How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others: The Game You Can’t Win
with Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby and Dr. Ron Siegel
Why You Can’t Win the Comparison Game (and What to Do Instead)
Comparison is wired in, the game is rigged, and the way out isn’t another win — it’s connection.
You know the feeling. It’s late, you’re scrolling, and someone else’s life starts looking like a verdict on yours. If you’ve been trying to figure out how to stop comparing yourself to others, the honest news is this: you’re not broken. Your brain is doing exactly what it evolved to do. The way out isn’t more willpower or another achievement. It’s learning to see the game clearly and reaching for connection instead of approval.
My guest is Dr. Ron Siegel, who has taught psychology at Harvard Medical School for more than three decades and wrote a whole book on this exact ache, called The Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary. He is candid that after a lifetime of doing his own work, he still rides the self-esteem roller coaster — and that honesty is the heart of everything he teaches.
We talked through why comparison is built into your nervous system, why no amount of success ever delivers the lasting okay-ness you were promised, why social media pours fuel on the fire, the small mindfulness move that loosens the grip, and the four-word principle that quiets the comparing mind faster than any pep talk: make a connection, not an impression.
“Make a connection, not an impression.” — Dr. Ron Siegel, Love, Happiness and Success Podcast
Moments from this episode
Episode transcript
LMB: Let me open this conversation with a confession. I still struggle with self-comparison. I am a psychologist. I have been working on myself for a long time. Intellectually I should know better, and still there are business owners or people doing things I admire and I think, what is wrong with me? Why can’t I be as cool or as interesting or as successful as that person over there? I mention it to open the door to the fact that I think we can all relate.
Ron: When it gets into the realm of self-esteem, what happens is we are constantly going around, looking around the primate troop and wondering, where do I fit? And we are not just thinking about who is strongest physically. We all get hooked on different dimensions. For one it is who is smarter. For another, who is kinder, who is more physically attractive, who is in better shape.
LMB: So this is a sign there is not anything wrong with us. It means we are human. But the way we go about fixing it often makes it worse, and there is a better way.
Ron: For most of us we oscillate between feeling somewhat down and discouraged, or doing well in the competitive game but stressed out trying to stay on top of it. Neither state is particularly fun.
LMB: I am so pleased to introduce Dr. Ron Siegel. He is an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, where he has taught for over three decades, and he has spent his career bridging clinical psychology with mindfulness practice. He is the author of The Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary, which I cannot stop thinking about. Has it always been this way, or is the comparison accelerating?
Ron: There is actually some evidence about this.
Ron: There is something called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, a social psychology instrument used for many years, mostly studying cohorts of first-year college students. It is a series of forced-choice questions. My favorite: you choose between, if I ruled the world the world would be a better place, versus, the thought of ruling the world scares the hell out of me. You can see how it scores. They have tracked students’ responses for decades.
Ron: And the graph went up dramatically. Scores really went up a lot throughout the 2000s, basically since social media became a huge part of our lives.
LMB: What do you make of that?
Ron: The way I understand it, social comparison goes back to our evolutionary roots. If you traveled the African savanna with a naturalist, they would point out the same pattern in species after species of social mammal: a dominant figure, and younger ones working to build the skills to be dominant. It is not just mammals. Put crickets in a box and within minutes they organize into a dominance hierarchy. We talk about pecking orders because birds have them. And by about age four, if you put kids in small groups, they organize into stable dominance hierarchies and know who defers to whom.
Ron: For most of us this does not mean beating our chests. It shows up as fluctuating self-esteem, as exactly what you began with: what’s wrong with me, these other people are better than me. Why do so many species do this? If you are dominant, the chance of reproducing and protecting your offspring goes up, so the genes pass on. The happy hominids who did not care about this did not reproduce as much, so we do not have their genes. We have the genes of the ones who were really into it.
Ron: And we get hooked on different dimensions: who is smarter, kinder, more attractive, more lovable, more popular.
LMB: It is endless.
