Are you suffering from Comparisonitis?

6 ways to Stop This Epidemic and Get Back to Living

* If you prefer audio, you can listen to this newsletter on Substack. Just find the play button on the top right corner.

THE EPIDEMIC

Let’s call it what it is. Comparisonitis. It’s not a clinical diagnosis, but a term that organizational psychologists now use to describe the chronic, habitual loop of measuring ourselves against others until we’re too demoralized to move. It is, at this point, an epidemic. Social media didn’t invent it, but Instagram has absolutely turbocharged it into something we’ve never seen before at this scale.

We’ve all known this instinctively for years. I feel it on a daily basis. But it was through my advisory work with women founders that I realized that, not only it wasn’t just me, but it was everyone. The same story session after session, across industries, across very different women. Brilliant women, with real ideas and real capability, all frozen. Because they opened Instagram and saw someone doing something adjacent, and decided on the spot that it had already been done by someone better.

I use founders as an example because that’s where I’ve watched this happen the most, but comparisonitis doesn’t care what you do. It finds the mother who scrolls through other people’s family Sundays and feels like she’s failing her children. Or the woman in a new relationship who measures her life against someone else’s engagement announcement. Or it finds the one who just wants to start something — anything — and talks herself out of it before she even begins.

After watching so many people (myself included) suffer through this, I decided I had to go looking for answers. I’ve been looking at this for months, and today I’m sharing what I found. Why we do this, how it freezes us, my own spiral before pushing “publish” on this newsletter, and six things that actually help. I hope by the end of this you feel a little less alone in it, and a little more ready to live your life like nobody’s watching. Because, as it turns out, they really aren’t.

WHY WE DO THIS: looking sideways and upward social comparison

It’s normal for all humans to look sideways at other people as a way to evaluate themselves (called the Social Comparison Theory proposed by psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954). But research consistently shows that women engage in upward social comparison — measuring themselves against people they perceive as more successful, more put-together, further along — more frequently than men, and are far more likely to internalize the damage afterward. Men tend to deflect (“different circumstances,” “she got lucky”). Women absorb it directly into their sense of self. They are both comparing, but with very different aftermath.

And Instagram is a near-perfect machine for this because in most things that actually matter — am I a good enough mother, is my work meaningful, is my life adding up to something — there is no actual objective score. So we outsource the verdict to other people’s curated feed of best moments, and we use that as our mirror. No wonder we are all reeling with insecurity.

THE FREEZE: the spotlight that isn’t even on you

Psychologists Gilovich and Savitsky identified something called the Spotlight Effect — our consistent tendency to believe we are being observed and judged far more than we actually are. We walk through our lives convinced the room is paying attention to us: to our choices, our bodies, our work, our failures. It isn’t. Everyone else is too busy being convinced the room is paying attention to them.

This matters because comparisonitis feeds on that imaginary audience. You’re not just afraid you’re falling short, you’re afraid everyone can see it.

The shame of feeling behind is bad enough. But the belief that it’s obvious and visible, and that people are clocking the gap between you and others is what turns a passing moment of self-doubt into a full freeze. The spotlight isn’t real but the paralysis it causes very much is.

WHAT THE DATA SAYS: what hits us the most, how women lose it, and the self-defeating cycle.

Research has found that when we scroll through idealized images and lives on social media, we don’t feel bad about everything — we feel bad about the specific things that matter most to us personally. A writer feels like a fraud. A mother feels like she’s failing. A founder feels like she’s already been lapped.

To make matters worse for women, the “better than average” effect (Svenson, 1981) shows that most people naturally rate themselves above average on most things but men maintain this bias even after repeated failure, and women lose it faster and take longer to rebuild it. Every scroll accelerates that loss.

And to tie everything with a crazy self-defeating bow, just like women are conditioned to judge their bodies through someone else’s eyes, we do the exact same thing with everything else we create or care for. The newsletter, the home, the children, the relationship — they all become extensions of us, waiting to be graded. No wonder a bad scroll can level us.

