Comparing ourselves to others can become a healthy habit

Not too long ago, on a cold winter night, somewhere in America, there was a tween who wanted more screen time and a parent who said no. The tween in question was advocating vociferously for her right to scroll for an extra 30 minutes at night. The parent in question argued against this request by trotting out the fact that none of her friends’ parents let them have screens after 9 o’clock.

“I thought we don’t compare ourselves with other people in this family?” the tween said in reply. The parent in question — who was me, by the way — just got served. Because what my daughter said was true. Since they were young, I have told my daughters not to compare themselves with other people. I have argued countless times that comparisons are the “thief of joy.” They put you in a box, limiting your aspirations and creativity to what you see in others.

Although my daughter didn’t prevail in her quest for more screen time, she did help expose one of the shoddiest pieces of advice I have ever given. In my defense, I did what we’ve all done before, which is repeat received wisdom without delving into the nuances. But now is the time to set the record straight, which starts with interrogating the idea that all social comparison is unhealthy.

Spoiler: It’s not.

There are good reasons people are wary of comparison making, well illuminated by social media. Some of my initial research on social media sites in the early 2010s showed that interacting with Facebook (the dominant platform at that time) negatively affected well-being. It was a straightforward finding: The more time people used Facebook, the more their positive mood declined over time. It wasn’t until a set of follow-up studies that we understood why this was happening: The more people scrolled on Facebook, the more envious they felt, which in turn predicted declines in their well-being.

Considering how many people use social media platforms such as Facebook (3 billion people, in that case), you can approximate that hundreds of millions of people feel bad every day because of digital social comparison.

But before we write off social comparisons as inherently toxic, let’s remember that it’s a universal feature of human psychology; it’s a behavior baked into our brains.

Once we start making comparisons around the time of preschool, we keep doing it. And that’s true regardless of our income bracket or culture. It’s inescapable; we are constantly weighing how we are doing against others. Sometimes we do this spontaneously, like when we’re mindlessly scrolling through Instagram. And sometimes we do it deliberately, like when we’re scanning the alumni magazine announcements to see how we stack up against our college nemeses.

These comparisons help us make sense of ourselves. Our self-worth isn’t just determined by how objectively good we are at sports, how much money we earn or how many A’s we get in school; it’s also about how we fare in comparison to others. When there are no clear objective standards (Am I smart enough? Good-looking enough? Social enough?), we look to others to form our opinions about ourselves.

Social comparisons do, of course, often get us into emotional trouble. One of the largest analyses of social comparisons to date reviewed more than 60 years of research on the topic and found that most of the comparisons people make are to people who are outperforming them in some way, and the juxtaposition generally results in them feeling bad.

But social comparisons can be harnessed for our betterment if we understand how they work. In ongoing research that Micaela Rodriguez, Ozlem Ayduk and I performed, we recruited participants who were dealing with a difficult problem and then asked them to think about someone they knew who was faring worse. We learned that many of the participants found comfort and strength in those comparisons; they felt more optimistic and less negative than another group of participants who were just asked to reflect on their problem.

One student reported thinking about their family members who were grieving and suffering, but who still managed to get out of bed every day. This comparison sparked the realization in the student that they were fortunate and gave them a boost of motivation: If those family members can go out every day and do what needs to be done, with everything they’re dealing with, then I can too.

The social comparisons we make — ones that lead us to feel good or bad about ourselves — are vital to our ability to thrive. Science provides a guide we can implement to harness the way we perform these comparisons to mitigate their negative emotional impact.

Comparing yourself with someone who is outperforming you could result in feelings of envy and dejection if you focus on the things they have and you don’t, or it can be energizing and inspiring if you use these comparisons as a source of motivation, for example, “If they can achieve that, so can I.”

Comparing yourself with someone who is doing worse than you could result in fear and worry if you think about how you could fall into similar circumstances, or it can elicit feelings of gratitude and appreciation if you use that comparison to broaden your perspective — for example, “Wow, things could be much worse; I’m doing great.”

What I wished I taught my daughter earlier were these nuances about social comparison. How we feel about ourselves hinges not just on whom we compare ourselves with but also on how we think about that comparison. That’s something we all have control over.

Ethan Kross, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, is the author of “Shift: Managing Your Emotions — So They Don’t Manage You,” from which this article is adapted.