You open your phone for two minutes between classes. Someone has posted a timetable with eleven hours of revision on it. Someone else has posted their term test marks. A classmate seems to be finding all of this effortless.
You put the phone down feeling worse than when you picked it up, and you are not entirely sure why.
Comparing is automatic, not a flaw
First, the reassuring part. Measuring yourself against other people is not weakness, vanity, or insecurity. It is one of the standard things human brains do. When there is no objective way to know whether you are doing well, your mind reaches for the nearest available yardstick: the people around you.
Psychologists have a name for this. Social comparison theory, set out by Leon Festinger back in 1954, starts from the idea that people have a drive to evaluate their own abilities and opinions, and that when no objective measure is available they turn to other people instead (Festinger, 1954). Seventy years later, that is still roughly what your brain is doing when you glance at a classmate's paper.
That instinct is genuinely useful sometimes. It is how you work out what a reasonable amount of revision looks like, or that you are not the only one who found the paper hard.
The problem is not that you compare. The problem is what you have been given to compare against.
You are comparing your inside to their outside
You know everything about your own experience: the hours you wasted, the topic you still do not understand, the morning you cried before school, the doubt sitting underneath all of it.
Of another person, you know only what they chose to show you.
You are matching your full unedited reality against someone's carefully selected highlights, and then concluding that you are behind. It is not a fair contest, because the other side is not the whole picture.
There is a second problem. We tend to compare upward, toward people who seem to be doing better, and to skip past everyone who is struggling in the same way we are. On social media that upward tilt is the pattern most consistently linked with feeling worse afterwards (Verduyn et al., 2020). Your feed is not a representative sample of your peers. It leans heavily towards their better days.
Why "study with me for 12 hours" content backfires
Study accounts look like motivation. For a lot of students they quietly function as the opposite.
Worth being honest about the evidence here. Across the research as a whole, the average link between social media use and teenage wellbeing is negative but very small, and it differs a great deal from one person to the next (Orben, 2020). Time on the app is not really the point. What you spend that time doing seems to matter more, and comparing yourself upward is one of the parts most reliably associated with feeling worse.
- The output is the point, not the learning. A photograph of aesthetic notes and highlighters shows effort that looks impressive. It says nothing about whether anything was understood or remembered.
- Nobody posts the wasted afternoon. You see the twelve-hour day. You do not see the three days before it when they did nothing, or that the twelve hours included a lot of scrolling.
- It sets a standard nobody can hold. If your reference point for a normal day is an unusual day, then every ordinary day of yours registers as a failure.
- It moves the goal from "learn this" to "look like someone who is learning this." Those are very different activities, and only one of them earns marks.
If you want to know whether your revision is working, the honest test is whether you can answer past-paper questions without your notes. It is not how your desk looks.
Comparison doesn't stay online
None of this is only a phone problem, and switching off your data will not solve it.
Marks get read out in class. Tuition classes post rankings. Group chats fill up after every paper. Relatives ask how you did and mention a cousin who did better, usually meaning to encourage you. Whole conversations happen in which everyone quietly performs how much they studied.
Two things worth knowing about those moments. First, a good deal of the confidence in the room is performed. People tend to keep negative feelings more hidden than positive ones, which means we routinely underestimate how much everyone else is struggling (Jordan et al., 2011). The classmate who sounds most certain the paper was easy may not be telling you much about how they actually felt. Second, you are allowed not to take part. "It wasn't my best paper, I'd rather not go through it" is a complete answer.
What actually helps
Not "stop comparing." You cannot switch off something this automatic by deciding to. But you can change what you feed it and what you do when it fires.
- Change the input. Unfollow or mute anything that reliably leaves you feeling worse. You are not being petty. You are choosing what your brain gets to use as a yardstick, and that is entirely your call.
- Put a limit on when. Late at night and immediately after an exam are two moments when comparison tends to do the most damage, because you are already depleted. Keep the phone out of the room at both.
- Compare to your own past self. It is the only comparison with real information in it. Could you answer these questions a month ago? That is a measurement that means something. Someone else's timetable is not.
- Name the feeling when it lands. "That's envy, and I'm tired" takes surprising heat out of the moment. Naming what you feel is a skill you can build, and Understanding Your Emotions walks through how.
- Notice what the feeling is pointing at. Envy is often information. If a classmate's steady routine bothers you, it may be because you want that steadiness. Take the useful part and leave the rest.
- Look after the basics. Comparison tends to hit hardest when you are short on sleep and running on empty. Self-Care for Busy Students has small habits that fit a real schedule.
When it stops being ordinary comparison
Most of this is a normal, if uncomfortable, part of being a student. Sometimes it becomes something heavier.
If you find yourself feeling worthless rather than briefly deflated, avoiding friends because seeing them hurts, checking other people's posts compulsively, or believing you are fundamentally behind everyone in a way you cannot recover from, and this has gone on for weeks, please talk to someone. A trusted adult, a teacher, or a parent is a good place to start. The Soul Care is not a clinical service, but we can listen and help you find professional support when it is needed.
Whatever is on your feed today is not the standard. It is one person's best hour, formatted to look like a whole life.
Evidence and further reading
The ideas here come from research on social comparison and on how social media affects wellbeing. If you want to read further:
- Social comparison theory. Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117-140. The original paper that named the drive to evaluate yourself against other people.
- Why everyone else looks like they are coping. Jordan, A. H., Monin, B., Dweck, C. S., Lovett, B. J., John, O. P., & Gross, J. J. (2011). Misery has more company than people think: underestimating the prevalence of others' negative emotions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(1), 120-135.
- Comparison on social media. Verduyn, P., Gugushvili, N., Massar, K., Täht, K., & Kross, E. (2020). Social comparison on social networking sites. Current Opinion in Psychology, 36, 32-37.
- How big the effects actually are. Orben, A. (2020). Teenagers, screens and social media: a narrative review of reviews and key studies. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 55, 407-414. A useful corrective in both directions, and free to read.