“Stop comparing yourself to others” is common advice, the kind that’s easy to agree with and hard to actually act on, especially now that a feed of other people’s curated lives is available at any idle moment. A specific, well-designed study gets at why that particular kind of comparison seems to cost so much.
The clearest evidence comes from a 2015 study by Philippe Verduyn, Dong Seon Lee, Jiyoung Park, Holly Shablack, Ariana Orvell, Joseph Bayer, Oscar Ybarra, John Jonides, and Ethan Kross, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. The researchers ran two separate studies to test this. In the first, a controlled experiment, they manipulated whether people used Facebook passively, scrolling and reading without interacting, or actively, posting and messaging, then measured mood shortly after. In the second, they followed real Facebook users for three weeks, texting them multiple times a day to check in on their mood and their Facebook use in that moment, an experience-sampling method that catches how people actually feel in real time rather than relying on memory afterward. Across both studies, passive use reliably predicted feeling worse afterward, while active use didn’t have this effect. Crucially, the researchers were also able to test why: the decline in mood after passive use was specifically explained by an increase in envy, the sense of coming up short next to what other people appeared to be doing or having.
A separate, much larger body of evidence supports the underlying mechanism at play here. In a 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis by Peter McCarthy and Nexhmedin Morina, published in Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, the researchers pooled findings from 54 separate studies on social comparison, drawing on both adult and adolescent samples. Across the pooled data, unfavorable social comparison, evaluating oneself as coming up short against others, showed a strong, consistent association with both depression and anxiety, among the more robust relationships identified anywhere in this particular area of psychological research. The pattern held broadly across the very different studies feeding into the analysis, not just in the specific context of social media.
Put together, these two bodies of research describe the same mechanism from different angles. Verduyn and colleagues’ experiments show, with a design strong enough to support a causal claim, that passively watching other people’s lives online specifically triggers envy, and that envy is what drags mood down afterward, not the platform use itself. McCarthy and Morina’s much larger meta-analysis shows that this isn’t a narrow, social-media-specific quirk: unfavorable comparison of the self against others is reliably tied to depression and anxiety across a wide range of contexts and study designs. The specific act of comparing unfavorably, whether triggered by a feed of other people’s highlight reels or by comparison in daily life more broadly, appears to be doing real psychological work, and not in a good direction.
It’s worth being honest about what this research doesn’t establish. Verduyn and colleagues’ field study is based on self-reported mood and self-reported Facebook use captured via text message, which is a strong method for catching real-time experience but still relies on people accurately reporting their own state. Their sample, while used across two complementary studies, wasn’t especially large by the standards of the field. McCarthy and Morina’s meta-analysis, meanwhile, is built mostly from correlational studies, so while the association between unfavorable comparison and depression or anxiety is strong and consistent, the pooled data can’t fully rule out the reverse explanation, that people already prone to depression or anxiety may also be more likely to compare themselves unfavorably in the first place, rather than the comparison purely causing the distress.
Within those honest limits, what the research supports is a specific, useful distinction rather than a blanket rule. The problem doesn’t appear to be comparison itself so much as the passive, undirected kind, quietly consuming a stream of other people’s edited lives without any real engagement, and the specific emotional response, envy, that tends to follow. Advice to simply “stop comparing” may be less actionable than it sounds, but the research does point toward something more specific and doable: paying attention to when a comparison habit shifts from active engagement into passive consumption, since that shift seems to be where the actual cost shows up.
