You finish a piece of work. It’s solid, deliberate, and better than you could produce six months ago. That grounding feeling of competently executing a task.

Then you unlock your phone.

Within thirty seconds you see someone three years younger with twice as much achievement, published earlier, or who produced something with four times the scale. The work laying on your desk didn’t physically unravel. The paragraphs didn’t fall apart. But whatever physiological state you were in thirty seconds ago is gone. Replaced by a restless dissatisfaction.

We call this envy, or a lack of mental resilience. But examining how the nervous system computes reward reveals an alternative interpretation: upward comparisons not only damage your ego but subtly recalibrate the machinery that makes you feel worthy to try.

Reward prediction errors and the issue with relative value

Dopamine rarely cares about the absolute pleasure of an outcome. In behavioral neuroscience, dopaminergic neurons in the midbrain predominantly function as reward prediction error circuits. They report the discrepancy between what you expected to experience and what you’re actually experiencing. When an outcome is better than expected, dopamine levels increase, teaching your nervous system to expect better outcomes. When an outcome is worse than expected, a decrease in dopamine informs your body that the behavior in question is not worth the energy.

But here’s the catch: the human brain does not compute reward in a vacuum.

In a landmark neuroimaging study, Christian Fliessbach and colleagues placed pairs of participants side-by-side in separate fMRI scanners for a working memory task for monetary reward. It wasn’t the preference for monetary reward that fascinated researchers, but rather where the ventral striatum, a core dopamine-processing region, lit up with activity.

When measuring a participant’s reward, the magnitude of the ventral striatum response was less informed by the amount of money earned and more informed by the amount of money earned compared to the other participant in the task. Earnings of sixty euros when your neighbor earned thirty had a vastly stronger response than earnings of sixty euros when your neighbor earned sixty, or ninety euros.

Your brain uses relative social comparisons as an implicit multiplier. Exposing yourself to other people’s accomplishments silently trains your brain to update it’s algorithm for what constitutes a reasonable personal outcome. Suddenly, the modest progress you made on that afternoon’s work feels either neutral or like a subjective loss. Your reward prediction error becomes negative.

The subtle collapse of self-efficacy

This is where the neurobiology meets psychology in a critical junction.

Albert Bandura defined self-efficacy not as the degree of one’s self-esteem but his belief in one’s ability to produce a given behavior of the path to a chosen outcome. Bandura identified four sources of self-efficacy but the two relevant to this piece are mastery experiences (your own successful behaviors) and vicarious experiences (successful behaviors in people you deem similar to yourself).

Vicarious comparisons are meant to be a boost. In a survival environment, seeing your peer successfully build a fire communicated to your nervous system that behaviors that produce fire are worth pursuing, since someone of roughly comparable capability also succeeded.

Digital environments subvert vicarious comparisons in two ways:

The reference pool is no longer your peers: You are not comparing your unedited reality to the curated highlight reel of those who are statistically similar to you, but to the best 0.1% of people in human history.

The similarity heuristic fails: Bandura’s research emphasized the importance of vicarious comparison only working when one views the modeled behavior as achievable for someone of reasonably similar circumstances. If the comparison is disproportionately different from your own situation, the effect of a vicarious comparison is reversed. Your brain begins to implicitly reason that if such resources and circumstances are required for somebody else to succeed, then it would be an inefficient allocation of energy to pursue similar behaviors.

Upward comparisons burn out self-efficacy because if your brain reasons that large investments of time and energy will still result in you being at the bottom of a list of aspirational figures, then continuing to invest in yourself is deemed to be an inefficient allocation of resources. You are not lazy or demotivated, you’ve simply just been convinced by a lifetime of upward social comparisons that you’re always in last place.

The useful distinction: Benchmarking vs Calibration

We often tell people to “stop comparing themselves to others.” But you cannot stop evaluating yourself against an implicit set of standards. You are biologically programmed to have reference points for everything you experience.The useful distinction is between benchmarking and calibration:

Benchmarking asks: Who is winning, and how far behind am I? It fixates on rank, and the feeling of being in a competition. It fixates on an external source that you cannot control, reliably causing a decrease in dopamine due to the negative reward prediction error.

Calibration asks: What mechanic did they use that I can adapt to my current environment? It completely ignores relative standing and instead extracts procedural information from observations.

Benchmarking is dopamine-burning while calibration is dopamine-preserving. The reason? Benchmarking implicitly signals to your brain that you are losing ground. Calibration transforms another person’s successful tactic as a hypothesis you can test for yourself.

Run this one-week experiment

For the next week, run an audit of your reference points:

Create an operational airlock between working and consuming. Never browse industry feeds, portfolios, or social networks within sixty minutes of beginning or ending focused work. Let the dopamine hit from completing the task not be immediately overwritten by seeing someone else’s highlight reel. Shift from identity comparisons to procedural comparisons. The next time you feel that familiar sense of dissatisfaction from a vicarious experience, instead of trying to talk yourself out of it, write down a sentence that isolates the tactic rather than the person: “I am not looking at their status, what is the specific tactic variable they solved for?” Log the internal delta. Keep a visible, handwritten record of your output from seven days ago compared to today. Force your dopamine system to calculate prediction errors against your own progress instead of an abstract average.

A necessary caveat

None of this implies that all social comparisons are inherently toxic. Controlled, realistic upward comparisons can sometimes serve as useful guides, assuming the model is accessible and reasonable.

Furthermore, social comparisons are not the only cause of anhedonic depression, chronic motivational depletion, or low self-efficacy. Clinical stress, depression, and systematic disadvantages drain motivation through entirely different biological pathways. If you feel consistently unable to engage with meaningful acts of self-betterment, the root cause likely stretches far beyond the people you follow on social media.

The goal is not to live in a bubble of self-congratulation, but to ensure that your inner reward system does not mistake a highlight reel for an accurate assessment of reality.

The research

Fliessbach, K., Phillipps, C. B., Trautner, P., Schnabel, M., Elger, C. E., Falk, A., & Weber, B. (2007). Social comparison affects reward-related brain activity in the human ventral striatum. Science, 318(5854), 1305-1308. DOI: 10.1126/science.1145876

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman and Company.