Avoiding Overthinking and Social Comparison

Overthinking
So, what is overthinking?

Overthinking is thinking too much, needlessly, passively, endlessly, and excessively pondering
the meanings, causes, and consequences of your character, your feelings, and your
problems.

"Why am I so unhappy?”

“What will happen to me if I continue to procrastinate at work?”

''I'm so dismayed by how thin my hair has gotten,"

"What did he really mean by that remark?”

and so on.

The scientific term used for overthinking is Rumination

Challenge the assumption

Many of us believe that when we feel down, we should try to focus inwardly and evaluate
our feelings and our situation in order to attain self-insight and find solutions that might
ultimately resolve our problems and relieve unhappiness.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and others have compiled a great deal of
evidence challenging this assumption.

Numerous studies over the past two decades have shown that to the contrary, over thinking
ushers in a host of adverse consequences.

Many of its definitions reflect this.

“Tendency to engage in sustained, repetitive thinking about negative topics” (Mandell,

Siegle, Shutt, Feldmiller, and Thase, 2014, p. 35).

“Repetitively focusing on the fact that one is depressed; on one’s symptoms of depression;
and on the causes, meanings, and consequences of depressive symptoms” (Susan Nolen-
Hoeksema, 1991, p. 569).

Adverse consequences

• sustains or worsens sadness

• fosters negatively biased thinking

• impairs a person's ability to solve problems

• saps motivation
 A notable feature of overthinking is that it draws on a person's mental resources.

Research shows that rumination about bad experiences and overthinking harms person’s
concentration, and ultimately their performance, at demanding everyday activities like reading
and writing.

Although people have a strong sense that they are gaining insight into themselves and their
problems during their ruminations, this is rarely the case.

What they do gain is a distorted, pessimistic perspective on their lives.

Research shows that people who ruminate while sad or distraught are likely to feel

• besieged

• powerless

• self-critical

• pessimistic and

• generally negatively biased

Ruminators can make less than appealing social partners, so your friends and coworkers might start
avoiding you.

All these factors together could lead you to lose confidence in yourself and even to spiral into
clinical anxiety or depression.

The evidence that overthinking is bad for you is now vast and overwhelming,

If you are someone plagued by ruminations, you are unlikely to become happier before you can
break that habit.

How to break the habit

If you are an overthinker, one of the secrets to your happiness is the ability

• to allay obsessive overthinking,

• to reinterpret and redirect your negative thoughts into more neutral or optimistic ones.

It is found that truly happy people have the capacity to distract and absorb themselves in
activities that divert their energies and attention away from dark or anxious ruminations.

Becoming happier means

• learning how to disengage from overthinking about both major and minor negative
experiences

• learning to stop searching for all the leaks and cracks-at least for a time--and not let them
affect how you feel about yourself and your life as a whole

Social Comparison
FOMO Fear of missing out
 One thing that is really consistent across all ages and races and socio-economic
statuses is the FOMO or fear of missing out.
What is this fear of missing out?
Missing out on a party that everyone else is at
Or missing out on something better that you think you should have
Kids want better toys because other kids have them
Teenagers want better clothes
Millenials want better gadgets
So, basically what it boils down to is you end up comparing what you have to what
you don’t have
FOBO Feeling Of Being Outcompeted
Social comparisons are ubiquitous.
In our daily lives we can't help noticing whether our friends, coworkers, family
members, and even fictional characters in the movies are brighter, richer, healthier,
wittier, or more attractive than we are.
Why do people compare?
In 1954, psychologist Leon Festinger hypothesized that people compare
themselves to others in order to fulfil a basic human desire:
the need for self-evaluation.

Categories of Comparison
Two basic categories
1. Considers social norms and the opinions of others
2. Pertains to our abilities and performance
A discussion/debate
Are social comparisons useful/harmful
Researchers have shown that such comparisons can be useful.
Sometimes they inspire us to strive for ambitious goals or to improve weaknesses.
Example
Watching a piano prodigy play a beautiful sonata can motivate the amateur
to work harder.
 Social comparisons can make us feel better about our own plight.

