What is comparison? Comparison can be defined by, “a consideration or estimate of the similarities or dissimilarities between two things or people.” As of right now nobody can fully explain why we do compare ourselves although professionals have narrowed it down to 2 types of comparison; upward and downward. Upward comparison is defined by comparing ourselves to people who have shown greater success than us. Downward comparison is when we tend to compare ourselves to people that have accomplished less than what we have. We’ve probably all compared ourselves to someone at some point in our lives. Sometimes we even can use it as a tool for reassurance to collect information from others. Sometimes when we were younger our parents would compare us to our friends, because they were more helpful or cooperative around our parents so they would sometimes say something like, “Why can’t you be as helpful as ***”. A little healthy competition can definitely be a good thing for trying to better yourself or use someone's successes to inspire you and motivate you to be a better person. However there are also many negative elements present in comparison. Especially with social media, we have normalized that especially for young girls, that they should look perfect at such young ages, such as 13 and older. For our generation, I think we have grown up with the normalization of comparison at such young ages of our lives where we didn’t have enough maturity to understand that social media is fake. So why would we compare ourselves to something unreal? This is the negative side of comparison. Many studies have shown that social comparison can guide you into feelings of guilt and sadness. Comparaison can vary in many different forms depending upon the type. Upward comparison has shown to lower our self esteem because if you always only compare yourself to people that you think are better than yourself, you are already going into the mindset that you are less than them, which is not true, because everyone has different factors that shape who they are. Downward comparison in research has been shown that it is proven as more effective as being positive for yourself, because when you compare yourself to someone who is “inferior” to you that can make you look/feel better. In my mind both these types are toxic to your mental health because it either causes you to look down on yourself, or causes you to look down on others around you. A really important thing about comparison that isn’t talked about enough is the fact that every single person is different so no person can look and act the exact same. For my own personal experience with comparison I’ve always found it to be a negative experience. Now that I am older and more mature I can understand the difference between “positive and negative” comparisons. For myself when I was younger I would find myself comparing myself to a few of my friends not even considering factors which affected the situation.
When comparing myself for instance when I was younger and when I used to do dance, I would compare myself a lot to the people around me thinking to myself, “wow, they’re so good, why can’t I be as good as them?”. This was a really bad way to look at my progress. Now that I’m older and I do rethink situations like that when I did compare myself I realize that I didn’t even consider why they were “better” than I was. Now I can reflect and can see they had more experience as they’ve been doing it since they were little and I joined much later than them, so it makes sense they are more experienced than myself. Brooke
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