This article is featured in The Australian Financial Review and is republished with permission.
Weighing your life up against peers and strangers can damage your self-esteem. But how do you ditch this potentially corrosive habit?
Back in London on a work trip, I catch up with an old school friend in a Soho pub. Over a pint of Guinness, he tells me how some of our former contemporaries have gone on to do remarkably well. One bookish outsider has become a hot-shot film director best known for resurrecting the career of Paddington Bear. There’s the friend who’s published a well-received novel while commanding a senior role at the BBC. The lanky kid from the tennis team is now such a successful investor that he recently bought a share of a Basquiat painting for $US12 million ($19.3 million).
That night I wake up at 3am suddenly questioning, oh, about 90 per cent of my life decisions to date. I reflect on the tawdry state of my finances, the bright opportunities I fumbled, the precarious nature of my see-sawing career. By dawn, I’m mired deep in a pessimistic funk.
Theodore Roosevelt nailed my predicament when he noted that comparison is “the thief of joy”. Sizing your fortunes up against other people’s rarely delivers feel-good results. The problem is that we seem grimly hard-wired to do it.
Evolution may be to blame. Primatologist Frans de Waal did a famous experiment on monkeys where he encouraged them to exchange pebbles with a researcher in return for slices of cucumber. The monkeys were happy with this arrangement, until they saw monkeys in a neighbouring cage receive grapes for their stones instead. Comparing their situations, the cucumber monkeys went beserk, hurling the vegetable slices to the floor and beating the walls in rage.
Admittedly, grapes seem like a better deal here to me, too. But the point is that much of our contentment rests on social comparison, a scenario that’s particularly true when it comes to money.
In a 2010 study, economist Angus Deaton and Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman showed that it’s not how much you earn that matters – your personal satisfaction rests on how your income compares with your friends’. More startling research, from the University of Alberta, found that your chances of going bankrupt increase if your neighbour wins the lottery. Confronted by their newfound wealth, a determination to keep up with the Joneses compels you to overspend.
Dr Zena Burgess, the CEO of the Australian Psychological Society, points out that our comparison habit isn’t necessarily all bad and can often lead to self-improvement. “I think it’s very natural and it’s how we learn as humans,” she says. “We see what someone else is doing and we copy it and that can lead to some really positive things. If you’re learning music or a sport or a language, then you’re encouraged to copy someone else who’s more expert than yourself.”
Yet Burgess explains the habit can become corrosive if it regularly leads to self-abasement. “The observation of what people do and how they do it, that’s all fine,” she says. “It’s the self-talk in your head that can make it destructive. So you may see somebody and think: ‘Oh, they look really great in that dress!’ But it’s when you add the extra bit and think: ‘I look terrible’ – that’s when it becomes negative.”
The modern gamechanger that’s inflamed this age-old habit is, of course, social media. “Now, rather than just comparing people who live in the same suburb or office, we can compare ourselves with people across the whole world,” says Burgess.
That’s why we need to constantly remind ourselves that social media offers a heavily stylised and inauthentic reflection of real life. At its heart, Instagram is a glorified form of showing off, just as LinkedIn is founded on shameless humblebragging and confected workplace optimism. If you think the grass is greener, in other words, it’s probably Astroturf.
“Social media really blurs the boundaries between what’s real and what’s created,” Burgess says.
While that’s hardly a revelation, few of us remain entirely immune to those unsettling pangs when we see pictures of a former colleague’s new boat or multimillion-dollar renovation. So how do we cultivate a headspace where we can genuinely celebrate our friends’ achievements rather than secretly resent them?
The most important thing, Burgess advises, is to be mindful about your social media usage and ensure you’re getting enough face-to-face contact. “If you have real connections with real people, your social media focus starts to subside because people will talk about their actual warts-and-all lives – what’s working and what isn’t working. It’s when you just get all the curated half make-believe stuff that people can feel bad about their circumstances.”
The other key tactic is based on that old chestnut gratitude and actively dedicating time to appreciate the positive things in your life. “It’s really important for undoing the effects of negative social comparison,” Burgess insists.
To build that mindset, she suggests book-ending each day with a simple gratitude exercise. First thing in the morning, think about one thing you’re really looking forward to – even if it’s as inconsequential as your first cup of coffee. Similarly, before you go to sleep, consider what went well that day or, in the worst-case scenario, what didn’t go as badly as you feared. Build up from there to single out three items at both ends of the day to train your brain to become grateful.
If you still find yourself stuck in a negative comparison loop, Burgess suggests professional help. Depending on your situation, a psychologist might recommend cognitive behavioural treatment, mindfulness exercises or some other form of intervention. Perhaps they might even remind you that, when you actually stop to think about it, you’re not really much of a Basquiat fan anyway.