What do you do when you find yourself caught in a cycle of compare and despair? How do you keep your self-worth intact when you are constantly comparing yourself to others? Learn the secret behind what compare and despair is really about and why it devastates self-worth. Learn exactly what to do when you find yourself scrolling and feel that gut-punch of not-feeling-good-enough. In 4 simple steps, you'll learn a 4-step process so that you can stop suffering and start building self-worth.
transcript
Today I wanna talk about compare and despair and how you get out of that cycle and start building self worth. So you know how it goes. You're scrolling on Instagram and then all of a sudden you see someone you went to high school with or somebody who has the same business as you or someone who you used to live next door to and they're put together or their kids are beautiful or maybe they're successful or something. Something that you wish you had or something that you're seeing in that picture and that immediate hit of like, Ugh, I'm not good enough that happens to you. Well, that's commonly called compare and despair because you're comparing yourself to another person and then you feel this cycle of despair.
But today I wanna break it down because there's a lot of little pieces that happen super fast in that little cycle and we can really use it to not only build self-worth, but to get a better understanding of what your values are. So while it might seem like shame is the thing driving the compare and despair cycle, it's actually two different emotions and I want to break them down for you.
Compare and Despair
One is jealousy and one is envy. And they're a little bit interchangeable. They kind of feel the same, but they come up in two different situations. Jealousy is what you feel when there's unfaithfullness or deceit in an intimate relationship. Envy is a response to unfair distribution of resources or recognition.
So let me say that really quickly again. Jealousy is typically about your intimate relationships. It's about unfaithfullness or deceit, or you are feeling threatened in that way. Envy is also a threat, but it arises from this feeling of unfair distribution of resources or recognition. Both contain anger and both contain fear.
Self-Worth Is Built by Honoring Your Feelings
Self-worth is built by honoring your true self. So these emotions are real and you are feeling them, and I'm gonna walk you through how to actually honor them and what you're supposed to do with them. When you do honor these emotions, they will give you stability in your personality and in your relationships.
If you don't, you make yourself very unstable and you end up in that little despair cycle, and you might be acting out in your relationships or in friendships, or even in professional circles. They both come up when you've lost your personal sense of boundaries and when you feel an intuitive risk to your security, your position, your resources, or your intimate relationships.
This means that you're going to have this unpleasant feeling when you've detected a risk to your social, economic, personal, or familial securities. So now let's break that down even further to determine whether you're feeling jealousy or envy. Jealousy is an intuitive, almost body-based fear that comes on and a feeling of needing to protect. So there's this fear and there's this anger that arises when your most intimate or important relationships are threatened. Intimacy and security in intimate relationships is super important to your health and wellbeing. So much that you'll actually feel physically threatened when you sense betrayal from your mate or from a close friend.
Healthy relationships and committed relationships are vital to social and emotional wellbeing, and in truth to your very survival. We were hard wired to be social creatures. We needed each other, and so when there's this threat, of somebody who's gonna take away something important to you in this relationship.
They're gonna harm your relationship, or they're trying to come in or, or take you out of a relationship. This is a hardwired, primitive feeling that comes on. We evolved to feel it, to protect ourselves, and to keep our social bonds intact. Now, one thing that's interesting about jealousy, I used to think that jealousy was really caused by thinking like, oh, I'm just a jealous person, and what I have come to find, not only for myself, but also from working with clients for 20 years, is that jealousy doesn't really come out of nowhere. You're not just a jealous person. It's typically founded in some sort of truth. And so in general, for emotions, I say, Honor your emotions as if they are true.
That doesn't mean that somebody's cheating on you if you're feeling jealous, it means your jealousy is real and you need to honor that. It doesn't mean that the activity happened, if that makes sense. So remember, all emotions are true. Even when they're unpleasant. They are filled with really good information for you, and they actually want you to take some sort of action to respond to them.
So if jealousy shows up, just notice it, invite it in and listen to what is happening. When you see something, you're, you're in the compare and despair cycle. You're feeling what you're thinking is jealousy... respond to that. Notice that.
Jealousy and Envy: A Mixture of Anger and Fear
Now let's talk about envy. Envy is similar to jealousy because it contains a mixture of anger and fear.
The difference between the two emotions is that envy uses anger and fear to help you identify risks in your position, in your security and your social groups rather than in your most intimate relationships. So for example, if I saw something or I had this compare despair feeling where I felt like my marriage was being threatened or I saw someone, I'm like, oh man, she's after my husband.
