Why You Can't Stop Comparing Yourself

Jake Humphrey (0:00)

Hey, it's a massive week for High Performance, and we have a special bonus episode dropping this Friday with Richard Hammond. Make sure you hit follow.

Hi there, welcome along to another episode of High Performance with myself and...

Damian Hughes (0:15)

Damian Hughes. How are you, Jake?

Jake Humphrey (0:16)

I'm good, mate, yourself?

Damian Hughes (0:18)

Very good, thank you.

Jake Humphrey (0:19)

I've really been enjoying these Wednesday episodes. They're a little bit shorter, they force us to think a little bit, and I was listening to one, actually, a couple of days ago with my mum and dad in the car. They've just moved house and I was driving them to their new house. My mum was like, oh, aren't these eclectic? And I think what she means by that is don't we hear from lots of different guests? So we thought we would do another one today.

And the topic that we've come up with, because we hear about this so much from our audience, people listening to this, people watching this right now, is that people struggle with comparison culture, with sharing their real world, with comparing their real world to the worlds of other people. So we've got some cool clips, Dina Asher-Smith, the athlete, she's going to talk about her approach to competing against people by deliberately avoiding watching them. Alex Albon, the Formula One driver, is going to tell us what it's actually like to be measured against someone, because his life is literally, here's how you compare to your teammate. We're also going to hear from Nick Cox, the former head of the Manchester United Youth Setup, really interesting guy.

Damian Hughes (1:20)

He's now technical director at Everton.

Jake Humphrey (1:22)

He is, yeah.

Phil Heath (1:23)

Which is an amazing job.

Jake Humphrey (1:24)

He's doing a really good job there. And also Phil Heath, Mr. Olympia, bodybuilder extraordinaire, will share the advice to his teenage self. And you've got a bit of research as well. Don't share it yet.

But this is interesting. It's about medals that people win and the way it impacts them, isn't it?

Damian Hughes (1:39)

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Counterfactual thinking. We'll explore it in more detail.

Nick Cox (1:43)

If only I knew what that meant.

Jake Humphrey (1:45)

Well, look, welcome along to the episode. If this resonates with you, if you enjoy it, please send us a message. Tell us what you're struggling with when it comes to comparison culture. Explain to us the things that you do to avoid comparing yourself to other people, the things that make you happy, the things that you're struggling with, because the more that you listen to this, can leave comments on Spotify or Apple or on YouTube, wherever you're enjoying this, then the more it helps other people in the high performance community. So how about a bit of vulnerability to start with?

Damian Hughes (2:12)

Go on.

Jake Humphrey (2:14)

Is there someone that you compare yourself to and you can't help it?

Damian Hughes (2:20)

Oh, that's a good one.

So I'm one of four children. So growing up as a kid, it was, you weren't compared to, but we were all at the same stage together. And so that idea of competition, I think it was knocked out of me a little bit. Like I think my mom and dad always made clear that you lift each other up, you don't compete against each other when that instinct came in. So from a family point of view, I've been really, like, I've never really had that sense of comparison with the people closest to me. I think I've met people in the past that have triggered me though, people that have sort of aroused it. And I'll tell you what does it for me when people sort of suggest that in a competition that I didn't know was happening. So do you remember over somewhere, I mean, you met somebody and we found out that they'd been comparing themselves to us, to other people, telling them that they were better than us at what we did. And I found that really quite difficult to manage that.

Jake Humphrey (3:23)

Really? Because that's just their, that's their hang up, not yours.

Damian Hughes (3:26)

Yeah, yeah. But it was more like a competitive instinct then. I didn't realise.

Jake Humphrey (3:30)

You hate unfairness as well, don't you? You don't like them having those conversations behind your back.

Damian Hughes (3:34)

Yeah. Yeah. There was that bit about that lack of authenticity because they were being really nice to our face and then we find out they weren't being so generous behind our backs. That bothered me, but it was almost the idea that I didn't think we were in competition. I thought we were helping each other and then to find out that somebody was doing that, I found that really triggering. So that's when I really especially struggled.