277: 4 Things Keeping You Stuck – Part 3 – The Comparison Trap

The Comparison Trap: The Stuck That Disguises Itself as Inspiration (Part 3 of 4)

Welcome, especially if you’ve just stumbled onto this podcast! We’re in the middle of a four-part series on why we get stuck and can’t seem to take action on our homes. You can listen in any order, but make sure you catch all four. Part one (episode 275) is about matching your capacity to your choice of activity. Part two (episode 276) is about making sure you have enough stress to actually take action — and if you’re dealing with the opposite problem, too much stress to the point of paralysis, please get real support for that; it has bigger implications for your health than a messy home, and there are people far more qualified than me to help with it. Today, part three, we’re digging into comparison traps — a special kind of stuck that loves to disguise itself as inspiration or research.

Doom scrolling is not research

You know exactly where this is headed. It bears repeating anyway, because it’s so easy to forget: every hour we spend doom scrolling through Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube — watching other people’s lives instead of living our own — is genuinely dangerous. I’m not immune to it either. I have my own battles with it, especially given how well those platforms are built to hand our fish brains a dopamine hit.

For ADHD brains especially, it’s an incredible trap, because it leans right into our love of shiny, distracting things, and it feeds the feeling that we’re somehow different, somehow unable to get our lives in order the way everyone in our feed seems to have theirs.

Nothing you’re scrolling through is real

Everything on those platforms is performative: staged, edited, styled. You’re not seeing people just like you, not because they don’t exist, but because a brain like yours managing to set up the camera, hold onto the thought long enough to film it, and not wander off mid-task doesn’t make for tidy content. Even the creators who are trying to be raw and real have help behind the scenes — scheduling, editing, filming. Nobody is 100% unfiltered in something they’re putting out to the public. Podcasts included.

That format rewards a certain kind of brain: sometimes the “monkey brain” type-A presentation, sometimes people whose need for control genuinely does produce a well-ordered life. That doesn’t mean they don’t have their own battle happening just out of frame. We reward that particular battle instead of shaming it, but everyone has one. The next time you see something that looks flawless, remember: they’re walking through their own struggle. Just because we reward perfectionism doesn’t make it a healthy trait, and it doesn’t mean it comes without cost to the person living it.

Nobody is doing all the things

Here’s the other piece: you have time to scroll through the best cooks, the best workout accounts, the best-dressed, the best-styled homes, the best organizers, the best party throwers, the best gift givers, the best readers — and think, I can’t possibly do all of this. Neither are they. Every one of them has zeroed in on the one thing they do, and because it’s become their job, because they do it far more than anything else in their life, they’ve gotten really good at it.

We somehow convince ourselves that the sliver of time they spend on that one thing matches the time we spend on the same task in our actual, full lives. It doesn’t. That’s their thing. And whatever you do as your job — whether or not you’d call it a “real” job — you get good at too, because you put in the reps.

Real life doesn’t fit in a perfect planner

We also see people online who seem to have their schedule locked, their planner immaculate, killing it without a single hiccup. Their life doesn’t seem to life the way yours does. Case in point: I’m getting this episode out two or three hours later than planned because I have an old dog struggling and I was up most of the night. People get sick. Appointments pop up. Fires need putting out. That’s just life.

You are not supposed to squeeze your life into the margins of a perfect schedule. You live your life, and you fit what you want to get done into the margins of that living. Focus on the actual human element, not on whether everything checked off matches the plan. So you time-blocked meal prep and forgot to pull the chicken out of the freezer last night — that does not mean the whole day is blown up.

Your brain remembers the misses, not the wins

Our brains are especially good at holding onto the mess-ups, the open loops, the things left undone. But when we actually finish something, there’s no built-in mechanism that says “hey, nice work” — it just gets checked off and flows right out the other side like it never happened. That’s exactly why you can reach the end of a day feeling like you scrambled nonstop and have nothing to show for it, when you actually do. You just haven’t trained yourself to notice it.

That’s one of my favorite things about Fish School: we build in moments to check in with each other on what actually got done, on our Tackle It Tuesday wins. Training yourself to reinforce what you’re accomplishing is just as important as the accomplishing itself.

Get out of the trap with any action

So if you catch yourself “just” putting together one more mood board, “just” watching one more video on whether to color-drench a room or add something to that one wall — pause and ask whether that’s genuinely useful, or whether it’s a way to avoid the thing that would actually move the needle: attacking a pile and finding it a home, whether that’s the recycle bin, the trash, the donate pile, or a real spot because you actually want to keep it.

Decluttering isn’t about perfection or the camera. It’s about function — being able to walk into a space you own and smile, without needing the can of paint you agonized over for three months. Small, imperfect steps get you unstuck. Not the “right” action. Any action.

Join us in Fish School

If you need help taking that action, that’s exactly what accountability is for — people in your same situation pushing you to take the next step, sharing a before picture (even if it’s only for your own eyes), setting a 20-minute timer, and taking the after picture. You’ll see the difference in that photo in a way your brain won’t let you feel on its own. That’s the kind of reinforcement we build into Fish School.

If loving, encouraging, nonjudgmental accountability sounds like something you need, carts are open now at joylovinghome.com/membership. Come join us and actually get to enjoy accomplishing things in your home, together.

Until tomorrow, when we wrap up this four-part series — continue to choose joy.