Ron: In the meditation world it is flat-out hilarious. Who is less concerned with social comparison? Who is less egotistical? We once had a conference at Harvard Medical School where the Dalai Lama was with us, and everybody was competing to seem the least narcissistic, the most deferential. Whenever our self-esteem goes up or down, it is really based on these comparisons. If I think of myself as intelligent, I am implicitly thinking others are less so. It is always comparative, even if we are only comparing ourselves to some inner image of who we think we should be.
LMB: So my level of self-esteem is yet another point of comparison. People feel bad about having low self-esteem, and that is a whole spiral. But you are saying this is how human beings are wired. Everyone has that comparison, that hierarchy, less than and better than, and that is just part of the human experience.
Ron: It is a really toxic mythology in our culture that only losers are concerned with self-esteem, that if you were truly successful you would just be nonstop winning. For most of us we oscillate between feeling somewhat down and discouraged, like we are not cutting it, and doing well but stressed trying to stay on top. Neither state is particularly fun.
LMB: And there is the hedonic treadmill, which I think Martin Seligman named. The myth is that when we attain a certain status, or a career reaches a certain point, or we live in a certain house or have a certain amount of money, then we will finally feel good enough. And that is not the case, because there is always someone somewhere who is better than you.
Ron: There are at least two reasons success fails us. One is recalibration. What used to float our boat no longer floats our boat. As a child I remember the sense of, hey, I did it, getting the wooden disks stacked on a pole in the right order. I could do that today and it would do nothing for me. Same for every accomplishment: learning to walk, riding a bike, a driver’s license, a house, a degree. I train psychotherapists, and I once asked a room of them how many woke up that morning feeling good about themselves because they have their degree. Everybody laughed, because nobody does. We habituate to whatever used to do it for us, and then we need more. You only have to watch billionaires competing over whose private rocket went higher to see there is no ceiling.
Ron: And as if that were not bad enough, what goes up comes down. Win an Olympic gold and the question becomes whether you can do it again in four years, eight, twelve. The game is not winnable.
LMB: The game itself is not winnable. I would love to shift to how we begin to lighten up and feel more free. Would you share a personal story of how you started applying different ways of thinking to your own life?
Ron: I started working on this in earnest about ten years ago, in my sixties. I had spent decades as a psychologist, been in my own therapy, been deeply involved in meditation practices about interconnectedness and not being preoccupied with social rank. And despite all of that, I was still going up and down with every email. One invites me to speak and I feel good. Another shows colleagues involved in something I was not invited to, and I do not feel great. A great session and I think I have become a well-oiled machine. The next hour, someone presents the same problem they had fifteen years ago, and I think this is clearly not my calling.
LMB: But you are so accomplished. Harvard Medical School. And even that did a number on your own feelings.
Ron: It is because these things do not work. If it does not work for a billionaire to send a rocket into space, it does not work for a psychologist to write books and be on a well-known faculty. Luckily there are ways out, and they have to do with noticing that we have other instincts too. The brain evolved for cooperation. We share food, we have a justice impulse, and we have a powerful instinct to nurture our kids, our partners, our siblings. Those instincts are there too.
Ron: This starts, for most people, by seeing how unwinnable the game is, and that is where mindfulness comes in. Mindfulness is not necessarily sitting and following your breath. It is noticing what is happening in the mind and body each moment, and instead of judging it or trying to change it, just being open to observing it. When you take that attitude toward the self-esteem roller coaster, you realize it is a crazy ride.
Ron: I started tracking each moment in a day when I felt a little boost or a little collapse, and they were constant. I would feel good about something, then recalibrate, and that became the new normal. The first time I published a book was a big deal. That has happened a number of times now, and it does not have much sticking power. So the first thing is just catching ourselves in the act.
Ron: My friend and colleague Terry Real suggests a little exercise. Picture your self-worth as a balloon. Every time you feel yourself rising above others, tug it down a little and remind yourself nobody is actually better or worse than anyone else. Every time you feel yourself sinking, tug it back up with the same reminder. It starts simply with observation.
LMB: I have had Terry on the show before. Absolutely delightful.