A CONFESSION: this newsletter almost didn’t happen

I’m not a professional writer, nor do I have a degree in journalism, and English is not my first language. I didn’t come from fashion editorial, newspapers, or digital media. When I joined Substack, I was very intimidated by the caliber of the writers here, and I was convinced that, not only someone had already brilliantly covered every topic I thought of, but when I finally decide to write about it, I will be judged for being a terrible writer.

I had talked myself out of it approximately forty times before I finally hit “publish”. The voice in my head was relentless: “Who do I think I am to write anything here? I don’t belong here, and whatever I decide to write has already been done by someone better”. Sounds familiar?

I started anyway, and not because I’m brave, but because I’m terrible at living with regret.

That voice is still here, and sometimes it’s very loud. I still feel the anxiety every time I send you this newsletter. I often catch myself sliding into comparison mode, but I’ve learned a few things that help me interrupt the loop before it freezes me. I am sharing them below, and I hope it’s helpful to you too.

WHAT I TELL MY CLIENTS — AND MYSELF: six ways to get your blinders on

Though I’m not a life coach (my work is focused on brand and retail strategy), nothing will get done if the Founder is paralyzed with fear and comparisonitis. So I often share these practical and grounded tools I use for getting out of the comparison loop and back into my own life.

1. Decide what success looks like for you before you start scrolling

Comparison is most damaging when someone else sets the criteria. Before you open Instagram, go to that dinner party, or attend a networking session, ask yourself: what does a good week actually look like for me, specifically, right now? What are you actually trying to do? When you have your own definition in hand, someone else’s version of success stops being a verdict on yours. Research on self-concordant goals shows that women who pursue goals tied to their own values are significantly more resilient to comparison because they’re playing a different game entirely. I had to do this over and over again in my business, and I can attest this is a huge help.

2. Fall in love with the doing, not the outcome

There’s real research behind the difference between being focused on mastery (getting better at the thing, enjoying the process) versus performance (being seen to be good at the thing). The mastery-focused are dramatically less destabilized by comparison, because they’re measuring themselves against their own last version, not against someone else’s Instagram feed. You can’t control what other people’s lives look like from the outside. You can control whether today felt meaningful to you. Redirect there.

3. You’re not behind others. You’re ahead of where you were.

Some people are in chapter twelve. You’re in chapter five, but of your specific book, which they have never written and couldn’t. These are not the same paths. They aren’t even the same story. Research shows that comparing yourself to your own earlier self produces more accurate self-assessment and higher motivation than comparing upward to someone else. Your only real competition is who you were last year. That’s the only gap worth closing.

4. Step away from the phone.

Research distinguishes between active and passive social media use. It’s the passive scrolling, the absorbing-without-doing, where the psychological damage concentrates. You don’t have to post, engage, or perform anything. You just have to stop consuming on autopilot. The simplest intervention is also the most effective: close the app before you’ve convinced yourself you need to see one more thing. Take a break from the phone and exhale.

5. Look behind the painting

So many people only show you the final painting, but never how hard it was to get there from the blank canvas. We don’t see the overnight success that took eleven years, the picture-perfect family that just got back from therapy, the glowing skin from a painful and expensive procedure. We compare our raw work-in-process life to someone else’s carefully framed and staged masterpiece. That’s not a fair fight and it was never meant to be. Train yourself to ask: what am I not seeing? Ask it every time.

6. Call someone who knew you before

One of the most effective antidotes to comparison is being truly seen by someone who has actually watched you grow. A friend who knew you at your most uncertain. A mentor who remembers where you started. A sister who has no reason to perform for you and no reason to compete. These people hold a mirror that Instagram simply cannot. When the scroll is making you feel like you’re losing a race you never signed up for, call one of them. They know the whole story.

One last thing worth saying out loud. There is nothing wrong with us. Comparisonitis isn’t a personal failing, it’s just a product of well designed platforms that need all of us feeling inadequate, scrolling and engaging to continue to make billions of dollars. The strategies I shared above are meant to remind us that this system is built to keep us consuming instead of living.

So put the blinders on, and get back to your full, beautiful, imperfect life. Your chapter five is the only one that matters right now.

Sending love,

Patricia

PS: If you are an entrepreneur and need help with your brand, check my credentials and some of my advisory work HERE. You can also schedule a Discovery Call HERE so we can chat and see if we are a good fit.