This, my friend, is an important email that I really want you to read, for nobody's benefit but your own (I promise the picture is relevant lol)....

I have spoken with a lot of people, both male and female, of all sizes, who are holding themselves back in life by placing too much emphasis on how they look. This is a growing problem. People are comparing themselves to outliers in the population and attaching their self-worth to isolated variables, rather than looking at themselves holistically.

This is how it plays out....

You detach yourself from your specific situation in life. You begin to arbitrarily compare your life as a whole to the highlight reel of the life of someone else. You then use those metrics most closely linked to that highlight reel as a means of evaluation of your life.

The result?

Well, you're going to evaluate your life pretty poorly every time. Instead of asking yourself where your values lie, what your strengths/weaknesses are and what metrics can be used to evaluate your life based on your career aspirations, socio-economic status etc., you basically just ignore all of that and compare apples to oranges.

It's a self-deprecating pursuit that is likely to do nothing but push you into a catastrophic mindset, where you fail to acknowledge the positive aspects of your life.

But where do you go from here?

The most important thing is to identify what really matters to you in life. Without doing this, you will forever be comparing your life with those who you follow on different forms of media. Humans did not evolve to be connected to thousands, if not millions of people. We evolved in small tribes, in which we shared similar values and goals, and lived in the same environmental and social context. Therefore, comparison to others was probably mostly valuable, as you could look at those who've been successful in that same environmental and social context, with the intention of replicating the steps they took, assuming you share the same goal. There are examples of where this is useful in both the past and the present.

For example, if you are hunting for food, it would serve you well to replicate the actions of the person who had previously been able to collect the most food. Similarly, if we were to carry this over to the office environment, it would serve you well to follow the steps taken by the person who climbed from being an intern to being a supervisor in a short space of time. In these cases, you are comparing apples to apples, because you're looking at someone who has achieved something that you wish to achieve in the specific environment and social context in which you wish to achieve that thing. Therefore, it is a valid approach to try and replicate what they have done to get there, so not all comparison is bad.

If you would like to be a doctor, then you need to start by recognising the things that are required of you to become a doctor. This may include putting a lot of hours into studying and working, which will put a limit on the amount of time that you can allocate to things like working out, travelling or partying. It may even require you to sacrifice sleep or expose yourself to a high amount of work-related stress that may be considered to unhealthful. However, you do so while keeping your value structure and long-term goals in mind. You accept that there are trade-offs that you're going to have to to make in order to reach that goal of being the best doctor that you can be. In this context, it would be counter-productive to compare yourself to someone who trains 6-7 days per week to build a muscular body, or someone who works as an entrepreneur, or someone who happens to travel the world. While these may be attractive goals that you can respect, you have to realise that they may not be things that you are going to ever be able to fully pursue, given that they are some of the things that you have to trade-off in order to be a doctor. Likewise, none of those people would be served well to compare themselves to you, since they would clearly look pretty useless trying to manage a patient just admitted to the intensive care unit.

The reason that this is relevant to all of you is because, each and every day, you log in to Instagram and automatically (maybe even subconsciously) begin to compare your life to someone else’s, even though they are not in the same situation as you, nor do they value the same things that you do. However, because you see them looking happy in pictures (in the highlight reel you see), or maybe because you see other people praising them, or maybe because you see the money they are making, you feel that you need to replicate their actions and chase their outcomes. You choose to do all of this, as opposed to recognising that, yes, those people are worthy of respect, their achievements are worthy of respect, but they are not relevant to you with your life and your values.

Basically, I am telling you to wake up and smell your own fucking coffee. The more time you spend comparing yourself to people who are irrelevant to you, the more you hold yourself back from pursuing the things that actually matter and becoming the best possible version of you. If you are constantly dieting and exercising for hours per day in pursuit of some perceived ideal body that you think you're going to be happy with, and it happens to take away from your quality of life and the effort that you can put into your career and other things that actually matter to you, you really need to sort yourself out and stop self-sabotaging. It is totally okay if having an attractive body is the most important thing in the world to you, but in my experience, when you really ask people about what they truly want, you will find that they're often mis-allocating their time and effort. 

And TRUST ME, I do get where people are coming from when they compare themselves to others, beyond just the realms of body image. Back in January, I spoke in front of 500 people alongside Christian Guzman, Maxx Chewning, Rob Lipsett and so on, all of whom who literally live the "dream life" by most people's standards. There are, of course, moments where I'm on placement in the hospital listening to someone's chest and thinking "fuck, am I misplacing my efforts? why am I not chasing that life?", but I quickly snap out of it and realise that I would be chasing someone else's life. We have different values, goals, strengths and weaknesses, so why would I try to live like them or compare their apples to my oranges?

Time is valuable and you are most definitely going to die (promise). What I ask of you, is to not be on your death-bed thinking back to all of those times that you let your pursuit of a better body (or any other goal that isn't your priority) take away from your quality-of-life and your productivity/contribution to the world.

Finally, one step you can take from here is to unfollow people who are not contributing any value to your life. If this means unfollowing Triage, that is totally okay with me. For every one of those people you unfollow, why not replace them with someone who has achieved success on your career path? It always surprises me when I see people who work in different disciplines, who all seem to follow models, fitness personalities, make up artists etc., yet don't follow people who actually achieved success in the field that they're interested in. Why not follow science pages, follow law pages, follow medical pages (and whatever else is relevant to you)? I totally get that not everyone is consumed with their career, but that doesn't mean that you should chase entertainment solely by indulging in the highlight reel of the lives of other people.

While this was a long email, I feel it is really important. I get messages multiple times per week from people with body image issues, who are unable to perform in their jobs or exams and are unable to enjoy their relationships, solely because they are unhappy with how they look and think that others will judge them in the same way they judge themselves.

Go out there and be more than your image.

Gary McGowan

Triage Method