Ron: It is also really helpful to see how we marinate in a culture that reinforces this. Social media is awful this way. Very few people post, woke up anxious again, afraid I will get a bad review at work and my partner will leave me. It is, here I am at a fantastic place looking beautiful with cool people, and you were not invited. If we were nation states, it would be like reading our own crime and poverty statistics while watching everyone else’s travel films.
LMB: But you said college kids trend toward narcissism, an inflated self-esteem. In the context you are describing, it seems like more people would feel worse about themselves, and we do have worrying mental health statistics among teenagers. How do you explain the narcissism rise?
Ron: The curve went up and then flattened somewhat when kids got totally inundated with social media. It started going up in the eighties, with more cultural emphasis on individual achievement. There was a time we were proud to say, my son is becoming a priest, as opposed to, my son is in private equity. There is also a debate. Clinical psychologists tend to think narcissism is compensatory: people feel inadequate and the mind flips into thinking I am better than others. Social psychologists say some people are just deluded and really think they are better than everyone, sometimes because they were born into a kind of royalty and treated as special no matter what. One can imagine people have more need to compensate because the culture keeps messaging that winning is everything, so I have to present as a winner even if underneath I am in pain. That pain is showing up in the terrible statistics around adolescent anxiety.
LMB: So there is the grandiose true believer who genuinely believes they are better, and the wounded version, a baby narcissist, struggling with low self-esteem underneath without even being conscious of it.
Ron: The second step is noticing how the culture does it. I was flying Lufthansa, and their logo says, nonstop you. We idealize this individualism. Surveys of young people put being a social media influencer very high on the list of aspirations. Every commercial, every airline gate: first we invite first-class passengers, fair enough, then active military, then strollers and kids, and then the social ranking, executive platinum, platinum, gold, silver, and heaven forbid you are one of the eight who slink on knowing there is no room for your carry-on.
LMB: I was recently in boarding group eight and felt like riffraff. I had that little twinge of shame and did not even notice it. Now I will.
Ron: Just notice it. And if you get a privilege, notice that too. They put me in business class once and I felt better about myself, and I thought, how ridiculous is this? But there it is. I had the good fortune of a dad who taught economics. As a kid I saw a Cadillac drive by and he said, that is a status symbol, and in 1899 Thorstein Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class about conspicuous consumption, buying things not because we need them but to show others we can. There is a wonderful book called Whistling Vivaldi by an African American professor who found that when he walked his Chicago neighborhood whistling Vivaldi, basically signaling I am an educated person, people treated him better and safer. This happens on a million levels.
LMB: So to reiterate: seeing it in the world, seeing everyone participating, seeing what the marketplace does to pull those levers, and then noticing what it actually does to how you feel on the inside. That is the important first step. But there is more.
Ron: One of the most important things, which we are actually doing right now, is orienting in life to make a connection, not an impression. So often we want to impress people, with the fantasy that if they think we are cool or smart or accomplished, they will like us and we can find love. Noticing that we are really just looking for love is helpful, because love is a potent antidote. When we are with a good friend, or on a podcast with someone who resonates and says, oh yeah, it happens to me too, it changes.
LMB: Let’s be good friends.
Ron: When we feel connected to someone who is not posturing, the sense of self shifts. Instead of me with you out there, we start to feel like an us, like we are in this together, and the comparison stuff falls away. In a group I do an exercise from the book, an inventory of what we each get hooked on. I ask how many noticed at least one, and almost all the hands go up. More than one, most hands. Practically all of them, a lot of hands. Just being with people who are honest about this, instead of hiding in shame, is therapy for the next several days.
Ron: It even works for external goals. In a job interview you might think, I have to show them I am smart and accomplished. But if you go in with the principle of making a connection, ask the interviewer about themselves, get curious about the organization, they will remember how it felt to talk to you, not your resume. Same with meeting potential in-laws. It both gets us off the roller coaster and gets us what we actually want, to be connected and loved as we are, instead of posturing and then fearing that if they really knew us they would not like us.
LMB: To be around someone actively trying to be amazing is kind of annoying. They are not curious about you. Is it possible people actually like them less for it?
