You Want To Be Happy, Stop Comparing Yourself To Others
Our culture has made it
increasingly easy to compare ourselves to others, through Facebook, Instagram, and
hundreds of other platforms.
But constant comparison only makes us feel like failures: No matter what, there will always be
someone who's at least one step ahead us; and the perfect job, spouse, salary,
etc., will always remain elusive.
Elizabeth Weil recently interviewed University of California
psychology professor Sonja
Lyubomirsky about this phenomenon for The New York
Times. In her article, "Happiness
Inc.," she writes that, "As Dr. Lyubomirsky has found in her
lab (and many of us find around the office or at a bar), unhappy people compare a lot and
care about the results."
In a study, "Hedonic
consequences of social comparison," Lyubomirsky and her co-author Lee Ross
from Stanford
University looked at how happy and unhappy people respond differently to
feedback, both positive and negative, on a teaching exercise. Happy
participants' self-confidence was enhanced by positive feedback, no matter if
they also learned that their peers got better results. On the other hand,
confidence levels for unhappy people soared when they received positive feedback
alone, but only increased minimally when they learned their peers did better.
Most surprisingly, they found that:
The overall pattern of
results that emerged
was striking in that unhappy participants
showed greater increases in self-confidence
after learning that they did poorly but their peer did even worse
than after learning
that they did very well but their peer did even better whereas happy participants showed smaller increases in
self-confidence in the latter condition than in the former
condition.
Here's a chart showing the results
of the experiment:
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While modest comparison to other people makes for healthy competition, those who are consumed by peer comparison are simply choosing to live an unhappier life.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/happiness-research-2013-4#ixzz2SLcr0GhO
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