Why Comparing Yourself to Others Will Always Lead You Away from Peace

Issue 144. November 28, 2025 ✨ Higher Power Coaching & Consulting ✨

As we head into the heart of the holiday season, I want to talk about something that steals our peace more than we realize. It slips into family gatherings, social events, and even the way we scroll through other people’s cheerful holiday posts. It’s the comparison trap.

Very early in my recovery, I heard someone say they were comparing their insides to other people’s outsides. I remember thinking, I don’t totally get what that means, but it feels important. The phrase stuck with me even though I didn’t fully understand it yet.

Later on, it hit me hard. I’d spent my whole life comparing the rich, messy, emotional world inside me to the glossy surface of other people’s lives. I assumed everyone else felt more grounded and confident. I assumed their lives looked calm because they actually were calm. I thought I was the only one who wrestled with fear, shame, anxiety, or confusion.

Recovery taught me that this is almost never true.

Holiday gatherings make this even trickier. You see families smiling in photos and assume they have harmony and ease. You see someone arrive looking polished and assume they’re fine. You see a couple holding hands at a party and imagine they don’t fight or struggle. What we forget is that the only thing we ever see is their outside. Their inside may tell a very different story.

This is why hearing people share honestly in recovery is so powerful. We get tiny glimpses into the private battles they’ve fought or are still fighting. Those glimpses remind us that no one gets through life without pain. They remind us to stop creating fantasies about other people’s lives and using those fantasies to beat ourselves up.

One example from my early recovery still stands out. A man started attending my regular meeting. He looked polished and confident. He spoke clearly. I assumed he had years of recovery and was visiting from another fellowship. Then we had an outreach call. Within minutes, it was obvious that he was drowning in anxiety and self-doubt. He was full of fear and negative self-talk. His internal world was the opposite of the image I’d created in my mind.

That experience taught me something essential. You can’t know someone’s internal world from the outside. You only ever see the mask.

And it works the other way too.

Years before recovery, I attended an anti-racism workshop and made a snap judgment about a woman on the panel. She was extremely obese, missing teeth, and had a thick Southern accent. And here’s the thing that still floors me today:
I was also obese at the time. Yet I still judged her.
I sized her up in seconds and rolled my eyes, thinking, “Here we go…”

Then she delivered a sentence that changed my life. She said, “It used to be that the worst thing someone could call me was racist. Then I learned that if someone calls me racist, instead of getting defensive, I ask what I’ve done that caused them to believe that. Because then I might learn something about myself.”

Her words helped shape my path toward becoming anti racist, but they also cracked something open in me that later became essential to my recovery. I’d been so defensive, so afraid of anyone seeing behind the facades I used to people-please my way through life. Feedback felt threatening because I had no internal safety.

Today, when someone tells me I’m being controlling or reactive, I practice asking what I did that caused them to think that. And if it’s obvious, I own it right away. That woman taught me that the real danger isn’t being called something. The real danger is refusing to look at something that might be true.

All of this ties back to comparing our insides to other people’s outsides. When we compare, we erase our own humanity. We forget that every person carries pain and history and longing and fear. We forget that what they show is only a sliver of who they are.

Two common clichés come up here. The first is don’t judge a book by its cover. The second is keeping up with the Joneses.

Let’s talk about the Joneses for a moment. The Joneses don’t actually exist. They live only in our imaginations. We create perfect versions of them so we can use them to judge ourselves. We look at what we think they have and feel smaller. We look at what we assume they feel and tell ourselves we’re behind. That comparison keeps us stuck in scarcity and adequacy.

A better question isn’t, “Why can’t I be like the Joneses?” The real question is, “Why do I need to compare myself to them at all???”

When I stopped asking why I wasn’t like other people and instead asked how I compare to the former me, everything changed. I could finally see my growth. I could see the places I’d softened. I could see the old patterns I no longer practiced. I could see progress instead of failure.

This shift is one of the biggest gifts of recovery, and it’s something we need even more during the holidays. This is a season filled with images of perfect families, perfect homes, perfect meals, perfect relationships, perfect moods, perfect everything. But those are only outsides.

Your insides are where the real work happens. They’re your world. They’re your responsibility. They’re your sacred territory.

So this season, when you notice yourself comparing, pause. Turn inward. Ask yourself who you were last year. Ask yourself who you were five years ago. Ask yourself what you no longer tolerate. Ask yourself how you’ve grown. When you compare yourself to the former you, you get traction instead of shame. You move toward action. You build internal safety. You strengthen your boundaries.

And when you keep the focus on yourself, you reclaim the only life you can actually change.

The serenity prayer reminds us that other people live outside our circle of control. Their reactions, choices, emotions, and behaviors aren’t ours to fix. What we can change is ourselves. That’s where our power is. That’s where peace lives.

As we close out November and move toward the holidays, I hope you give yourself the gift of dropping the comparison game. Let your inside world matter more than how anyone else appears. Let your growth be the thing you measure. Let your internal safety become your north star.

You deserve that kind of peace.