Do you struggle as much as I sometimes do with maintaining perspective?

We're not alone. It's easy to fall prey to comparing ourselves with others, and/or becoming immersed in unrealistic expectations of ourselves. That's important to remember if you have been, or plan to start, integrating wellness services into your offerings to patients and clients.

Comparing ourselves unfavorably with others is epidemic with the explosion of social media. Call it the Facebook phenomenon. The title of a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology1 said it all—"Passive Facebook Usage Undermines Affective Well-Being." Those authors studied the evidence and concluded their analysis with this sentence, "Though we all ‘present' ourselves in daily life, the current findings suggest that how people do so on Facebook creates an environment that is difficult to passively navigate without negatively influencing how we feel."