That would be jealousy if I am in a compare and despair cycle because I saw somebody sold 1 million copies of their book. That is more envy because it's not about my intimate relationship really about resources. It's about my security. It's about my established position in my career. But envy's really powerful because it responds to your most self-preservation threats, uh, your social position, your connection to money, food, privilege protection, your belongings, your status.
Envy shows up if you have something that feels unfair or if you feel like someone else is getting favoritism or if your resources have been or seem to have been pulled away from you and have been given to someone else.
So once you determine whether you're feeling envy or jealousy, the next thing is to break down the components of what it wants you to do, what those emotions want you to do.
Now, both of them have fear components and both of them have anger components. So first, Let's look at the fear. When you're moving from worthless to worthy, you're going to be trying to acknowledge to the best of your abilities and honor what you're actually feeling that's moving from ideal to actual true self.
For the fear component, you articulate the threat. I want you to get very specific about what's threatened. If it's jealousy, there's some threat to the relationship. And if it's envy, it's some kind of threat to your status or your resources. And what you say is, I am afraid. I am afraid that... I am afraid of... you just articulate the fear. That's how you honor it. That's how you make it real. That's how you actually get it to naturally flow through you and. Instead of compiling into this despair bucket, you move on and you can let it go. For the anger piece, anger is about protecting boundaries. It's about keeping the bad guy out or keeping the bad guy in, or whatever you need to do, but it's about putting a wall around yourself and making sure that.
Your resources, the things that are really valuable to you, the things you really care about are being protected. So in the case of jealousy, you look at what needs to be protected in the relationship or how do I need to protect myself in this relationship? So maybe you need to look at how do I put a boundary around this relationship?
Or maybe from within the relationship you're feeling threatened and you need to actually just protect yourself for envy. You want to look at what needs to be protected as far as status, resources, money, finances, whatever that thing is. When you got to the fear, I'm afraid of da, da, da. Then you go to how do I protect that specific fear?
Worthless Cycle and Ideal Image
Now the worthless cycle is built by comparing yourself to an ideal image. I talk about that a lot. So of course, compare and despair is in the worthless cycle. You're comparing not only to your own ideal image, which is bad enough and feels horrible, but you're comparing pretty much to somebody else's ideal image.
You're very rarely coming up against someone's true self on Instagram or in a magazine or whatever you're seeing. So when you're comparing. Making an ideal image out of someone else. You're ignoring your internal emotion signals. You're ignoring your own envy, you're ignoring your own jealousy, and you're ignoring your true self.
And this only ends in despair. And despair means the complete loss or absence of hope. And I'm going to tell you some bad news. Despair is 100% guaranteed if you're chasing your ideal image. It's a million percent guaranteed if you're chasing someone else's ideal image. So really, the recipe for worthlessness is go find somebody's ideal image.
Compare yourself to them. Feel hopeless and stay stuck. This devastates self-worth. The goal is not to achieve your ideal image. It is not to achieve anybody else's ideal image. The goal is actually to make the ideal image irrelevant so that you can focus on the true self, because that is where self-worth is built.
4 Steps to Stop the Compare and Despair Cycle
So what do you do when you find yourself in a cycle of compare and despair
remember this is envy and/or jealousy
First. You remember that this is not about shame. This is about jealousy or envy, or maybe both.
get clear on the threat
Two, you determine what the actual fear or threat is. You say, I am afraid that, or I am afraid of, and then you also figure out what needs protection.That's the fear part. That's the anger part. So I'm afraid that. Fill in the blank. I need to protect, fill in the blank.
Take your focus off the ideal
Number three, despair is what happens 100% of the time when you reach for ideal image. So instead, focus on what's true. Your emotions are true. Uh, what you value is true. This information that's coming up, whatever this jealousy is, whatever this envy is, it's pointing to something true.
There's some good information in that little terrible feeling, so go to what is true, honor that, and you start moving over to the worthy cycle, and then you do something.
take action to reinforce your self-worth
The last step is to do something that reinforces that what you value deserves your time, attention, and energy. So if you realize I'm worried about my relationship, okay, then make a phone call, set a date, have a conversation.
If you're worried about your security at your job, take some sort of action that reinforces that what you value is worth your time, attention, energy. Respect, care, kindness. So this is how you move out of comparing and despairing and into honoring and building self-worth.