Ron: We might be attracted to them, with the feeling that being in their orbit raises our rank. People want to be near a celebrity. Look at the Jeffrey Epstein nightmare, where people wanted in because other fancy people were in. But that is not the same as enjoying being with them. We sense the posturing, and when we have been with someone more hooked on this than we are, we feel lousy afterward. When we make genuine connection, we leave with a warm feeling, humbled but alive and balanced. Organizations also elevate narcissists to leadership because they seem decisive and confident and promise the moon, but those organizations typically fail, because the narcissist does not take counsel and bets the whole farm on a fifty-fifty idea. We see it on the world stage too.
LMB: To recap: this is how we are wired, you cannot escape the instinct, but bringing it into awareness is the biggest first step. Consider the instinct toward cooperation and connection as the reliable, longer-term way to meet the need underneath, being loved and accepted. Use Terry Real’s balloon. And realize that people working very hard to impress us, cultivating an attractive brand, might not be the horse to bet on.
Ron: I will briefly name one more arena worth working on. Every time we experience a self-esteem collapse, we can use it to heal a little bit of trauma. When a current failure feels intense, it is usually because it resonates with something earlier in our lives, and recognizing that gives us freedom and a chance to rework the earlier wound. I was at a conference social event with people well known in our field who were already deep in conversation. I immediately felt the pain of not being part of the in-group, that shrinking feeling. I took a moment to ask, what is this? And I had an image of being the younger brother, allowed to tag along with my older brother and his friends, but never quite one of them. When I realized it was that old pain being activated, I could feel it, and tell myself, this is not then. I do not know what will happen, but maybe it will be okay. I listened a while, chimed in, and the group was gracious. A nice evening.
Ron: So you have to feel it to heal it. Every collapse today usually rhymes with one from earlier. If we use them as things to learn from, we are not so freaked out when they happen, and we do not immediately reach for a self-esteem boost or the addictive cycle of building ourselves up. We use them as opportunities to grow.
LMB: A little hack for listeners: sometimes I ask clients, is this feeling familiar? When have you felt this way before? When was the first time? It is a doorway. Even if you are stressed in the moment, you can recognize, this is a familiar feeling, I can take care of myself here, I am a grown adult in the present, I am okay, and find the courage to try.
Ron: It is hard to do that if we do not see what is really going on. It is much easier if we can say, oh, this is that childhood feeling, I know that. That offers perspective that lets us move forward. Instead of leading life fearing self-esteem collapses, use them as little teaching moments.
LMB: A primary pain point I hear about over and over is self-worth: wanting to feel good about myself, to love myself, to have confidence. Everything we talked about today illuminates this in a very different way, with practices anyone could start today. Where can people connect with you?
Ron: For a deeper dive with structured exercises, that is what the book is about. Go to drronsiegel.com, and the best thing is to join the mailing list. I will not sell your name or spam you.
What to take with you
Comparison is wired in, not a character flaw.
By age four we sort ourselves into hierarchies. Feeling it does not mean something is wrong with you.
The game is unwinnable by design.
Every win recalibrates and every high wears off, so the next milestone never delivers the lasting okay-ness you were promised.
Self-esteem is a roller coaster for everyone.
The myth that only insecure people struggle with this just adds a layer of shame on top of a universal experience.
Social media pours fuel on the fire.
You are comparing your real inner life to everyone else’s curated highlight reel, which is a rigged matchup.
Noticing is the first real move.
Catching the rise and fall in the moment, and seeing how culture sells the game, loosens its grip more than willpower does.
Connection is the actual antidote.
When you reach for connection instead of approval, the comparing mind quiets, because you are no longer auditioning.
How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others: The Game You Can’t Win
You know the feeling. You are scrolling at the end of a long day, half-watching someone else’s vacation, someone else’s promotion, someone else’s seemingly effortless life, and a small voice starts up in the back of your mind. Why not me? Why can’t I get it together like that? If you cannot stop comparing yourself to others, here is the first thing I want you to know. You are not broken, and you are not doing it wrong. Your brain is built to size you up against the people around you. That is the honest, slightly annoying answer, and it is also the beginning of the way out.
