Hey SereneWolf,

I haven’t commented on something important you’ve said, about comparing yourself to others:

I mean I don’t know if I’m expecting a lot and I might be comparing myself with others here like others are already doing it then I can do it too. So I tell myself it’s doable. Because I think some people are dealing with more things than me yet still reaching their goals and finishing tasks then I can do it too. And whenever I try to give excuses to myself about something I feel guilty and yet still lot of times I procrastinate a lot.

Okay, so you believe you need to achieve the same as someone else, and then if you don’t, you beat yourself up, you feel bad about yourself (I feel guilty), and then your performance gets even worse (I procrastinate a lot).

Comparison with others is something you were exposed to during your entire childhood: both your father and your grandfather were comparing you with other kids all the time, right? And now you are doing it to yourself. You’ve internalized your father and grandfather’s voice and it became a part of your inner critic. So comparing yourself to others is another way of telling yourself “I am not good enough/successful enough/rich enough/high on the ladder enough”.

That’s why you “feel like times is passing too fast” (the title of your thread) – because there is a pressure to perform, to achieve, to push, push, push… because someone else is doing it better and faster than you.

Would you agree with that?

Comparing ourselves to others is very toxic – it doesn’t motivate us but makes us feel like a failure. It’s not like a positive encouragement, but it always comes with a lot of self-judgment. And it eventually prevents us from thriving, because we feel like a failure, and so we self-sabotage.

So my suggestion is to stop the comparison. See it for what it is: a toxic feature of your inner critic, something you’ve learned from your father and grandfather.

There is a great youtube video “How to stop comparing yourself to others“, which just popped up in my feed, by Therapy in a nutshell. She says some fantastic things, e.g. that by comparing ourselves to others, we believe that our worth is dependent on how we score compared to others, how many people are above us or below us on the “ranking list”. And this always lead to disappointment because someone will always be better and more successful than us.

Bottom line: by comparing ourselves to others we are allowing our worth (which is inherent) to be dependent on external factors. And we are setting ourselves up for failure.

A better approach, she says, is to focus on integrity (living in accordance to your true values) rather than comparison. Here is an example: if we want to lose weight, the comparison mindset would say “Oh, Martha is in a such a great shape. I have to lose weight already!” Whereas the integrity mindset would say “My health is important to me. I will cut down on junk food and exercise more, because I want to be healthy.”

I found this pretty cool: integrity mindset vs comparison mindset. Never heard it described this way, and loved it!

Anyway, just wanted to share this…

How have you been? I hope you are fine…