Hello and welcome back to the Self-Healer Soundboard. This week's episode is another

direct request from you, the viewer and listener. And this one is on Comparison. Specifically,

this person asking was mentioning their own comparison to their friends who are married

and with children. And this person is single and on their own and playing that game of,

this is what everyone else's life looks like around me. I am the odd one out. How can I stop

comparing myself? Why do I compare myself? So we are going to break that down in an episode today.

I think a really great place to start this conversation on Comparison, whatever it might be, whether

or not you're comparing your marital status, your children status to someone else, or the many

different endless things that we compare about ourselves to others. I think a really important

place actually to start is to understand that Comparison is really natural for us humans. We are

all instinctively trying to make sense of our environment, particularly other humans in our

environment, since the dawn of time. And as quicker, the quicker that we can make these assessments

really based on whether or not this is a person that's part of our group, whether or not they're a

safe person in other words, or whether or not the person that we're happening upon is maybe a

threat, a danger to our group. The quicker we can make that assessment or compare how they

compare to ourselves, how they compare to our in-group or our community, the quicker than we can

determine and act if we need to, if that person is an outsider or does pose a threat. So to start

with the last part of the question that I heard at least I think, which was how can we stop? Why do

we do it? I think it's an important acknowledgement, which is that we necessarily can't stop. It's

something that we're always seeking to do to see how are we measuring up? How do we compare to these

others? Mainly again to determine whether or not these are people that we can interact with

and are safe to interact with. So it's really wired into us, Comparison, that is, and is an

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