There's a particular kind of tiredness that comes from comparing your insides to someone else's outside world.
For example — when scrolling on social media, you put your phone down and something in you has quietly deflated, not because anything bad happened, but because everyone else's life looked so full and favourable. One person has had a beautiful kitchen renovation. Another just made a record marathon time. An old school friend just went on the trip of a lifetime, posting all the meals that feel impossible for you to face. Perhaps someone is in recovery and their body looks entirely different to yours, or you are inundated with pictures from a random stranger's beautifully connected and stable relationship, and you envy every cheesy post they make.
Meanwhile you're sitting in your actual life, which still has your unfinished dishes in the sink, the confusion about where your career is headed, the argument you haven't resolved, and the way your stomach felt weird after lunch, which is consuming your every thought.
You can't seem to understand why your life feels like it comes with so many internal battles, while everyone else seems to "have it all together." If you've ever thought or felt this way, I want you to know first: this is a well-documented psychological process, and once you understand what's actually happening — in your mind and in your body — it gets a lot easier to catch yourself mid-spiral and come back to yourself peacefully.
Why We Compare in the First Place
The psychologist Leon Festinger named this back in 1954: social comparison theory. His basic idea was that humans have a built-in drive to evaluate themselves, and in the absence of an objective yardstick — because there's no physical ruler for "am I doing okay at life" — we use other people as the measuring stick instead. It's not vanity. It's how we've always figured out where we stand, whether we're safe, whether we belong.
Comparison itself isn't the problem. Festinger and the researchers who followed him distinguished between upward comparisons (measuring yourself against someone who seems to be doing better) and downward comparisons (measuring yourself against someone who seems to be doing worse). Downward comparison can actually be self-soothing — it's part of why "misery loves company" is a real phenomenon. Upward comparison is where things get complicated, because it's the one most likely to leave you feeling behind, lesser, or like you're the only one who hasn't got it figured out.
And here's the thing about the world we're comparing ourselves against now: it is almost entirely curated. Before social media, we had much less opportunity to see the highlights of someone's life, and now we see curated information that can become very misleading. A feed is a highlight reel, edited and selected and often filtered, and our nervous systems are being asked to treat it as reliable information about how everyone else's actual, felt life is going. That's the mismatch at the heart of it — we're comparing our internal experience, the one we have full, unedited access to, against other people's external presentation, the one we only ever see the finished version of. It's not actually a fair comparison.
We don't see the three hours that person spent feeling bored in a queue at Home Affairs, or the frustration they felt when their partner forgot something important for the fifth time. We don't see the two years they spent not knowing if they were in the right career, the hour they spent in a therapy session talking about a father wound, or the doubt they felt going on a first date. We don't see that they still freak out every time someone offers them a soda with sugar in it. We are not comparing apples to apples here.
What the Research Shows About the Body and Food
This pattern doesn't just affect our mood — it has a measurable relationship to how we feel about our bodies and how we relate to food. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis pooling 83 studies and over 55,000 participants found a moderate, consistent association between online social comparison and both body image concerns (r = .454) and disordered eating symptoms (r = .36), while comparison was linked to lower positive body image (ScienceDirect). Crucially, it was the upward comparisons — appearance comparisons specifically — that carried the strongest association, more so for women than men (Turk et al., 2026, International Journal of Eating Disorders).
So why would comparing yourself to a stranger's photo change your relationship with food? Because of what comparison actually does in the body. Researchers studying what's called "social-evaluative threat" — the sense that you're being watched, judged, or ranked — have found it reliably activates the body's stress response, raising cortisol and heart rate much like a direct threat would (PMC, UCL research on stress and social hierarchy). Your nervous system doesn't fully distinguish between "I might get left out of the tribe" and "I saw someone's holiday photos and now I feel behind." Both register, at some level, as I might not be safe here, I might not belong here — and that activation has to go somewhere. For a lot of us, it goes toward food and body: restricting as a way to regain a feeling of control, eating as a way to soothe the activation, or turning the discomfort into a verdict about the body itself, since the body is the most visible, most "fixable"-feeling target.
The Deeper Mix-Up: Outside Information Standing In for Inside Information
Underneath all of this is something I think about a lot in this work — the difference between interoception (your felt, internal sense of your own body and state) and the exteroceptive information constantly pouring in from outside you (what you see, what you're told, what everyone else appears to be doing). Comparison asks you to use exteroceptive information — someone else's edited exterior — to answer an interoceptive question: how am I actually doing?
That question can only honestly be answered from the inside. No amount of looking outward will ever give you an accurate read on your own internal state, because it isn't designed to.
It's a bit like trying to check the weather by looking at someone else's window.
This is also where self-compassion research offers something genuinely useful. Kristin Neff's work has found that self-compassion and self-esteem are related but functionally different: self-esteem tends to rely on favourable comparison with others to feel good, while self-compassion doesn't require the comparison at all — it's rooted in accepting yourself as you are, imperfections included (self-compassion.org). In studies of women's body image specifically, higher self-compassion predicted fewer body concerns, greater body appreciation, and — importantly for anyone doing this work — less guilt after eating something they'd labelled "off plan." Self-compassion accounted for that protection even after self-esteem was controlled for. In plain terms: the antidote to comparison isn't feeling better than someone else. It's needing the comparison less in the first place.
A Tool for Coming Back to Yourself: The Internal Check-In
Here's a practice I'd invite you to try the next time you notice that deflated, behind, not-enough feeling creeping in — whether it's triggered by a scroll, a conversation, or just a passing thought about someone else's life.
1. Notice and name it. As soon as you catch the spiral starting, just name it quietly to yourself: "I'm comparing." That single act of naming interrupts the automatic pull of it and gives you a sliver of choice.
2. Locate it in your body. Rather than staying in the story ("she has it so together"), drop down and ask: where do I feel this? A tightness in the chest, a sinking in the stomach, a clench in the jaw. You're not trying to fix the sensation — just find it and let it be there for a moment. This is the felt sense, and it's far more trustworthy information than the story your mind is spinning.
3. Ask what it's actually about. Comparison is rarely about the surface thing. Underneath "I wish my kitchen looked like that" is often a real, valid longing — for ease, for beauty, for rest, for being seen. Ask: what am I actually longing for right now? That question takes you from a verdict about your worth to a piece of information about your values.
4. Return one fact to yourself. Something true, not something inspirational. Not "everything happens for a reason," but something plain and grounding: "I don't know what her life actually feels like from the inside." "I am allowed to be in progress." "This is one photo, not a whole life." Let it be simple enough to actually believe.
5. Choose one small, embodied action. Not a plan to overhaul your life — something small and immediate that reconnects you to your own experience rather than someone else's: a few slow breaths, a hand on your chest, stepping outside, drinking some water, texting someone who knows the real you. The goal isn't to never compare again. It's to build the muscle of noticing, and choosing to come back.
The truth is, comparison will probably always be part of being human — Festinger was onto something that hasn't gone away in seventy years, it's just got a faster, more curated delivery system now.
Further Reading
- The association between social comparison in social media, body image concerns and eating disorder symptoms — systematic review and meta-analysis (ScienceDirect)
- Social Comparison and Its Association With Disordered Eating Symptoms — Turk et al., International Journal of Eating Disorders
- Manipulating Levels of Socially Evaluative Threat and the Impact on Anticipatory Stress Reactivity (PMC)
- Stress, Cortisol, and Social Hierarchy (UCL)
- Self-compassion and body image (self-compassion.org, Body Image journal)
You don't have to let someone else's outside keep deciding how your inside gets to feel. The information you need about how you're doing was never going to be found out there. It's always been available closer than that.