Do You F*cking Mind?
470. How to End Comparison and Competition for Good - Psychology tools that work
01 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, my beautiful beans, and welcome to the podcast episode of today. This episode is a topic that I hold very close to my heart because it is something that has woven into so many episodes throughout the last, I can't believe I'm about to say it, six years of my podcast. Shout out to the OG beans who've been here for the last six years and shout out if you're brand new today. Love you so much.
Thanks for joining. And the topic is comparison and competition. One of my first ever episodes was about comparison and how comparison will kill you and all of that. And it was literally, I think, like one or two months in.
And I thought I should really revisit a lot of the things that I spoke about in that episode and across many of the episodes around similar topics, because it is something that once you are able to get a really good grasp of how much you are comparing yourself and how much you are competing. And I'm not talking about healthy competition.
Obviously, if you're in a competitive industry, if you are competing within sports, that's very different to what I'm referring to. I think it goes without saying, obviously. More so when you're competing for something that has to do with your self-value and your self-worth, when you're competing for the love of someone, that kind of stuff, okay? So once you really can...
As I talk about it, you're going to start to identify, oh my God, I do that. She's made this episode for me. She's really speaking to me. Once you start seeing these, you identify these and you see it as patterns within your life, that's the golden moment where you're able to then do something about it and change how you approach certain things in your life.
You're going to see how you can still... Be in a position where normally you would be comparing yourself and it would be causing you to feel small, insecure, cause self-doubt, cause self-esteem issues. And you could then learn about that, learn about why it is that you're suffering and why it is that you're competing.
And you'll be able to be in the exact same position but not feel that way, not feel threatened, not feel attacked anymore. still be able to celebrate other people's wins and genuinely want the best for other people without feeling like there's less for you. I think one of the issues where a lot of people struggle is I want to be happy for the people around me.
I want to see other people succeed, but deep down, and I hate to admit it and you probably never admit it, but deep down, when I see my friends do well, find love, buy their first property, get a really good paying job, while I'm not even close to having those things in my life, I deep down part of me wants a part of them to fail. Like I feel like, fuck you, why can't it be me?
We, after the end of this episode, not only are you going to not feel that way anymore, you'll be able to celebrate other people's wins, but you're going to start seeing success for other people as more of a possibility of what's available for you.
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Chapter 2: Why is comparison linked to loss of self-trust?
This is something that I want you to think about throughout the entire episode and just in general in your life. Be really careful to never use comparison as a tool to make yourself feel better by putting someone else down. Like, oh, that person failed at that. Ugh. okay, I've got one up on that person. Now I feel okay.
Now I feel I can breathe for the next 24 hours until I've got to put someone else down so I can feel better. You know, that means that you can't stand on your own merit, that the only time that you can feel comfortable or okay or good enough is if you see the people next to you doing poorly or suffering or having a setback and then you think, okay, well for now I'm still better than them.
That's really dangerous territory. It makes it harder and harder to become happy, genuinely happy for other people and And it makes it feel like the only time you can feel good about yourself is if like it requires other people to do poorly. So therefore you can't feel good about yourself independently. Okay. It's quite dangerous to get into that territory. Okay.
You always feel like, you know, if someone gains, you lose, which is not the truth at all. Um, it always feels like, um, And how you feel about yourself is dependent on where you are on a scale, on a kind of sliding scale of the people around you. So make sure that you never use comparison as a tool to make yourself feel better.
If someone close to you, a friend or an acquaintance or something does poorly comparison, you would like to think that your initial reaction would be like, oh, I really feel bad for them. I genuinely don't want them to suffer. I don't want them to fail. I don't want them to have not gotten that promotion or that job or have been heartbroken or all of the above, okay?
So I just wanted to mention that at the start. Now... Like I said, comparison is what's happening in your head. It's, you know, often quiet. Often you don't necessarily voice it to other people. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Competition is what happens once that comparison is kind of driving your behavior. So you can be comparing yourself to someone without doing anything about it.
But the moment you feel the urge to prove, to outperform, to one-up yourself, where you need to seek validation, you're crossing into competition, okay? Now, it's not about... I'm not saying that being ambitious and having ambition is an issue.
It's when comparison starts to get in the way of your identity, when you stop focusing on what it is that you want for your own growth, for your own life, and you start thinking... Where do I rank among these people? And how can I one up this other person? That's when it starts kind of bleeding into your identity. And people who do that will find that they actually aren't living for themselves.
They don't actually know what they want. They spend too much time competing and comparing that then they realize, wait a minute, I actually really haven't lived for myself because my lens was just, I was always just focusing outside and not really focusing on the things that probably made me happy.
