In her regular column for Canberra Daily, ‘Why your mind matters’, founder of Anytime Counselling, Tina Kendall-Davis BA, BEd, DipCouns, GradDipPsyc, offers general advice to help us cope in everyday situations. This week’s topic: Comparison. The killer of comfort.
Why do we so often feel inadequate? A failure? Worth less than others?
Why?
Because we’ve been trained to compare.
Everywhere, everything, every time.
To the point we’re even doing it unwittingly.
It’s now so engrossed into our norm – there’s an entire industry booming from it. Influencers, who, by definition ‘have the capacity to have an effect’ – and that effect is on us.
And we’re suffering from it. Oh boy are we suffering.
We are miserable.
It’s hard to find happy when you’re constantly blinded by the seemingly unattainable, often-times photoshopped-therefore-actually-unattainable life of others.
So how do we combat this?
We question it.
Seriously.
Question it.
That amazingly wealthy person you admire – the one with the private jets living the constant holiday? Question it. Have you seen their bank accounts? Do you actually KNOW FOR SURE they’re wealthy? (Did you know you can hire time on those planes and take as many photos as you like – without ever leaving the tarmac?)
Question it.
That perfect body you idolise and hate yourself for not having – the one with zero blemishes and perfect tone. Have you seen that body in the flesh? Do you KNOW FOR SURE that is a real representation of their body? (We all know the innumerable number of filters available to everyone what they can do, right? Hell, I lost a decade of age just the other night after my kids left a filter on. I was horrified when I turned it off – a stab of reality I didn’t benefit from and wasn’t even aware of until I had a ‘comparison’.)
We’re all subjected to it.
To survive, we must counteract it. And we do this by putting some reality behind it, by questioning it.
Ask yourself – What do I KNOW FOR SURE about this person? The likely answer being nothing. This being the case, take the pictures they SELL you with the same level of caution as that of a used car salesperson. Of ANY sales person. When browsing with our money, we bring conscious consideration to the table. When browsing with our mind, we tend to accept face value as reality and leave conscious consideration at the door.
Always consciously consider validity. Ask yourself for the proof you would want if you were handing over your hard-earned money.
Documentaries like “Fyre. The greatest party that never happened” (Netflix) are perfect examples of what we see versus what can be the reality. Spoiler alert – it ends in jail time for deceptive practices. Shows like this permit you to question the image. Always give yourself permission to question the image.
Then, ask yourself “what do I have that they do not?”.
No – we are not saying things like ‘debt’ because it’s a fact that we don’t know if they have debt or not; we’re saying things like ‘my kids’, ‘my partner’, ‘my job’, ‘my friends’, ‘my family’.
It’s the things that make you a great friend, employee/employer, parent, son/daughter, neighbour. It’s the things that make you happy. It’s the things you have worked for, earned, created, experienced. It’s the things you care about. It’s the things that make you you.
There is none of this in those photos, in those feeds. And this is the stuff that is enviable. This is the stuff that is yours. All yours. You just need to bring your awareness to it.
- Tina Kendall-Davis
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