#542 The Comparison Trap: Why looking at their life is ruining yours
Happiness Podcast
Dr. Robert Puff, Ph.D.
4.4 • 920 Ratings
🗓️ 4 July 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Comparison Trap: Why looking at their life is ruining yours
Welcome to The Comparison Trap. In a world filled with curated highlight reels, it's easy to measure your life against someone else's—but we rarely see the full story behind the success. This podcast is about breaking free from that cycle to find contentment and purpose in your own unique journey, one day at a time.
New Happiness Podcast episode with Dr. Robert Puff, Newport Beach Psychologist
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. |
| 0:10.9 | When I first started working as a clinical psychologist many years ago, I discovered we as humans |
| 0:17.3 | spend a lot of time comparing ourselves to others. Some of the women I would work with |
| 0:22.7 | would tell me how they'd walk into a room, look around, and see if they were the prettiest girl in the |
| 0:28.4 | room. And with men, it was so often, how much had they achieved? Were they doing better |
| 0:34.4 | than other men that they knew? After all, what is the first question |
| 0:38.6 | that most men ask when they meet for the first time? What do you do for a living? Now, these are |
| 0:44.3 | basically stereotypes, but they're strong ones based on some reality. Some women do compare how |
| 0:50.8 | they look compared to other women, and some men do compare how they've achieved compared to other men. |
| 0:56.5 | But our world has changed since I've been working as a clinical psychologist, |
| 1:01.3 | and now with social media, these comparison games have been magnified. |
| 1:07.1 | Social media has put this instinct on steroids, where we used to be able to walk into a room |
| 1:13.4 | with a group of people and size up the room whether we're better or not as good as other |
| 1:18.1 | people, whether in our looks or in our success. Now we can compare ourselves to highlight |
| 1:23.9 | reels of millions. And as I think most of us know, there can be a huge discrepancy |
| 1:30.8 | between behind-the-scenes reality and people's public-facing highlight reels. Haven't we all known, |
| 1:39.2 | or seen, or perhaps even partaken, in seeing people having a horrible time, being miserable, but then |
| 1:47.7 | taking a picture to post on social media, putting on that happy smile and everything is just |
| 1:53.4 | wonderful. And yet at the same time, when we look at these other people that we compare ourselves |
| 1:59.6 | to, it can have such negative effects, |
| 2:03.0 | because it can lead us to feel inadequate, envy, anxiety, and even paralyze us from taking |
| 2:10.2 | actions for our own life because we feel we'll never measure up. |
... |
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