Dr Katzenstein continues,
“Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
Continuing our discussion of social comparison, today we will look at a number of other risks and dangers of comparing ourselves constantly with others. It must be said, that viewing social media is really about comparing ourselves to what we must recognize as other people’s fake, inauthentic, disingenuine lives.
No one is going to put onto
Instagram or Facebook, their failures or boredom - just sitting around the house doing nothing.
They post the restaurants they've been to, and the vacations they've been on, and we start to compare ourselves to this false notion of what other people's lives are about. This creates unrealistic standards. Social comparison can contribute to the development of unrealistic standards and expectations. When we constantly compare ourselves to other, with their seemingly perfect lives, and their seemingly inordinate amounts of achievement, we start to set unattainable goals for ourselves, resulting in an incredible amount of chronic stress, anxiety, and a sense of perpetual, infinite dissatisfaction with our own achievements and goals.
We can also develop distorted self-perception. When we compare other people’s strengths with our weaknesses, it can lead to an inaccurate assessment of our abilities and achievements. We then skew or distort our perception of ourselves, which can hinder personal growth and development, because we're no longer attempting to achieve our own goals. Rather, we're attempting to achieve and accomplish what we perceive as others' achievements, their accomplishments, and their goals.
This can significantly impact our mental health. Research has shown that engaging in frequent social comparison has been linked to various mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, and body image issues. The constant evaluation of ourselves in relation to others creates a negative mindset that's very difficult to get out of, and it fosters feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.
We're going to walk around, in our daily lives, feeling like we're not enough. Others are doing more than us, so in comparison, I'm not doing enough. That very quickly turns into I myself, am not enough. That becomes my identity: I am inadequate. I am not enough.
It can't be emphasized enough, how damaging this can be to our own sense of self, our sense of self-worth, and our sense of who we are as people.”