The Healthy Competition!

The Healthy Competition

Is competition good? Does competing bring positive changes?

Yes and No. 

Yes, to some extent. It releases huge amounts of endorphins on winning and gives the winner and their fans a great sense of achievement. At the same time, if it is done in the healthy spirit, the loser and their fans also enjoy the spirit of the game as well as the workout, whether mental or physical. Let's consider the Olympics. It's fun to watch it. The sportswomen and sportsmen compete against each other to put up a great show. This is just one example. 

There are several competitions going on every minute throughout the world. Sometimes it may motivate the players to do better. However, there could be several factors that can affect the loser's ability to cope with losing and may unnecessarily put them through stress.

Let's talk about the competitions in our day to day lives, whether during the phase of learning or working or any other. One may say, the survival of the fittest is how our existence came into being and competition is a vital part. That may have been true when we were living in the stone age. At the current times, when we have evolved to the current living arrangements that we have today, kindness and empathy play a bigger role than competing.

Competition in day to day lives does not necessarily provide a sense of accomplishment. In fact, it can give birth to the fear of being suboptimal and substandard. Believe it or not, a lot of young and old lives have succumbed to these "day to day competitions".

Some of the small kids learn to compete right from the very early childhood. And this is at the age when they don't even know who they are competing with and why are they competing. Is their opponent big or small, older or younger? They stress on losing and they are happy on winning and may sometimes make other kids feel less about themselves. It is our job as grown-ups to help the kids use competition in a healthy way and teach them to compete with their own selves.

The best and healthy competition is competing with oneself. 

Yes, you heard it right, 'COMPETING WITH ONE'S OWNSELF'. This way, the candidate is always a winner. Either s/he breaks her/his previous records and wins over her past achievements or the winner's own past achievements were better.

This way they are not limited by their competitor's caliber and they can continue competing with themselves until they bring the best out of them and can feel great about themselves. 

Speaking from experience, I myself have done much better when I competed with my own self than when competing with others. It is less stressful, more joyful, more accomplishing and less mean.

A lot of us may have experienced this already. For example, if you ever played a simple one player videogame, have you experienced the urge to beat your own previous score? And when you did it, didn't it give you a thrill? Sometimes we do look at the highest score and try to achieve it. It's good to use it to set a goal. But if we start competing with it, then we are reducing the joy and also limiting ourselves to that highest score. Instead, if we keep on beating our scores, we may reach even higher scores.

Any talent or skill that we have should be used towards the good of mankind. Who knows, we may be up against a great unpredictable, unknown and unseen competition with an unknown opponent somewhere in the universe.  Of course, the person who possesses those skills should get her/ his fair share of recognition and profits. If people believe in this way, then people can do what they are good at and contribute to making the world a better place together.

We should also remember to reward ourselves for the hard work that we do in the process. The net result is not everything. The achievement of a paralyzed person to be able to transfer from the wheelchair to the bed may be more meritorious than a sprint winner.

The journey and the process count too which is oftentimes not visible to the other people. So one should always pause and look back at the efforts that one put in and then reward oneself for that. Don't always wait for others to recognize and praise the work. Sometimes the results may not be that appealing to the others as they are not aware of the journey. In the end, what matters is that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you are able to tell yourself honestly that you worked hard and you improved and that you are proud of yourself. 

We can all reach our own peaks! Let's do a healthy competition with our own selves and let's all be proud of ourselves! 

Jaya Sonkar, MD, MPH 

06/29/2019

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