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Chapter 3: How do triggers reveal where we've outsourced our worth?
You're not happy. So you feel uncomfortable. You feel upset. You feel dissatisfied with where your life is at. So then you then resent the information you received and you resent your friend. You resent their success. And it's not because you're mean. It's because you've just been reminded that you're not where you wish you were and someone else right in front of you is. That's all it is.
So don't feel too horrible because this can be changed. You're not a bad person. Don't be embarrassed. We just need to tweak how we approach these things and it's going to feel a whole lot better. Okay. You're not the only one drawing comparisons. Everyone does it all the time. People are constantly doing it. People do it sometimes out loud, unintentionally, you know, to other people.
People are always pitting themselves against other people, okay? It is a really, really common thing. So just accept that that's what it is, but it can be changed, all right? Now, this brings me to my next point, which is the importance of not forgetting who you are as an individual when all of this is happening, okay?
So no matter how close someone is to you, your value doesn't come from comparable or shared milestones. Your value is always going to come from being an individual. And the reason I say this, and it sounds like so cliche, oh, be yourself, be yourself, be
I mean it in the sense that think about the people that you love the most in your life, the people that you really value hanging out with, the people that bring the most value to you. What is it about them? You could probably rattle off a thousand things about this person that you adore that's really unique to them. Oh, my God, it's their humor. It's the way they make me feel. It's the way.
It's this. It's that. You wouldn't say, oh, my God, I love my friend so much because she's just like every other cunt that walks down the street. You don't say that, right? It's because they are quite an individual person.
person often when you think about um on even on a not a close scale but on a bigger scale of celebrities often the ones that really stand out are the ones that are quite unique they carry themselves in a very unique way they're memorable right um they don't have to be the best actor or the best singer to be memorable okay so that's why i'm saying that it's really important that
You always bring it back to what makes you, you, okay? Comparison thrives when you are always trying to be the same or just a little bit better than someone else doing the same thing. When you start measuring yourself only on things that can be like on metrics that can be shared, okay?
like career success relationship status how much attention you get um your appearance that's a huge one you know how you look your hair your this your that your fashion your style then you're going to feel more and more and more insecure okay your power does not come from being better than someone else your power comes from being different okay different on par
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Chapter 4: What distinguishes healthy ambition from toxic competition?
People are always going to be remembered by how they make other people feel, their energy, their impact, their presence. When comparison... takes over, it's harder to feel like yourself. It's harder to feel like these harder to measure traits, these things that really aren't measurable.
And I feel that when it comes to personality and when it comes to the essence of who someone really is, it's not really something that can be measured, okay? It's something that is experienced and something that is felt. Another thing that I really want you to think about is this timeline idea, okay?
We feel like because our timeline is not on the same timeline as someone really close to me, my sibling, my best friend, my peers, I'm falling behind. But again, when it comes to life and career and love and everything that you can think of, It doesn't follow a linear timeline for most people. It certainly didn't for me.
I remember feeling at 30, at 30, I had not even a dollar to like, or maybe $3 in my bank account after like just before my paycheck would come in. I had no savings. I had all my possessions fit into two suitcases. I didn't really know where I was going career-wise. I hadn't even started my master's.
There was so much up in the air and I was looking at people around me and I was really falling into that comparison trap and starting to feel a little bit hopeless and desperate as far as career was concerned. I had really good friends, to be fair. I had really good friends and family and that made me feel quite comfortable in that regard.
But when it came to career, I really was comparing myself a lot. And the more I compared, the less empowered I felt. I felt like I had less and less and less control, less and less power. And it was just getting worse. It wasn't me continuing to compare myself, wasn't getting me out of that slump. If anything, it was digging me deeper and deeper.
And when you are in that slump, it's really, really, as Dr. Su says, it's hard to unslump yourself. yourself, right? Like you have to completely change your perspective because you're not going to get yourself out of that mindset by thinking more and more into that whole of a mindset. Okay. So I had to start focusing on things that really, really made me happy for me.
And only when I started doing that, did everything turn around. Only when I started thinking, I need to get rid of this timeline comparison because it's I'm just going to feel more and more upset and frustrated about my current situation. Instead, why don't I focus on things that really make me happy, that no matter where I was in the timeline, I would do it regardless.
I started studying something that I was really, really passionate about. I started leaning into things that made me feel good when I did it instead of thinking,
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Chapter 5: Why do comparisons with friends and siblings hurt the most?
But if you're always living in that state of I've got to keep up, I've got to keep up, I've got to keep up, Even when you start achieving these financial successes, these external successes, they're still not happy because they get stuck in that mindset of never enough, never enough, never enough, compare, compare, compare, compete, compete, compete. You're never happy.