Example
In the neonatal intensive care unit the parent of a low birthweight infant may
be comforted by noticing that other parents' babies are even more fragile.
Much of the time, however, observations of how other people are doing or about
what they have can be pernicious.

Direction of Comparison
"Upward" comparisons (e.g., "He's paid a higher salary;' "She's thinner") may lead to
feelings of inferiority, distress, and loss of self-esteem.

“Downward" comparisons (e.g., "He got laid off," "Her cancer's spread") may lead to
feelings of guilt, the need to cope with others' envy and resentment, and fears of
suffering the same (equally bad) fate.

Upward Comparison Downward

Comparison

Gratitude, higher self-

Positive Effects Hope, Inspiration
esteem

Dissatisfaction, Envy,
Negative Effects Scorn
lower self-esteem

Frog Pond Effect

The theory that a person’s comparison group can affect their evaluations of themselves.
Specifically, people have a tendency to have lower self-evaluations when comparing
themselves to higher performing groups.
 On the other hand, they evaluate themselves more favourably or as better than they
actually are when in a group of low-performing individuals.

For example,

A person might take particular pride in considering himself the best player on his office
softball team of colleagues who are mediocre players.

Yet the worst performer on an Olympic softball team might feel incompetent, even though
he is among the best softball players in the world.

Its premise can be illustrated using the simple analogy of a frog in a pond: as a frog, would
you rather be in a small pond where you’re a big frog, or a large pond where you’re a small
frog?

People in general had a better academic self-concept if

they were a big frog in a small pond (e.g., the top student in their local high school)

rather than a small frog in a large one (e.g., one of many good students at an Ivy
League university).

In other words, average students have a higher academic self-concept when attending a
below-average school (big fish in a small pond),

and they have a lower academic self-concept when attending an above-average school
(small fish in a big pond)

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The tendency for unskilled people to be overconfident in their ability and highly skilled
people to underestimate their ability.

Addresses the fact that unskilled people often think they are on par or superior to their
peers in tasks such as test-taking abilities.

That is, they are overconfident.

Basically, they fail to accurately compare themselves or their skills within their surroundings.

What causes the Dunning-Kruger effect?

Confidence is so highly prized that many people would rather pretend to be smart or skilled
than risk looking inadequate and losing face.

Even smart people can be affected by the Dunning-Kruger effect because

having intelligence isn’t the same thing as learning and developing a specific skill.

Many individuals mistakenly believe that their experience and skills in one particular area
are transferable to another.

Overconfidence has been described as the “mother of all biases,” because it leads people to
underestimate their own weaknesses and take disproportionately high risks.
What is the double curse of the Dunning-Kruger effect?

“Those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach
mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the
ability to realize it.”

Not only do people perform poorly, but they are not self-aware enough to judge themselves
accurately—and are thus unlikely to learn and grow.

The poor performers, compared to their more capable peers, lack specific logical abilities
similar to the logic necessary to do some of the tasks/tests in these studies and, as such,
cannot really distinguish which questions they are getting right or wrong.

This is known as the double-curse explanation.

Why do people fail to recognize their own incompetence?

Many people would describe themselves as above average in intelligence, humor, and a
variety of skills.

They can’t accurately judge their own competence, because they lack metacognition, or the
ability to step back and examine oneself objectively.

In fact, those who are the least skilled are also the most likely to overestimate their abilities.

What is the opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect?

If the Dunning-Kruger effect is being overconfident in one’s knowledge or performance, its

polar opposite is imposter syndrome or the feeling that one is undeserving of success.

People who have imposter syndrome are plagued by self-doubts and constantly feel like
frauds who will be unmasked any second.

Social comparisons are particularly invidious because no matter how successful, wealthy, or
fortunate we become, there's always someone who can best us.

People who pay too much attention to social comparisons find themselves chronically
vulnerable, threatened, and insecure.

How to Shake off Ruminations and Social Comparison

• Cut loose

• Act to solve problems

• Dodge overthinking triggers

• Take in the big picture