As a mother of two teenagers, I’ve had a front-row seat to comparisons in action. Why just our teens? It plays out in all our lives every day. You just need a social media account. Someone’s spotlight moment is right there, in your face, while you might be having an off day. You are comparing someone’s curated highlight to your own unfiltered, behind-the-scenes reality. Social media, the great leveller in reverse.AdvertisementI couldn’t sleep one night, doom-scrolling, feeling as though my life lacked the zing I could see in everyone else’s, when I stumbled upon a quote by James Clear: “Comparison is useful as a point and destructive as a loop. When you compare for a point in time, you can identify a gap in your approach and then shift your attention back to what you can control. When you compare on a repeated loop, you can get locked into a cycle of envy and disappointment.”When do we cross over from point to loop, from useful to destructive? Can we do anything to halt the slide? How do we teach this to ourselves, to our teenagers on social media, even to younger children who aren’t? How do we stop comparing and start living on our own terms? Because, let’s face it, comparison erodes confidence. It keeps us small and makes us feel we aren’t good enough. And that’s not how we want ourselves or our children to be.So much for sleep. I started digging into these questions with an enthusiasm I rarely muster these days.AdvertisementWhat I quickly realised was that many parents of today’s teenagers themselves grew up being compared to other children in the family or neighbourhood. Comparison was how my generation’s parents motivated us: Setting the bar high, expecting us to stretch. An inherited problem, then, perhaps rooted in scarcity. One had to be better than the rest to succeed.So, what can we do? The first step is to stop and name it when it happens. Just a simple “I am comparing now”, said aloud or silently, is enough. Naming it puts the brakes on the loop. It creates distance.The next step is to audit the content we consume, or, to train our social-media algorithms. If you linger on a post that makes you feel small, your algorithm smells it and serves you more of it. So be ruthless. Be like my editor with her red pen when going through your feed. Unfollow or mute content that makes you compare. Curate a digital space that feeds you rather than drains you. This goes for people in real life too. Recognise how a meeting, a phone call or a WhatsApp message makes you feel — there’s your cue.you may likeSometimes, and this is a tricky one, something stings because it hints at hidden potential within us. This is where comparison can become useful. It might help to use it as a mirror, and ask: What is this showing me about myself? Seeing someone succeed can reveal a possibility we already sense in ourselves. With a little nudge, someone’s success can make us think, I’d love to do that too. Or, it can make us think, I’ll never be that good. The trigger is the same; what changes is the story we tell ourselves.The last step is to measure our progress against who we were six months or a year ago, rather than against someone else. Your path, your pace, the trajectory of your life with its own hurdles and blessings are yours alone. You are a perpetual work in progress, constantly evolving, and who better to measure your progress against than your past self?There will always be someone running faster, someone living bigger. Their story is not the measure of ours. The only person to outgrow is who we were yesterday. That’s the race worth running.Sorensen is a Mumbai-based children’s author