How To Deal With Comparison As An Overthinker

Relatability 

How It Feels To Overthink With Comparison 

We have so much access to compare ourselves to others. It’s easy to compare what we see and fill our minds with a story we make up about how well everyone else is doing, except us. It’s easy to spend everyday seeing where we are in life, and looking at one curated glance of someone else and assuming that someone else has it all together. 

Our brains will tell us what we allow it to tell us. When we feel a certain way about ourselves, and see a version of success in somebody else that we want it is easy to overthink about why we aren’t there. We focus on our shortcomings, we focus on what we don’t have, and we focus on how we feel about not being where somebody else is.

What Is Overthinking About Comparison Doing To My Life

Overthinking in comparison had me focusing on everything I wasn’t. Strangely when you’re feeling bad about who you are or where you’re at in life, regardless if we really truly know if someone is doing better it’s almost as if our brains just assume that people are. This assumption I had and how hard I’d be on myself as I ruminated on where I should be, kept me in a place of lack and in a disconnected state of trusting myself. 

When I was looking around and noticed that I was using the outside to compare so much of the things I wanted internally, I noticed I was so focused on the external influence of the world instead of focusing on not only my own internal workings, but other people’s too. What I wanted to feel was peace, stability, love, and understanding and I was looking all around me to see how I could attain those things by seeing what other people were doing. 

Reflection 

What Made Me Want To Change My View On Comparison 

When I focused on learning more about my thoughts on comparison, what it boiled down to what I really was comparing is how I wanted to feel vs how somebody's life looked like it felt. Again, I was focusing a lot on external things like what other people were doing, should I go back to school, will this job make me look impressive, or what can I learn to sound more intelligent. 

I was taking what I was thinking so much about comparison and using that to inadvertently guide my life I was living. I was way too focused on the outside that I was neglecting my inside. I wasn’t thinking about what all this comparing, wishing I was someone else or somewhere else was doing to my soul. I was focused so much on what I looked like in terms of what I was doing, that I failed to focus more on how I could build my mind and soul to love what I already had in me. I wanted to give myself an opportunity to build up my mind and heart to believe so much of what I wanted, instead of looking to what was around me to give me those things. Because when you’re building something inside of you, nobody can take it away.

What I Thought About To Make Changes With Comparison  

Just like I mentioned earlier about having a lot of access to compare ourselves to others, we have the equal amount of access to use comparison as a way to help ourselves. Thinking of comparison to what’s around you as more of inspiration instead of trying to attain exactly what you think other people have is a good start. 

The world around you is meant for inspiration, maybe an invitation to be curious about something new, or a way to learn something about what you enjoy. The idea is not necessarily to become what is around you. The strength of who you are is in your internal world. Who are you on the inside that make you who you are, where can you focus on your strengths, where can you highlight your individuality, where can you customize your own perspective. 

Knowing these things shifts the desire to compare your outside world to somebody else’s, because your internal world remains whole. This is where comparing and inspiring can become fun, because the idea of comparison is more genuine and it’s more of an exchange between you and what you find interesting or a pull to incorporate something you see into your life. 

Reinvention 

What I Chose To Do With What I Learned About Comparison 

Comparison is more than the thief of joy comparison is the thief of connecting with yourself internally and using that as your guide. Comparing yourself to others is putting your internal world against the external world. The center of everything and what goes on around it are two entirely different forces. The internal world is where you learn and expand, the outer world gives you opportunities to do just that. To not become the external or someone else but to learn from it and make it your own.

How I Carried Out What I Learned About Comparison 

Your perception and point of view is what makes you unique but using comparison to others as a way to expand yourself is the difference between trying to become something outside of yourself that you’re not and using different perspectives to still remain whole but simply expanding your core to show the external world around you who you are in your own way. The perspective of comparison has now shifted to sharing and inspiring growth instead of becoming something else entirely. What you see in the world around you that you love, is inside of you too you just have to believe that you’re capable of tapping into it.