When Compare Equals Despair, (And How To Handle It)
By Mary Dobson, licensed psychotherapist, certified eating disorder specialist, Founder/CEO: Lift Wellness Company, (serving Westport CT in-person, and TN, VA, CO, TX, NY, DC, GA, NC, PA. CO, FL, MA virtually); Founder/CEO Lift Teen & Parent Wellness Centers, coming January 2024 to Westport, CT.
Theodore Roosevelt once said, ‘comparison is the thief of joy.’ If true, there is no question why so many young American women are more joyless than ever. NAMI cites 1 in 6 U.S. adolescents, and 1 in 3 young adults, have experienced a major depressive episode, and young women have emerged as the highest-risk group for mental health.
To put comparisons in historical perspective: just before the advent of broadcast television, many Americans were only visually exposed to the faces and features of the individuals who lived in their own town or district. When it came to beauty and body comparisons, the options were limited to classmates, colleagues, community members, family, and friends. A person with aesthetically pleasing proportions might be admired, or even envied, but their attractiveness would have been chalked up to good fortune or good genes. Opportunities for comparison were limited, and time-restricted to the length of physical interaction. Further, while a person may objectively notice that an attractive person is frequently admired, no measurable means of comparison existed. A beautiful person could be admired, and the admirer could still believe that if a comparison were drawn between themselves and the beautiful person, their appeal may be equal or near.
As the American beauty industry evolved along with media, beauty companies discovered the power of utilizing television, newspapers, and magazines to sell a new to the American consumer: the dream of aesthetic improvement. ‘If you don’t like the way you look, you don’t have to accept it. You have choices, and you can change it.’ This simple but powerful suggestion created ripple effects in intrapsychic relationships, the psychology of an individual’s self-relationship, as well as the psychology of spending behavior. The freedom to choose, or buy, cosmetic improvement, was being sold as a fast-track ticket to greater self-esteem, better sex, a wealthier mate, a happier home.
Quite ironically, the exact opposite has proven true. Mental health is on the rise in America. The advent of social media platforms like Instagram in 2012 is so statistically relevant to American mental health that the Surgeon General recently issued an advisory about social media’s adverse impact on youth mental health, citing risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents. Problematic, when up to 95% of young people ages 13-17 report using a social media platform and more than a third saying they use social media “almost constantly.” (US Dept of Health and Human Services.)
Americans are now confronted with hundreds of images of faces and bodies in a day, and the opportunities to compare are bottomless. Further, unlike in the past, there is a measurable means of tracking the court of public opinion. “Likes,” “follows,” “shares,” and checkmarks, or the absence of these things, pronounce a person visually appealing or not, and there is no arguing with the evidence. Individuals know within minutes of posting how their visual aesthetic is playing on a worldwide audience, through comments, traffic, unfollows, and DM’s. When negative feedback is received, a person is then presented with modern day solutions: change yourself! The preferential representation in feeds by ‘influencers’ of a particular skin tone and physical anatomy, avows and reinforces the superiority of Eurocentric beauty standards, and provides some tangible suggestions to improve one’s appearance in order to garner greater popularity, or love via ‘likes:’ smaller nose. Lighter skin. Smaller bone structure. Straighter hair. Bigger eyes. The popularity of certain social media influencers can also invent (or extinguish) define beauty trends: Bigger butt. Bigger lips. Bigger boobs. Bigger eyebrows. Smoother skin. Whiter teeth. Longer lashes. Smaller waist.
Depending on who and what you follow, your echo chamber of an ever-narrowing beauty ideal will only further perpetuate the suggestion that in order to be liked or loved, one must confine themselves to a standard of beauty that may or may not resemble your own. While plastic surgery has grown in tandem with the beauty industry’s ability to be carried around in your pocket, not everyone is able to jump right in to surgical solutions. Filters, body-morphing and face-editing features such as those on Adobe Photoshop Express, can produce a refined and polished version of yourself, which may even meet the standards of your comparison-objects and garner an internal sense of worthiness and equivalency in ‘follows’ and ‘likes.’ But there is a flaw to that system, in that the discrepancy between edited images and your own real-life appearance will create a chasm where self-loathing and body dysmorphia can fester and grow. By creating an idealized version of self, the unedited image that exists in real life becomes intolerable and unacceptable. Rather than working to accept your flaws, you have erased them, but only in the metaverse. The gnawing disparity between a filtered image and your true presentation creates more unhappiness about your real presentation, and an internalized sense of shame. Forgetting that others are also altering their appearance in this forum, the knowledge of falsifying yourself makes any experiences of perceived aesthetic inferiority almost unbearable, leading to grief, despair, and self-hatred.
In my clinical psychotherapy practice in Westport, CT, and Boca Raton, FL, where I treat eating disorders, body dysmorphia, perfectionism, and self-love, I have seen a tremendous rise in body dissatisfaction due to social media. I am particularly disheartened by pre-pubescent and pubescent women, whose bodies are quite literally in a state of transformation in order to produce menses. These growing women point to women who are five to ten years their senior, and in a separate physical developmental stage altogether, and lament the differences in physique, facial structure, or tone. The unfairness of a perfectly imperfect growing person, comparing themselves to a person whose story they do not know-- who could suffer from eating disorder, mental health, or plastic surgery dependence-- and using that visual as a weapon against themselves, is egregious.