Sometimes the wealthiest people or what you would deem to be the most beautiful, physically attractive people are the ones that are the least satisfied because they're stuck in this loop of comparison. They're stuck in this loop of seeking external validation all the time. And when all your validation is external, some can be external.
It's okay to want your partner to make you feel good about yourself. It's okay to want some validation externally. That's perfectly normal. But when all of it
comes from the outside and you can't provide any for yourself that's a big problem that's a big problem and that's when your self-esteem and your confidence starts to take a plummet and it goes down like a lead balloon now many of you guys know that before the podcast Before the podcast, I was teaching Pilates. And before teaching Pilates, I was studying at uni. And prior to that, I was acting.
I wanted to make it as an actor. I wanted to be an Oscar-winning actress, actor, whatever you want to refer to it as. That was what I wanted, okay? But I was going absolutely fucking nowhere. I kind of got a few places.
I got a few roles here and there, but I had some close calls for some lead roles in like a TV show and a film, but just never really got nowhere near close to where I wanted to be. And the issue then became that I started feeling really self-conscious about where I was in this career and that, you know, I felt like I'd invested too much time.
I couldn't quit, but at the same time, am I going to be doing this forever? It's not working. So I was really starting to... this internal narrative I had started getting worse and worse and worse, okay? I then stepped away from acting. At the time when I stepped away, I wanted it to be, I thought, I'm just gonna take a hiatus. My agent had dropped me.
I wasn't in a good head space around the career. And every time I thought about getting a new agent or trying to get more shit for my show reel, I was really anxious and I'm not generally an anxious person. I'm more like anxious in the typical sense that I think most people experience anxiety where it's kind of acute and it's dependent on the situation.
So it's not like I necessarily would have ongoing chronic anxiety, but I found that my anxiety was higher than normal. And it was based around this, about every time I'd think about my career, instead of thinking hopeful thoughts, I would be really anxious. So I thought, I need a reset.
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Chapter 6: How does social media intensify feelings of insecurity?
They're really...
play a huge role in our life when we feel shit about ourselves one thing to note is triggers don't create insecurity they reveal what's kind of happening underneath it's kind of a little alarm so a trigger will say like for example like you might say that person makes me feel like shit that situation triggers me this social media account triggers me it ruins my confidence but that's
Not completely what's happening. Like I said, it doesn't create insecurity. It's going to wake up what is already there. It's going to wake up what is underlying. So, for example, say you're quite, you know, if someone talks about money, success financially, all these things, and you feel perfectly fine, you're probably secure in that area, okay?
But the moment someone talks about maybe dating or relationships or maybe something about physical appearance,
and it hits a nerve, that's your brain saying, this is a vulnerable point for me, there's something unresolved here that I don't feel good about, and it's made me feel, it's made me arc up, it's made me feel all this adrenaline, I feel like I've gotta get the fuck away, I don't wanna face this right now, okay?
Now, to an extent, yes, you can be removing the trigger, but if you only ever remove the trigger without looking at this unresolved issue, the issue is never going to completely go away. You're just protecting yourself from facing that issue. So I think it is always important to look at where is it possible for me to actually crack this open and look at it, right?
Say, for example, with my podcast, if I felt triggered every time I saw another podcast in the mental health space do better than mine, The solution wouldn't be to unfollow every other podcaster in the mental health space and to like mute them or block them or not. Because that doesn't take away the problem, does it? The problem for me is why would I feel that way?
Why would I feel like I can't stand on my own even though another podcaster in the same space is doing better than mine? If I can really address that and think different audiences, we talk about different things, we can both exist at the same time, we don't have to compete with each other, we can both coexist, I actually really like that other podcaster.
Maybe I can celebrate things that this podcaster does. Maybe I can appreciate all these things. Then I can feel really good about my podcast while still knowing that that other one exists in its own right, might be more successful than mine, might have a bigger audience than mine, might have topic ideas that I'd never thought about.
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Chapter 7: What mindset shifts can help reduce competition in relationships?
marry up to that so I don't like them that's my initial thought because it's a trigger so instead of thinking well it's not that I don't like this person because they're an arsehole or they're a cunt or they're really mean I actually don't like them because it wakes up this unpleasant feeling within myself but then for so many people once they got to know that person they ended up becoming best friends they ended up being like I can't believe I was here comparing myself and pitting myself against you and not liking you and now
You're one of my favorite people in the fucking world. Okay. So this is what I'm talking about when we talk about triggers. Okay. Triggers feel really painful and personal because they kind of bypass logic. You don't really sit there and calmly analyze what a trigger is. You feel it in your body. It's this tightness. You feel irritated. You feel defensive.
