, it merely reconnects you with yourself and how important it is just to exist.
Your confidence doesn’t need anyone else failing (the way they should be) to feel valued because this kind of confidence stands on its own without needing to constantly refer to how well everyone else is doing.
When you discover how to feel confident without constantly comparing yourself to others, this new feeling helps restore relationships in your life that might have been lost due to envy back into opportunities for learning.
In losing the need to compare yourself to someone else, confidence becomes what it was meant to be: a journey to finding a sense of worth in ourselves and loving who we are while stumbling through life instead of focusing on everyone else’s perceived perfection around us.