8. You Constantly Compare Yourself to Others
In life, people have their own paths to walk. Individuals have their strengths, weaknesses, failures and victories. The course that one’s life takes is unique to each individual. No two people start in the exact same place, so don’t achieve the same things. With this logic in mind, you can’t possibly compare your achievements to others. This is not to say you shouldn’t evaluate yourself with others in mind, but you should do so in context.
You can have role models. Most people look up to someone and aspire to achieve like those before them. This is healthy. This is a natural motivating factor for many people. The problem comes in when you start comparing yourself to others and consistently find yourself coming up short. Life can be difficult enough without people bullying themselves.
You can’t get stuck in a routine of beating yourself up because you won’t progress or perform as well as the next person. It is not fair to measure your victories against others. You can’t speak for the effort and hard work others have put in because you can only speak for yourself. This is what context means. A person can’t evaluate themselves properly if they don’t look at their circumstances.
Einstein was one of the greatest minds of our time, and even he said that everything is relative. But anxiety doesn’t allow for this kind of context. Anxious people will constantly look at others and chastise themselves for not being as good. They will feed badly for not being as well-adjusted or as functioning as others. This is self-defeating and results in nothing positive.