I will let you in on something. I am a licensed psychologist. I have been doing my own work for a long time. And I still catch myself looking at someone who is further along than me and feeling that little twist of what is wrong with me. So if you feel it too, you are in very good company, mine included. This is one of the most common things people bring to our practice, and it is exactly the kind of thing therapy and coaching for personal growth is built to help with.
Here is what I want to be straight with you about before we go any further. Most people who come to us tangled up in comparison have already read the articles. They know they are not supposed to compare. They have heard be yourself a hundred times. The problem was never information. The problem is that this pattern is wired deep, reinforced every single day, and almost impossible to interrupt by yourself at 10pm when the feeling actually hits.
So here is the deal with this article. What I am about to share is real, and it will give you language for what is happening in your own head. But the part where you live it differently, where you catch the spiral and do something new while it is happening, that is the work my team at Growing Self does with people every day. The ideas here are the map. A real person in your corner is how most of us actually make the trip. Keep that in mind as you read.
To get to the bottom of this, I sat down with someone who has thought about it more deeply than almost anyone. Dr. Ron Siegel has taught psychology at Harvard Medical School for over three decades, and he wrote a whole book on this exact ache, called The Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary. What he told me changed how I see the whole thing. Let’s get into it.
Why Is It So Hard to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others?
It is hard to stop because comparison is built into your nervous system by evolution. We are social primates, and for most of human history, where you ranked in the group affected whether you survived and whether your genes carried forward. The psychologist Leon Festinger named this decades ago in his theory of social comparison, which says we have a built-in drive to evaluate ourselves by measuring against other people.
Dr. Siegel put it vividly. If you walked across the African savanna with a naturalist, you would see the same pattern in species after species: a dominance hierarchy, with everyone sorting out where they fit. It is not just primates. Put a handful of crickets in a box and within minutes they organize themselves by rank. We talk about pecking orders because birds literally have them. And human children do it too. By about age four, kids in a small group will sort themselves into a stable hierarchy and know who defers to whom.
So when you feel that pull to measure yourself against the people around you, you are not being petty or insecure. You are running ancient software. The trouble is that in modern life this software fires constantly, on dimensions that have nothing to do with survival: who is smarter, who is kinder, who is more attractive, who looks more successful. As Dr. Siegel said, it is endless. If you want a closer look at the everyday toll of this, I wrote more about why comparing yourself to others tends to backfire and what it quietly costs you.
Why Does No Amount of Success Make the Comparison Stop?
Because success recalibrates faster than you can enjoy it. Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill. Whatever you achieve quickly becomes your new normal, so the relief you expected does not last, and the comparison simply moves up to a higher shelf.
Dr. Siegel told a story I keep thinking about. As a kid, he felt a real glow of accomplishment the day he managed to stack the wooden disks on a pole in the right order. He could do that today, of course, and it would do nothing for him. Same with the big stuff: the degree, the first book, the title. He asked a room of accomplished therapists how many of them woke up that morning feeling good about themselves because they had their degree. Everybody laughed, because of course nobody does. The high wore off years ago.
And it gets worse, because what goes up comes down. Win the Olympic gold, and the question becomes whether you can do it again in four years, or eight. The game, as he put it, is not winnable. That is a little bleak on the surface, and also strangely freeing once it sinks in, because it means the problem was never that you have not achieved enough. If you tend to chase the next thing hoping it will finally quiet the noise, you might recognize yourself in the perfectionism trap, and in some of the signs of low self-esteem that hide underneath a very busy, very accomplished life.
This is also where a strong opinion of mine comes in. Most people figure out that chasing the next win is not working long before they figure out what to do instead. That gap, between knowing the old strategy is failing and knowing the new one, is exactly where coaching earns its keep. It is genuinely hard to see your own life clearly from the inside of it, and a good coach on our team does that with you, not at you.
Is Social Media Making Comparison Worse?
Yes. Social media takes a normal human tendency and cranks it to an unnatural intensity. Research on social comparison, social media, and self-esteem has found that heavier social media use is linked with more upward comparison and lower self-esteem. You are not imagining the slump after an hour of scrolling.
