“I am delighted to announce that I have gotten into my dream university and granted a scholarship”. “I have been awarded a position in the honour roll for academic excellence”. “I have received an offer letter from the best company in my field”. “I am embarking on a new project which has been recognized internationally”. In our contemporary lives, scrolling through one’s LinkedIn and Facebook feed is flooded with posts about one achievement after the other. Individuals and organizations worldwide are in a competitive race against one another, all with the combined fear of ‘falling behind’. Today, each one worries that someone else will have a higher GPA, more work experience, or greater extracurriculars. However, does this race to ‘win’ always lead to a healthy competition?
Psychology suggests ‘competition’ in its very nature can be called “extrinsic incentive”. This means that competition acts as an external force of motivation for individuals to work harder towards their goals. Along with this, research in the field has proven the ‘helper’s high’ phenomenon. It refers to doing good, makes people feel good psychologically and the physiological release of feel-good neurotransmitters. However, competition leads to a reduction of the ‘helper’s high’ since ‘doing good for others’ now means reducing one’s own success. Psychologist and sportsman - Allen Fox, in his book ‘The Winner’s Mind’, spoke about the unconscious fear of failure. He mentioned that this is the reason behind an innate ‘will to win’, leading to competitors’ rise on and off the field.
Without competition, Google might not have existed, and Apple would not have created the new iPhone. Revolutionary technologies which improve our productivity and quality of life every single day would not be readily available to us. This is the most tremendous boon of competition – the drive for innovation. Individuals continuously strive for better solutions to their problems. They look for products that deliver more excellent value, are more cost-effective, and save time and effort. This is only possible when companies compete and develop new and innovative solutions. Psychology suggests the concept of ‘good competitiveness’, which is the drive to encourage individuals to work hard. In this way, competition stimulates growth by fostering cooperation, creativity, and more significant benefit for the community.
On the one hand, competition boosts motivation, leading to potential harm to mental health and self-esteem. This kind of unhealthy competition causes anxiety and lowers the desire to participate in activities. Psychiatrists prove that the constant comparison and competitive behaviour towards one’s surroundings causes a ‘destructive force’ of unhealthy competition. In the contemporary world, young adults spend hours each day on social media, adding to the internal pressure which stems from the competition. An individual’s focus from completing their own tasks then shifts to negative thoughts on sabotaging another person’s performance. Feelings of incompetence, insecurity, and inferiority complex brews while scrolling through one’s peers who may be getting a better job, a bigger house, or living a so-called ‘happier’ lifestyle.
Unhealthy competition harms mental health and individual performance.
Excessive competitiveness can be all-consuming. However, there are ways to limit these adverse effects. Here are techniques to cultivate and promote healthy competition:
Make people feel valued. Help your peers, teammates, or colleagues feel appreciated. Once their contribution is valued, it will increase their willingness to work harder against the face of competition.
Don’t fear failure. Foster it. Remind yourself that failure is a part of success. Accomplishments are showcased in public; however, social media does not represent one’s failure. Failure allows an individual to learn, grow and discover new potentials.
Create goals apart from winning. Encourage yourself and others to create goals apart from the primary goal of ‘winning’ or ‘coming first’. These goals should focus on learning about the journey and process rather than only the outcome.
In today’s world, society has brought us up so that the minute we begin to walk and take our first few steps, we are taught to run. Our education system has been built to pit preschoolers against each other without preparing them for a healthier way of competition. From a young age, parents teach their children that they are ‘winners’, boosting their self-esteem. However, it may lead to jealousy and anxiety as the same children grow up to see their peers succeed. There exists a thin and transparent line between healthy and unhealthy competition, which one should remain wary of. Each time you feel these lines getting blurred, remind yourself; your competitors are not enemies. They are instead the motivating force that pushes you to become the best version of yourself.
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