In the early 1990s, two American researchers, Susan Heidrich and Carol Ryff, asked 243 older women a set of questions most people would rather not answer out loud. How is your health? How often do you compare yourself with other women your age? And how are you doing, in yourself?
The women whose health was worst compared themselves the most. That part surprised no one. A body that has started to let you down sends you looking sideways: at the friend who still gardens all afternoon, at the neighbor who drives herself to her daughter’s three states away.
The second finding is the one worth keeping. When those comparisons left a woman feeling she was holding up reasonably well, her mental health came out close to that of the women in good health. The effect was strongest for the women in the poorest health of all. How often they compared mattered less than what they took away from it.
The feeling that shows up during a change
October started last Sunday with the idea that change is the one thing you can count on, and with the feeling that usually arrives first: the not-knowing, which can wear you out even when nothing seems to be happening. Today’s feeling tends to arrive once the change is underway, and people rarely admit to it.
It shows up at dinner, when you’re the only one at the table without a husband and the couples order a bottle to share. Or, if your husband is the one who’s ill, it shows up when the couple you used to travel with send photos from Arizona. It comes in the Christmas card from the friend whose grandchildren live ten minutes away, when yours are a plane ride off and call on birthdays. It shows up in your exercise class, when a woman ten years older than you gets down on the floor and back up again without a hand.
A flash of something sour follows. Then, usually, a flash of shame about the sourness.
Why a big change turns it up
Comparison has a poor reputation. It gets treated as pettiness, or ingratitude, or a social-media habit that sensible adults grow out of.
The psychologist who first studied it seriously saw it differently. In 1954 Leon Festinger argued that people compare themselves with others in order to work out where they stand, and that they do it most when there’s no objective measure to check against. He also noticed that people pick someone close to themselves to compare with. A stranger’s life tells you very little about your own. A friend’s tells you a lot.
That explains a good deal about the months after a big change. Before it, you had a sense of how your life was going. Afterwards the old measure stops working. You’re newly widowed, or newly retired, or newly diagnosed, and there’s no scale for that. So you look sideways, at the people living a version of your life that seems to be going better, and the people you look at are the ones nearest to you.
A stranger’s trip doesn’t sting. Your friend’s does.
The women in that 1990s study add the second half. Comparing often is not the problem. What matters is what you take away from it, and that part is more in your hands than it feels.
The clearest picture of this I know comes from an unlikely place: the Olympic podium. A team of psychologists took the television footage of the 1992 Barcelona Games and asked people to rate how happy each silver and bronze medalist looked. The silver medalists had the better result, and they looked less happy anyway. Right after their events, the bronze medalists averaged 7.1 out of 10 and the silver medalists 4.8.
The researchers’ explanation was where each one was looking. Silver was looking up, at the gold it had almost won. Bronze was looking down, at fourth place and going home with nothing, and could think, as the researchers put it, “at least I won a medal.” Scientific American’s write-up of the study has a photo from a later podium where you can see it for yourself.
So this Sunday’s question is something other than how to stop comparing. You won’t stop, and you don’t need to. The useful question is narrower: what is the comparison telling you, and how much say do you have in where you look?
What You’ll Find Below
✅ Where people look when life gets hard — what researchers heard from women facing a serious illness, and the trap they called the “supercoper”
✅ What you envy, exactly — a short exercise that turns the sting into something you can use
✅ What to say to “at least…” — word for word, for the comparisons other people hand you
✅ “Am I a bad person for not being glad for her?” — answered straight
✅ And everything else a Plus membership carries — the full archive and a new Fun Pack every month.