Dr. Siegel had the perfect image for why. Almost nobody posts the morning they woke up anxious with their stomach in knots, dreading a performance review and worried their relationship is slipping. They post the beautiful moment, the trip, the win. So all day long you consume everyone else’s highlight reel while living inside your own unedited footage. If we were countries, he said, it would be like reading our own crime and poverty statistics while watching everyone else’s glossy travel ads. No wonder we come up short.
There is also a measurable rise in self-focus over the last few decades. Dr. Siegel pointed to long-running data on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, which found that scores climbed across cohorts of college students over the generations, alongside the rise of individualistic culture and, later, social media. Researchers still debate how to interpret it, and Dr. Siegel’s own read, as a clinician, is that a lot of what looks like inflated self-regard is actually pain in disguise.
If your phone reliably leaves you feeling worse about yourself, that is worth taking seriously rather than shrugging off. Naming the specific feeling and the specific trigger is something our coaches help people do all the time, and it is a lot more effective than a vague resolution to use your phone less.
How Do You Actually Stop Comparing Yourself to Others?
You start by noticing it in real time, then you learn to see how the culture is selling it to you, and finally you reach for connection instead of approval. None of these require you to become a different person. They are small, repeatable shifts, and they work together.
The first move is simple awareness. Dr. Siegel started tracking every moment in a day when he felt a little boost or a little collapse, and there were a lot of them. This is where a simple mindfulness practice helps, not the sit-on-a-cushion kind necessarily, just the habit of noticing what is happening in your mind without instantly judging it or trying to fix it.
He shared a small exercise from my friend Terry Real, who has been on the show before. Picture your self-worth as a balloon. Every time you feel yourself rising above other people, give it a little tug back down and remind yourself nobody is actually better or worse than anyone else. Every time you feel yourself sinking below, tug it back up with the same reminder. It sounds almost too simple, and it quietly rewires the reflex. You can hear more of his thinking in my conversation with Terry Real.
The second move is seeing the machinery. Once you start looking, the comparison game is everywhere. Airlines board us by status tier. An airline literally ran an ad campaign whose slogan was nonstop you. Status symbols, from the luxury car to the right brand, are largely about signaling rank to other people. Dr. Siegel’s father, an economist, pointed out a Cadillac to him as a kid and explained conspicuous consumption: buying things not because we need them but to show others we can. Naming these forces does not make them disappear, but it does loosen their grip, because you can feel the pull and choose not to be yanked around by it.
The third move, and the deepest, gets its own section below. But even these first two are worth practicing daily. If you want a structured way in, building self-esteem one thought at a time is a good companion to this work, and so is learning to quiet the overthinking that often rides shotgun with comparison.
Here is the honest bridge between reading this and living it. Noticing your patterns is much easier when you have someone reflecting them back to you. Most of the people I work with can name the comparison spiral in hindsight, but catching it in the moment, and choosing differently, is the hard part. That is precisely what coaching with our team is for: a real person who knows your specific patterns and helps you interrupt them while they are happening.
Take our free What’s Holding You Back quiz and get a clearer picture of the pattern you keep running into.
Take the Free Quiz →What Does Connection Have to Do With Comparison?
Connection is the real antidote, because comparison thrives when you are trying to impress people and dissolves when you are actually with them. Dr. Siegel’s go-to principle is four words: make a connection, not an impression. The moment you stop auditioning and start genuinely relating, the comparing mind has nothing to do.
He gave the everyday examples. Walk into a job interview trying to prove how smart and accomplished you are, and you stay trapped in the rank game. Walk in curious about the people and the place, asking real questions, and something shifts. They remember how it felt to talk to you, not your resume. Same with meeting your partner’s family. Try to impress them and you are performing. Get genuinely interested in them and you connect, which is what you actually wanted the whole time.
There is a quieter truth underneath this too. We often believe that if people really knew us, they would not like us, so we lead with the impressive version and never let anyone close. That is a lonely way to live, and it keeps the comparison machine running, because an impression always has to be defended. Connection does not.
