Keeping up: How to break the negative comparison trap and focus on your own achievements

Comparing oneself to others can help us to achieve our own goals, but it can also be detrimental to self-esteem Comparison can give us clues about where we want to be in life. Photo: Getty Before social media, the matter of social comparison was encapsulated by the idiom ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ — a term that particularly referred to keeping up with your neighbours’ social status, wealth or popularity, together with all of the attending risks or overspending. But now, we live in a tsunami of opportunities to compare ourselves to others.

We can compare skin, hair, clothes, holidays, motherhood, baby sleeps — in fact, just about any aspect of life. The list goes on and on. What people have, how they live, their homes, their lives, it’s all out there.



But making comparisons isn’t always good, and too much of it can be toxic for us..