You open the door and the room is already full. You haven’t said hello to anyone yet, and the inventory is done: who looks more confident, who talks more easily, who dressed better, who is worth approaching and who you’d better keep away from. Ten seconds have gone by. Nobody has said a word to you, and you’ve already lost three times.

It doesn’t have to be a room. It can be a dinner with old classmates, a work meeting, or your phone at eleven at night: her trip, his promotion, the couple who look like they stepped out of an ad. The feeling is the same. Everyone else is moving on and you’re still standing on the platform.

A sum that was rigged from the start

Comparing yourself isn’t strange, and it isn’t a flaw. We all do it, all the time, almost without noticing. What goes wrong is the way the sum gets done.

You compare what you know about yourself (your doubts, your bad days, what you never finished, what embarrasses you) with what you see of other people, which is almost always what they choose to show. Your kitchen against everyone else’s shop window. With that data the result always goes against you, and not because you’re worse off: you’re comparing things that can’t be compared.

One more detail: you rarely compare yourself with someone who is doing worse. You compare yourself, precisely, with whoever has what you’d like to have.

The comment that stays

Social media made all of this faster. You post something and get forty likes, six kind comments and one curt one. Or the person you were hoping would notice just scrolls past. Which of them goes to bed with you that night?

Almost always, the bad one. We give a single negative comment a weight we don’t give all the good ones put together. The good ones get read quickly, as if they were just being polite. The bad one gets reread, searched for a hidden meaning, and answered in your head in the shower.

Maybe it’s an old habit of staying on alert: paying more attention to what could go wrong than to what has already gone well. It’s useful for crossing a street. For reading your own life, much less so.

Allies, rivals and a threat nobody named

Back to the room. That quick scan of who’s who isn’t just curiosity. Often it’s defence: working out who to side with, who to watch out for, who might show you up. As if it were a territory and not a gathering.

It happened to me for years in training groups: I’d walk into a new group and, before I’d learned a single name, I already knew who knew more than me. The funny thing is I was almost never right.

This often has a history. In many cases, people who compare themselves non-stop learned early on that their place wasn’t guaranteed and had to be earned: with good grades, by behaving, by causing as little trouble as possible, or by being the funny one. If that rings a bell, comparing yourself may be a way of checking, again and again, whether you’re still enough. Maybe that isn’t your story. Who were you compared with, before you learned to do it on your own?

What you can try the next time you start measuring

Name it as it happens. When you walk into a place and notice the inventory has started, say it to yourself: “I’m measuring again.” You don’t need to stop it. It’s enough to realise that this is a sum you’re doing, not a verdict on you.
Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to a friend. It’s an exercise I often suggest. Imagine someone you care about telling you exactly what’s happening to you: that they feel less than everyone, that their life isn’t going anywhere. What would you say? Probably something kind, nuanced and patient. Now compare it with what you say to yourself. The gap is usually huge: with others we’re fair, with ourselves, relentless. That distance already says a lot.
Actually count. Next time a comment ruins your day, count how many good ones there were and read one of them out loud. It sounds silly and it isn’t: it forces the scales to weigh everything, not only what hurts.
Choose what you look at. If some accounts always leave you feeling worse than before you opened them, you can mute them without falling out with anyone. It isn’t hiding: it’s no longer planting yourself in front of the shop window on purpose.
Ask your envy what it wants. When someone sets off that sting, instead of using it to beat yourself up, ask yourself what exactly you would like to have. Sometimes it isn’t their job or their trip, but something smaller and more your own: time, permission, the nerve to try. That is useful information.

When comparing starts deciding for you

Sometimes this doesn’t stay a bad moment. You stop going to meetings because you already know how you’ll come out. You don’t post, you don’t apply, you don’t suggest anything, because someone already does it better. You compare yourself so much that you’ve stopped playing.

If you’re there, working on it with someone usually helps. In Gestalt therapy we pay attention to what happens in the moment, including inside the session: how you walk in, what you look at, what you tell yourself when something is hard in front of another person. Trying to convince you that you’re worth it doesn’t usually work, and you’ve probably tried that already. What helps more is looking calmly at how you put that sum together, who you learned it from, and what would happen if you started measuring with a different ruler. Maybe the old one is still good for something; maybe not. You find that out by looking, not before.

In that full room, while you take your inventory, it’s quite likely someone else is taking theirs. They might be two metres away, by the drinks table, convinced that you’re the one who has it all figured out.

If what weighs most is the voice that judges you afterwards, I wrote about it in I punish myself every time I make a mistake. And if what drives you is how others see you, carry on with I care too much about what people think.

If you’d like us to work on this together, write to me through the contact page and we’ll find a time. Sessions are in person in Barcelona or online, in English or Spanish. If you want to know how I work first, it’s all on the Gestalt therapy page.