This is also why the people who try hardest to look superior tend to be the ones we feel worst around, and why, as Dr. Siegel noted, organizations that hand leadership to the most self-impressed person so often regret it. Real confidence is quieter than that. If you want to build the kind that does not depend on out-ranking anyone, here is a place to start on real self-confidence. And if reading this makes you realize how rarely you let yourself be known, that is worth saying out loud to someone. It is the kind of thing our coaches help people untangle every week, and you do not need to be in crisis to start.
Why Does Today’s Comparison Hurt So Much? Feel It to Heal It
Because the sting is rarely only about today. When a comparison knocks you sideways with surprising force, it is usually because it is touching something older. Dr. Siegel’s phrase for this is feel it to heal it, and it turns each painful moment into an opportunity instead of just a wound.
He told me about walking into a gathering of well-known colleagues who were already deep in conversation. He felt that familiar shrinking, the not part of the in-group feeling. Instead of scrambling for an ego boost, he paused and asked himself what the feeling actually was. Up came an image of being the younger brother, allowed to tag along with the big kids but never quite one of them. Once he saw that, the present moment loosened. He was not that little boy anymore. He waited, then joined the conversation, and the evening was lovely.
I use a version of this with clients all the time. When a feeling lands hard, I will ask, when have you felt this way before? When was the first time? It is a doorway. Naming the old echo gives you enough room to remember that you are a capable adult in the present, and that this moment is not a verdict on your worth. Doing that kind of gentle excavation on your own is tough, though, because the feeling and the old story are tangled together. Sitting with someone who can help you tell them apart is a large part of what therapy and coaching actually do.
Why Reading This Article Probably Isn’t Enough
I want to be honest with you about something. Everything above is real, and it works. People use these shifts and their lives genuinely change. But I would be doing you a disservice if I let you close this tab believing that reading it was the work.
Here is what usually happens. You read an article like this, something clicks, you feel a little hopeful, and you make a quiet promise to try the new approach next time. Then next time arrives, the comparison hits at 10pm after a hard day, your nervous system does the thing it has done for thirty years, and you are right back in the spiral wondering why nothing changed. That is not because you are unmotivated or broken. It is because you are trying to override an entire lifelong pattern, alone, in the exact moment it is most active. That is the hardest possible time to do something new.
What works is having someone in your corner who knows your specific patterns, who you can check in with after a rough week, who helps you debrief and recalibrate before the next one. That is what coaching with our team actually is. Not lectures, not generic advice, a real ongoing relationship with someone paying attention to your life. If you are genuinely unsure whether what you are feeling is something to bring to someone, that uncertainty is normal, and this is worth talking to someone about sooner than you think.
If something here landed somewhere specific, that is the signal. We do free first conversations, no pressure and no commitment, just a real conversation about what is actually going on for you and whether what we do here might help. You can schedule a free consultation whenever you are ready.
You Don’t Have to Win to Feel Okay
Here is where I want to leave you. The comparison game is not a game you are losing. It is a game nobody wins, by design, because every win recalibrates and every high fades. Once you really take that in, the pressure changes shape. You are not behind. You were handed a rigged scoreboard and told your worth depended on it.
You can step out of it. Not by becoming more impressive, but by noticing the pull, seeing the culture that feeds it, reaching for connection over approval, and treating each collapse as a doorway rather than a sentence. That is the whole shift Dr. Siegel calls the extraordinary gift of being ordinary, and it is a lot more peaceful than the alternative.
And you do not have to make that shift alone. The reason the comparing mind is so sticky is that it is wired in, reinforced daily, and loudest in your most vulnerable moments. That is exactly why having a real person beside you matters. If you are ready to stop measuring your worth against everyone else’s highlight reel, the coaches and therapists on our team do this work with people every day, and the first step is just a conversation. Come see if we’re a good fit. You are more than okay as you are, and you do not have to prove it to anyone.
xoxo,
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
P.S. A quick honest note about the timeline, because I said this on the episode too. These shifts are real, and they also take longer than five-easy-steps articles like to admit. The arc of growth is long, and it helps to have someone walking it with you. There are a couple of ways to do that with my team. You can work one-on-one with a clinician in my network by requesting a free consultation. Or, if you want a lower-commitment way to get traction, I am excited about a newer program called Unstuck in Eight Weeks: eight sessions with a therapist who is doing advanced training in coaching psychology, for $49 a session, designed to help you see your patterns and map out where you want to grow. You can learn more about Unstuck in Eight Weeks. Either way, you do not have to do this alone.