And of course you start comparing yourself. This is your brain saying, am I enough? Am I falling behind? Am I, you know, Can I live up to that person's standards? Am I hot enough, smart enough, funny enough? Am I safe in this situation? Can I live alongside this person with them constantly triggering me?
This is all just self-doubt and your lapses within your self-esteem, your self-confidence, looking for evidence outside of you. Triggers will show up in your life when you are outsourcing your validation or your self-worth, okay? So if you're triggered by someone else's hotness or appearance, you're tying your self-worth to how you look. And that's where your self-worth comes from.
That's why it's triggering because it's a threat, right? Because they're hotter than you and that equals more worth than you. Same as success. If you're triggered by your friend's success, you're tying your self-worth to achievement. You're saying that I don't feel worthy unless I'm achieving things, okay? Same as when someone gets into a relationship or gets engaged.
If that triggers you, you're saying my self-worth is tied to being chosen or being in a relationship and being alone means that I'm not worthy enough. The same goes for all sorts of things, confidence, all sorts of things, okay? So instead of asking yourself, why does this thing or this individual annoy me or trigger me?
Instead, you should be asking yourself, what standard am I trying to live up to? And is this a fair standard? Am I telling myself that my self-worth comes from something that's outside of me where it's not actually the case? Because like I said, it kind of goes unchecked and it's not logic. When you bring logic into it, you start to feel a lot calmer. You need to name it to tame it.
You need to be aware of it and face it. At some point, you're going to have to sit down and face your triggers. And for the most part, you will be able to talk yourself out of it through logic, through being like, what is this thing that I'm feeling? What am I tying myself worth to when this trigger lands in my lap? Because the trigger isn't just out of the blue for no reason.
There's a reason why. why that thing is reminding you of something that's making you feel self-confident or lacking in self-worth or feeling shit about yourself. And that is why long-term avoiding triggers doesn't work.
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Chapter 8: How can focusing on individuality help end comparison?
ask yourself, why do I feel insecure? Why do I feel like there's like a lack in this area? Because if you don't, that quote unquote trigger is going to just reappear somewhere else. It's going to reappear in a different job, in a different account that you follow, in a different partner, same fucking feeling. It's the same thing. Okay.
So look at it as information that you can learn from about how you feel about yourself and and about how you talk to yourself and about what your beliefs are. And then you can ask, are these beliefs true? Are they accurate? Are they a lie? All these things. Now, what can you do when you see yourself competing or like comparing yourself to people outside of you?
You don't have to completely think, oh, well, I can't do that anymore. I can't use that as a tool. If you start noticing, oh, my God, I'm really comparing myself or I'm trying to compete with this person. Ask yourself, OK, what is it that I really like about this person that I can compare?
you know emulate or I can learn to do or learn you know you don't have to instantly be like oh my god this is the fight I can't I can't I can't now I've got to find all it all has to come from me and I can't often even when we think we don't like that person or we don't or we you know like I gave the example of when you feel insecure by a strong energy you initially think you don't like them but it turns out it was just you know someone triggering your insecurity about yourself
this also happens in in many other areas when we meet other people instead of thinking i now have to compete with this person i have to be better than this person i xyz ask yourself what can i learn from this person maybe there's something in them that i've yeah identified a lack but instead of thinking now this is a huge problem i don't feel good about myself ask myself okay maybe they've highlighted a lack in my life but maybe this is an opportunity for me to learn from them
Let's say someone's a better – I'll use myself as an example again. Let's say someone's a better podcaster than me. I just prefer how they podcast than me. Instead of thinking, oh, my God, I can never listen to them again. Oh, my God, I hope they fucking fall on their ass and fail. I hope their fucking microphone breaks. I could think, why do I think that that podcaster is better?
What do I like? Do I like their segments more? Do I think that they speak clearly? Do they not ramble as much as I do? Do they – you know, there's many, many things that I could break apart that I think, okay – Yeah, cool. There's a lot that I actually could learn from them. And then there's certain things that I like about them, but it just wouldn't work if I were to do it.
Like it would just, I would lose the essence of my podcast. So I won't be able to do that anyway, but I can learn from it and like it. Instantly, instantly, I already like that podcaster more. I already feel more of a connection and more of... Oh, you know, we're both in the same industry. Now I can learn. I feel more empowered. I feel like I have control over the situation again.
You can do that with colleagues. You can do that with your partner's friends. You can do that with your friends. You can like things about someone else and think, I like how they carry themselves in public. I like how they don't feel the need to explain themselves. I like how this person doesn't collapse when they're not chosen. I like how they thrive being single. I like X, Y, Zed.
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