With an autoimmune disease, the body misidentifies its own healthy cells as threats: it fights them like they’re enemies.
With chronic social comparison, the same thing happens in your mind: you misidentify your own strengths as “not enough” because they don’t match someone else’s.
Part 2: The Self-Attack Spiral
I touched on the statement above in part 1. Now, let me explain what I meant by my concluding sentence:
“Once your mind learns to attack itself, it won’t stop there. It starts going after everything else.”
Similar to how systemic autoimmune diseases like lupus can spread throughout different parts of the body over time, social comparison spreads to more and more aspects of your life as your comparison tendencies become more frequent and ingrained.
Suddenly, you start to think about the people who are “better than you” when you’re doing normal daily activities like eating or trying to go to sleep, not just studying or working. You obsess over how your “rival” seems to make no mistakes on assignments and tests. Or maybe you even start to think not only about how much smarter this person is but also how much better, talented, or attractive he/she is and how you’re clearly inferior. The thoughts consume your mind. They take over your brain and steal your happiness and focus in the process.
To place you in the shoes of someone who you might resonate with:
At first, Mia only compared herself in math class. She’d glance at the test scores and feel a little knot in her stomach when she saw Ethan’s perfect 100%. But soon, it wasn’t just math. She noticed how he answered history questions with confidence, how teachers smiled at him, and how he always seemed to have the right joke at the right time. By the end of the semester, she couldn’t eat lunch without hearing his laugh across the cafeteria and feeling inferior & worthless. Even scrolling on her phone at night—in an attempt to relax—she’d find herself thinking about the way his friends gathered around him and how put-together he looked. It was no longer about a grade. It had spread into every corner of her life, the way a systemic autoimmune disease doesn’t stay in one organ. It was like the comparison was multiplying quietly in the background, until it was hard to remember a time when she wasn’t measuring herself against him. And with each new area it invaded, it stole a little more of her peace, motivation, and confidence.
As shown through Mia’s story, fighting yourself is exhausting. Autoimmune diseases drain your body’s energy, and comparison does the same to your mind: it leaves you too tired to enjoy the very things you’re working for.
Energy can be restored when the attack stops. When you shift from competing with yourself to caring for yourself, the space that comparison once occupied can be refilled with confidence. You just need to know how and where to start…
To be continued :)
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