I recently had the opportunity to speak to a group of local women about the negative spin that comparison can put on our lives. I discussed many tools to help us compare less, including self-love, but today I’m going to focus on one in particular. 

Although healthy comparison can be self-motivating, often times it isn’t balanced. Society has created a lifelong adolescence of sorts with the existence and overuse of social media. It’s developmentally typical to compare yourself to a great degree in your early years but it’s also typical for that to naturally decrease with age, at least that’s how it used to be. 

Due to social media, we now know what Sally Sue who you sat by in middle school is feeding her child or where she is going on vacation over spring break. We never would’ve known this had we not had access to FaceBook and others of its kind. Multiply this by the number of “friends” you have on social media and here in lies an over abundance of opportunities to compare ourselves to others to an unhealthy degree. So how can we get around this societal shift?

I have a challenge for you... Intentionally limited your exposure to social media for a week. Pick only ONE day that you will allow yourself to login and look. You can even give it a fun name like “Social Media Saturday.” See how you feel mentally after a week of not having your daily dose of all things digitally social, with a bonus of being more present in your day-to-day life. You’ll be surprised at how often your moods were affected by what you saw on the news feed and you may notice how little you are unnecessarily comparing yourself to others, due to its absence. You never know... you may just want to make “Social Media Saturday” a way of life.