Wellness Wednesdays with Diana: Dare to Deviate
When I turned in my Intro to Statistics final a few years ago, I hoped that would be the last I’d hear about calculating the mean and standard deviation.
I’ve always found it a little troubling that I’m expected to gauge how well I’m doing in a class based on how everyone else is doing. I worry because it’s a slippery slope—we start off by harmlessly comparing grades to one another. But we’re computing machines; as soon as we learn a mechanism in one specific context, we start applying it to other aspects of our lives. You start off by comparing your test scores to the next person, but then you start to compare looks, income, intelligence, popularity, until you’ve completely surrendered your control over your self-evaluation.
When our self-perception becomes a function of the performance of other people, we have a problem. Social psychologist Leon Festinger identified our tendency to evaluate ourselves through social comparison as early as 1954. This is not a new phenomenon we can pin on the Instagram generation; our parents and grandparents are just as guilty of comparing themselves to the neighbors.
But one thing that sets our generation apart is how much access we have to these comparisons—our ancestors could only compare themselves to a handful of people but we have global access to Bill Gates’ net worth, the number of albums Taylor Swift sold in a week, and Kim Kardashian’s waist-to-hip ratio. With MTV, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat stories at our disposal, we can tune in to see who has a prettier house, a sexier job offer, a taller Christmas tree, a more extravagant sweet sixteen, or a trendier OOTD—which by the way I recently learned stands for “Outfit Of The Day.”
With finals right around the corner, we could all benefit from a little bit of tunnel vision. This week, your Wellness Wednesday tip is to turn all that energy you exert comparing yourself to your peers into time you spend on developing and establishing your own standards and goals.
Runners seem to have a great understanding of this idea; you’ve probably heard them mention running their personal record (PR). Your PR is your best time running a specific distance. I’m a big fan of personal records or personal bests because as a measure, they’re absolute not relative. You’re only comparing your performance to a previous performance. Of course, you can compare your PR to someone else’s, but that’s not the point. Personal records give you the kind of focus I hope you can channel during this finals season.
At the cost of sounding “basic,” (another great term I’ve become acquainted with), I’d have to say maybe Robert Frost was onto something when he talked about the road less traveled. Perhaps what we need to do to achieve the greatness we strive for is to spend more time getting to know ourselves. Hopefully what will emerge is an individualized definition of success.
It’s so easy to look outside the window to see what everyone else is up to. But just for a day, humor me and shut the blinds. Trust yourself to make independent decisions about your future and more accurate evaluations of your performance. Ignore the mean and dare to deviate from society’s idea of what is standard.
Imagine how much we’d all achieve if we kept our eyes on our own paths and just kept striving for our personal records.
Diana Gonimah is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania from Cairo, Egypt. She is a writer, Features Editor, and Recruiting Chair at the UPenn chapter of Her Campus. She’s passionate about psychology, journalism, creative writing, and helping people in any capacity. Check our website every Wednesday for Diana’s column!