A coworker’s pay goes up, yours stays the same, and your satisfaction with your job drops. A survey of workers in Britain recorded exactly that.
Take a man who heads a sales department. He is not short of money and has not been through any major upheaval, yet on Sunday nights he has trouble sleeping, and on Monday mornings he wakes up with a sore jaw from grinding his teeth. He says: "I don’t have anything to worry about." Only after closer questions does the story come out: his younger brother has just bought a bigger house, his company has just published its quarterly sales rankings, and his wife often brings up how "other people’s kids take extra classes in three places".
The body reacts to social rank as it would to a threat
The stress response has two layers. The fast layer is run by the sympathetic nervous system. The slow layer is the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, which ends in cortisol, and this axis has a feedback loop that switches it off.
The catch is that this off-switch only works once the threat has passed. The Life Stress Management course lists the triggers that keep this axis switched on all the time, and most of them lie in social relationships: waiting for a decision, trying to keep a disagreement from escalating, carrying other people’s emotions.
Laurie Santos at Yale explains the pain of comparison through the way the brain keeps score. The brain scores everything against a reference point rather than by its absolute value, and the worst reference point is other people. The story of the coworker’s pay at the start of this article follows exactly that path.
Worse still, the picture we compare ourselves with is distorted. Ask first-year college students about their friends, and they usually think their friends are happier than they really are and run into fewer sad moments than they really do, simply because people hide their sad moments.
Norms that no one truly believes in
Most people at some point privately disagree with a habit, but assume everyone else agrees with it, so they go along anyway. Cristina Bicchieri at Penn calls this pluralistic ignorance.
At work, it might be "no one leaves before the boss". At home, it might be "a good mother takes care of everything herself". Everyone keeps the norm for fear of being seen as out of line, even though hardly anyone believes it is right.
In the Asch experiment, just one person in the room giving a different answer was enough to sharply reduce the pressure to conform.
You understand it, yet your body stays braced
The advice "don’t compare yourself" is right but hard to follow, because comparison is a reflex of the brain. After many months, stress also becomes a habit of the body, held in your breathing, your posture and your muscle tone.
The diaphragm, the neck, jaw and shoulders, and the abdominal wall
Long-lasting social pressure often shows up in three muscle chains. In the diaphragm, people breathe shallowly into the chest and tend to hold their breath whenever they concentrate. In the neck, jaw and shoulders, it is teeth grinding, like the sales manager’s sore jaw on Monday morning, along with shoulders raised as if bracing for a blow. The abdominal wall stays tensed all the time, with digestive problems that follow the rhythm of the work week. Deeper than the muscles, studies cited by Barbara Fredrickson show that long-term loneliness and low social status also push the expression of immune genes toward more inflammation.
When you need to see a specialist
Not every case of tiredness or insomnia comes from pressure. Iron deficiency anemia, thyroid disorders or another organic cause (a physical cause that tests can show) can produce the same picture, and these must be ruled out. On the psychological side, some signs should not be left to linger. If sadness or a sense of emptiness has stayed with you for more than two weeks, nothing interests you anymore, you lie awake for a long time even when you have the chance to sleep, or you have thoughts of harming yourself or others, you should see a mental health specialist soon. Physical recovery does not replace specialist treatment.
Muscle testing and calming the stress response
The session begins with listening to your story, with no adjustments yet. Muscle testing comes afterwards, to find which chain is braced and where the bracing starts. What is brought in for testing may be a deep breath, a jaw position or a situation you are thinking about, one thing at a time, and how the muscle responds shows right away. For the sales manager, there was no shortage of situations to think about, from his brother’s house to the quarterly sales rankings.
If the stress response switches on when you think about a particular situation, we calm it through reflex points on the forehead. Only after that step do we ask what this pressure is telling us about what you want, what you need, and what you allow yourself to receive.
If you have thoughts of harming yourself or someone else, go to the nearest emergency room or call 115 (the emergency number in Vietnam) right away.