About this episode’s experts
Dr. Ron Siegel
Dr. Ron Siegel has spent more than three decades teaching at Harvard Medical School, where he is an assistant professor of psychology, and much of his life’s work has been about bridging clinical psychology with mindfulness practice. He is a faculty and board member at the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy and co-directs the annual Harvard Medical School conference on meditation and psychotherapy. What makes his perspective land is that he is not preaching from above it — he is candid that after a lifetime of doing his own work, he still rides the self-esteem roller coaster, and that honesty is the heart of his book, The Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary. It is a warm, funny, deeply practical guide to stop obsessing over how you measure up and find a steadier kind of peace.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Licensed psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and Board Certified Coach. Founder of Growing Self Counseling & Coaching. Host of the Love, Happiness & Success podcast (15M+ downloads). 25+ years of clinical practice. Creator of the Growing Self Institute, where she trains licensed mental health professionals in evidence-based coaching psychology.
Frequently asked questions
Because the human brain evolved to track social rank. Comparing yourself to others was once tied to survival and status, so the impulse is built in. It shows up today as fluctuating self-esteem rather than literal competition for resources.
Completely normal. Research on social comparison shows it is a universal human drive. Even highly successful and self-aware people experience it. The belief that only insecure people compare is a myth that adds unnecessary shame.
Start by noticing how you feel after scrolling and naming the trigger. Remember that you are comparing your unedited inner life to other people’s curated highlight reels. Reducing exposure helps, but learning to catch the comparison in the moment helps more.
Because of the hedonic treadmill. Each achievement quickly becomes your new baseline, so the boost fades and the comparison moves to a higher level. This is why no single milestone delivers lasting self-worth.
The hedonic treadmill is the tendency to return to a stable baseline of satisfaction after positive or negative events. In the context of comparison, it explains why the relief you expect from achieving a goal wears off and you start chasing the next one.
Not by itself. Everyone’s self-worth rises and falls with comparison. However, if comparison is constant, painful, and shaping your decisions, it can be both a symptom and a driver of low self-esteem worth exploring with a professional.
Three things working together: noticing the pattern in real time, recognizing how culture and social media sell the comparison game, and shifting from trying to impress people to genuinely connecting with them. Consistent support makes these stick.
When you focus on connecting rather than impressing, you stop auditioning for approval, and the comparing mind quiets. Genuine relationships meet the underlying need — belonging and being valued — that comparison was trying and failing to satisfy.
Because intense reactions usually echo an older experience. A present-day moment of feeling left out or not good enough can resonate with something from earlier in life. Recognizing that link, sometimes called feel it to heal it, creates room to respond as your present-day self.
Yes. The hardest part is interrupting the pattern in the moment, which is difficult to do alone. Working with a therapist or coach gives you someone who knows your specific patterns and helps you respond differently in real time.
No. You do not need to hit a low point to talk to someone. A free consultation is simply a conversation about what is going on and whether support would help. That is exactly what it is for.
Resources Dr. Lisa talked about in this episode
Sources cited in this episode
- Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202
- Twenge, J. M., Konrath, S., Foster, J. D., Campbell, W. K., & Bushman, B. J. (2008). Egos inflating over time: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. Journal of Personality, 76(4), 875–902. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2008.00507.x
- Vogel, E. A., Rose, J. P., Roberts, L. R., & Eckles, K. (2014). Social comparison, social media, and self-esteem. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 3(4), 206–222. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000047
- Siegel, R. D. (2022). The Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary. Guilford Press.
- Veblen, T. (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class. (Origin of the term “conspicuous consumption.”)
- Steele, C. M. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. W. W. Norton.
Accuracy note: On the recording, the term “hedonic treadmill” is attributed to Martin Seligman. The phrase is generally credited to Brickman and Campbell (1971), with the broader idea developed across the positive-psychology tradition. The article describes the concept without pinning it to a single originator.
