Your brain is a comparison engine. In every new situation, it automatically rifles through your memory of every other situation you’ve encountered in the past. It swiftly finds one or a few that are similar to the current scenario, then uses that information to figure out what to do next. Most of the time, you do this without you ever realizing it.

Sometimes this cognitive reflex works to your advantage, and sometimes it doesn’t. But since it’s always happening anyway, you might as well make it work for you more often than against you–at least as best you can. Here’s how.

Helpful And Less Helpful Comparisons

Say you walk into a conference room at a company you’ve never visited. Your brain immediately hops to it, rummaging through your memory to find other conference rooms you’ve been in, then helps you to figure out where to sit and how to behave in the meeting that’s getting underway. In a case like this, this is pretty handy.

Not only do you compare situations to each other, you also use your knowledge of other people to help you understand yourself. When you start a new job, you have to figure out how you should treat the other people in your office. Is this a workplace where the supervisors are just another part of the team, or do the people above you in the hierarchy require a little more deference than you’re used to? You figure that out by identifying coworkers whose jobs are similar to yours and observing their interactions: Are they joking around with their bosses, or do they clam up and get pretty formal once their managers show up?

But this process, which psychologists call “social comparison,” isn’t helpful to you across the board. Think about the variety of people you know. For every given dimension of yourself that you can think of, there are some people who seem better off than you and others who are worse off. Chances are you know people who make more money than you as well as people who make less money. Same goes for how witty, athletic, or competent other people are, relative to you yourself.

Point-Counterpoint:

When you compare yourself to someone better than you on a dimension, that’s called an “upward social comparison”; when you compare yourself to someone you consider worse off on a given dimension, it’s “a downward social comparison.” So while these comparisons can be useful (in both directions) for figuring out where you stand, they can make you miserable, too. If you’re always making upward social comparisons and find yourself lacking something, you may start feeling bad about how you measure up.