Beat Back "Toxic Comparison" With These 4 Lifehacks

If you don't suffer from even a bit of "toxic comparison" good for you, but almost all of us do nowadays.

In case you're unfamiliar with the phrase (not sure if I invented it), this refers to the all-too-human tendency to compare ourselves to others and fixate on our failings and where we come up short. Your buddy has a hot girlfriend and you're single and can't seem to get a date. Your sister has a seemingly happy, growing family and you're childless. Your ex-business partner sold a business and is enjoying the windfall profit.

Your gym buddy is making greater gains there in the realm of metal than you. Or a guy you went to high school with and stayed connected with on social media now has this fabulous life of traveling the world - posting photos almost every day of them doing fun things in exotic places - and your life in the town you both grew up in now seems terribly mundane.

Comparing yourself to others, you'll often end up feeling like a loser. This is toxic and self-sabotages you in ways subtle and not-so-subtle...

• First, this comparison wastes your time and headspace. You're letting this person "live rent-free in your head" by comparing yourself to them often. Time and brainpower are better spent thinking about other things.

• Every time you do it, you're bashing your self-esteem; smearing feces on your self-perception. And there are enough external things in the world that bash your self-esteem. Living a meaningful and happy life requires self-assuredness to push through the inevitable challenges on your path. That self-esteem will keep you on your purpose when you get knocked down. I contend that, especially in modernity, it's better to error in leaning toward hubris than toward humility. Sometimes, you need to fake it till you make it.

• Toxic comparison makes you insecure, and when you're insecure you do dumb things. You overcompensate, you blow things out of proportion, you're easily offended, and you mistake other's errors and absent-mindedness for maliciousness.

• Toxic comparison is the enemy of faith. Faith in yourself, in your choices, in the relationships you've chosen, in a better future you're building, or faith in a higher power looking out for you. The great faith and knowledge traditions urge us not to envy our neighbor's wife or donkey (of wife's ass - to paraphrase the King James wildly) for good reason!

• An all-to-human response to toxic comparison is to internally (or externally) demonize those who seem to be doing better than you. The only reason my brother is richer than me is that he has no principles or morals. That's the only real way to get ahead in the business world! It turns you into this petty, vindictive, negative person. It turns you into this conspiracy theorist who speculates wildly, constructing myths about the world and what's holding you back.

So Should You NEVER Compare Yourself to Others?

I don't think this is quite the right mindset either. Competitiveness is a great human attribute. We have skyscrapers, smartphones, indoor plumbing, and modern medicine that save us from gangrene consuming our right arm after a mishap with a kitchen knife thanks to competitiveness.

But the philosophical mind compares oneself to the aspirational ideal and the average. I think it's ok to compare yourself some to the general population or those demographically similar to you - it often highlights how well you are doing quite well in a few important parts of life! But there's a subtle art to this and subtle art to not giving a damn.

Spend at least as much time and brainpower comparing present-day you to past you, and you'll see that you've made some great gains. And, if comparison always devolves into envy and jealousy for you, swear it off completely!

Social Media Puts "Toxic Comparison" Into OVERDRIVE

I've got a pretty sweet hack for a particularly troublesome form of toxic comparison, but I'd be remiss to not mention social media. Using it flagrantly will really drive you into self-loathing if you follow many show-off accounts. Look how beautiful I am! Look how rich I am! Look how much I travel! Look at all the beautiful people surrounding me! Look at how athletic I am! Look at my cool stuff! Look at how popular I am!

If you're following these accounts and spending more than 60 seconds a day ogling others' highly-curated (and possibly faked) public lifestyles, STOP. It's wasting your time and can have a real psychological cost. Hit unfollow, or better yet, uninstall the apps that draw you into voyeurism. You'll feel better about your life going to the grocery store, paying bills, cleaning the house, and movie nights with your family.

Something that helped me as a (sometimes struggling) entrepreneur, was the exposés by Coffeezilla and other investigators of many high-profile "make money online" gurus. You know those guys who post pictures of themselves driving a Lamborghini and promise quick easy profits if you buy their 4-figure courses.

It turns out that a lot of those guys are faking it - renting exotic cars, doing photoshoots in grounded private jets, paying models to hang out with them, photoshopping earnings reports - or worse running heartless scams on their followers. Knowing that helps on days when making an honest buck seems a Sisyphean task!

HRV vs Evolutionary Psychology

I recently finished a great book about heart rate variability by Dr. Torkil Færø which explains why we are so often driven to compare...

Mammalian survival is closely connected to our intense striving to compare ourselves to others. We get a serotonin kick when we feel that we are better than those we compare ourselves to and a charge of cortisol when it feels like the opposite. One consequence of this is that we avoid fighting those who are stronger than we are. We can more readily ensure our survival by adapting and finding our place in certain hierarchies. (p. 49)

And the book suggests that we can wrangle this pernicious tendency (and others) of the mammalian brain with HRV training. HRV devices and training put us more in charge of the autonomic processes that govern our biology. Having done over 300 HRV training sessions; I can tell you that it has made me a cooler cat - a kitty less prone to compare paws with others. Self-quantifying, as a biohacker should, your focus is always on comparing yourself to yourself. So perhaps, better self-esteem should be an advertised benefit of some of the affordable, stylish, and easy-to-use HRV wearables!

Toxic Comparison to Tribe

This Thanksgiving, will ample servings of toxic comparison be heaped upon your plate? Either by the cutting words of your family or by your inner critic? Toxic comparison to siblings and extended family can leave a bad taste in your mouth after what should be happy gatherings of the tribe. Toxic comparison can also undermine and sour what can be loving life-long familial relationships.

So, I've got a sweet hack for it. Compose an email to any or all family members who you find yourself sliding into toxic comparison with and propose something like this...

I love and respect you, not just because you're my [brother/sister/aunt/uncle/father/mother] BUT because of the impressive life you've built for yourself.
I'm writing because there's something you can do that would really help me (and I think it will be pretty easy for you). Something that holds me back in life is "toxic comparison" - the all-too-human tendency to compare oneself to others, particularly one's family members and tribe. When I see your, not perfect, but beautiful life; I beat myself up inside comparing my life to yours. It's a bad habit that I'm trying to break, but it's something that still subtly sabotages me.
There's a "relationship-hack" for managing toxic comparison that I'd like to propose to you.We end each interaction with words of validation for each other: at the end of a conversation or meeting we each just share one thing we appreciate about the other. It might sound a little silly but apparently, this has helped a lot of people, so I thought it couldn't hurt to run it past you.
It doesn't have to be an iron-clad rule, just something we try to do at the end of every conversation. Would you be willing to try that with me?

If they are decent person, I bet they will say yes. And their regular words of validation will do a lot to assuage toxic comparison!

And this might be something you can take leadership on.

Are you, by appearances, the one in the family that has their life most well put together? Do you have a brother, sister, or cousin who is kind of "the black sheep?" They struggle in their career, health, relationships, or some other department of life where you're doing better? Then you don't necessarily have to propose a validation practice with the template above, you could just start practicing it. It will cost you NOTHING a might make a huge difference to them!

If some toxic comparison has been nagging you for years or decades, you now know how to deal with it. Isn't it about damn time you left it in the dust and focused on the positive in your life?