It’s an early morning session, and I’m trying to understand why the woman sitting in front of me has been completely devastated by what she sees on her phone.

She chokes back the tears long enough to explain to me again what’s been happening.

“I can’t go more than 15 minutes without checking Facebook. I see everyone and their new homes, their awesome vacations, their amazing families with their perfect children. My life’s not like that. I don’t have a relationship like they do. I don’t think up those kinds of things to do with my kids. Right now, I’m having a hard time just waking up in the morning.”

It’s hard to see someone so distraught, and I spent the rest of our time helping her understand how she can protect herself from this emotional trap that has all but consumed her.

Now that Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and all the other social media have become a regular part of life, I have these conversations all the time.

Now, I understand how you can be going on with your average day and get completely discouraged after spending two minutes on Facebook looking at everyone’s amazing vacation, their new home, their great accomplishments and their amazing marriage and of course their cute, clever children.

But here’s the truth to remember when you are checking out someone’s profile. You just can’t capture the full truth about someone’s life within the confines of a social media profile.

What you are seeing is a very small percentage of what really goes on in their life.

They are only showing the smiley, happy, inspiring, and victorious moments. The majority of people are not intentionally trying to be fake. They just want to show the cool, funny, and interesting parts of their lives.

The problem is when everyone you know, or people you just kind sort of know, are all showing the best parts of their life, the Facebook version of life becomes too good to be true.

However, Facebook life is also not a lie.

That’s where I see most people falling into the trap of comparing the whole truth about what’s going on in their life with a one version of truth in everybody else’s life.

You only see the happy picture of the couple at the restaurant. Well, anyone can lean in hold up their glass and fake a smile for a moment and then post that little snapshot to show what a wonderful evening they had. Well, that looked like a wonderful five seconds you were having, but how did the other three hours of your evening go? What about that argument in the car over where to park that almost ruined the whole night?

The vast majority of a person’s life is never going to be posted on the Internet. And that goes for you too.

The real danger of the Facebook trap is comparison - when you look at what everyone else is showing about their lives, and become discouraged because you feel that in some way you don’t stack up well.

The problem isn’t that the Facebook life is a lie; the real problem is when you start believing a lie.

When you believe the lie, you compare what’s going on in your life with what you see in everybody else’s lives and become discouraged that you’re not doing enough, you don’t have enough, and that you’re not good enough.

This is what I told that woman in my office…

Your value is not determined by how well you stack up with others. Your value is not anything that’s going to be able to be fully shown on the Internet. It’s all the things you do that nobody on Facebook is going to see.

What you do for your family, what you do for your friends, how hard work at your job, how you make the most out of the bad situations. That stuff doesn’t show up on Facebook.

Nobody sees that.

Your Facebook profile is not going to show that when you are struggling with something difficult and at that moment your life isn’t all put together you are still important.

You still matter.

You are still valuable.

Before you log on to your Internet accounts again, remember what makes you important is not what can be posted for all to see.

Don’t compare the inside of you with the outside of others.

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