We take cues from our environment, and our modern-day environment exists in the 2D and the 3D. Individuals with high levels of anxiety or rejection-sensitivity will create constructs on how accepting the world will be, based on who and what they see portrayed in social media. If a seemingly flawless person posts a photo and it is met with a comment that they need to lose weight, all viewers will experience the vicarious trauma that occurs when we observe bullying, and know that we could be next. Given the presumed similarities between online behavior and social behavior, most people make determinations from online behavior that carry over to real life. If a person decides the internet is not a safe place for their authentic selves, then the real world will not be either. Feeling unacceptable and inadequate leads to detachment, isolation, and loneliness, which are three causal factors in the development of depression.
Because filters are free, acceptable, and available to everyone, most Americans have probably experimented with them. Just because usage may have felt benign at the time does not mean that harm was not caused. The inferred underlying message behind a filter is clearly, ‘you are not enough, just as you are.’ Many who start off with filters innocently eventually progress into body-altering and face-contouring apps, because the filter alone is no longer sufficient to effectively eliminate perceived flaws. The use of filters is progressive, because once you look a little better, that will no longer satisfy, and you will want to see what a lot better looks like.
Some Suggestions to mitigate harms caused by ‘the comparison trap’:
Sign off. Conduct regular ‘social media cleanses.’ I believe that regular use of a social media cleanse is essential for mental health maintenance. Just as you may take time away from alcohol during ‘Dry January,’ a social media cleanse provides an opportunity to re-examine your relationship with the apps that take up so much of our time. In reclaiming that time back, we break the knee-jerk reaction pattern of picking up the phone and going straight to social. It’s critical for each of us to learn what we then do with that time instead. Do we call a friend, reply to a message, take a walk, practice self-care? Behavioral addictions like scrolling provide quick and easy dopamine hits, but on a break, we are reminded that we have control of our time, our thoughts, and our media consumption, and to that end, we can choose what narratives to subscribe to.
Delete, Unfollow, Unsubscribe. You can tell so much about a person by looking at their feed. As people change, so will their feed. Unsubscribing to accounts that promote diet-culture, plastic surgery, hours in the gym, and obsessive emphasis on appearance, WILL enhance your self-image. Then, subscribing to accounts that share positive psychology tips, heartwarming hero stories, inspirational videos, relationship advice, cute puppies, health-at-every-size, or beautiful scenes from earth or space, will immediately enhance your mood. If you like the way you look in a filter, pick ONE (for me, it’s always been Clarendon ,) and apply it in one click to your photo-sets so you don’t have to agonize over your photos, alter them individually, or over—analyze your shots.
Quit using appearance altering applications. There is no safe use of face or body-altering apps, because the very use of them perpetuates a falsity that will inadvertently trigger your followers by reinforcing a narrative of unrealistic/unattainable standards, and that is causing harm. Your outright self-rejection, manifested in alterations to your features or waist size, will covertly or overtly send a message to your followers that you, and similarly they, are not acceptable and cannot show up as you/they are. Despite what you are thinking, your psyche is constantly observing and taking note of this behavior to form conclusions about your safety in the world. Let your subconscious mind witness your self-acceptance, and form the conclusion that you deserve it.
Be intentional about your real-life appearance alterations and the motives behind. People are free to make reasonable changes regarding their physical appearance. When these changes are specific and time-limited (coloring hair, a nose piercing, a breast reduction, adding muscle,) then they are relatively benign. However, when self-improvement becomes chronic and unattended, it often reflects a larger mental health issue at play. In this case, an individual can have a myriad of surgeries, gain or lose weight, alter their lips, eyes and nose, and still continue to have a list of needed improvements. The unawareness that rejection of the physical reveals an inability to accept the internal self is rampant at this time. We as therapists must work with clients to decide when to validate their hopes and dreams, even those appearance related ones, if they feel congruent to the individual and who they believe they are. But when a person is relentlessly critical of their appearance and appears unsatiated, it’s essential to help them discover the underlying issue at play motivating this self-abandoning behavior.
Make a gratitude list of all of your positive physical, intellectual, emotional and relational attributes, every day. Summer can be a difficult time for body image, and being mindful of this trigger is important. Make sure to give yourself attention and appreciation. Foster body neutrality and radical acceptance.
Experience the summer with all of your senses. Enjoy the taste of ice cream on a hot day. Feel the water on your skin at the beach. Take delight in the warm sun on your shoulders. Focus on the sensory experiences of this season rather than the visual aesthetic in a bathing suit. Let yourself take pleasure in the natural beauty, increased daylight, and fresh air, so you are too filled up with joy to waste time obsessing about your body in a bathing suit.
Remember: never compare your insides to anyone else’s outsides. People tell us constantly how they have been their richest and skinniest, while they’re most miserable and lost. Please don’t imagine that you know how someone’s vacation went, or how happy someone feels, based on a picture in a feed. I have had summers at home in my backyard that were far happier than summers touring abroad. You can never know what someone else is experiencing internally, and the person who is on the move in Montauk and Morocco all summer may never feel the satisfaction, contentment and inner peace you have sitting at Compo Beach without a care in the world.
Enjoy your summer. Focus on YOUR lived experience. Give yourself dignity and grace. If you need a lift, call your therapist and get your support. We love you and are rooting for your highest good, always!
Mary and the LIFT Wellness team