Envy can poison your life. When you’re always looking at everyone else, you have trouble focusing on yourself. Being envious can leave you feeling ungrounded, inadequate, and insecure. Plus, it’s a vicious cycle. When you feel envious, you lose yourself in a scarcity mentality. Concentrating on what you lack can make you feel even more of the negative emotion.
Stop the cycle once and for all. You can overcome envy and step into your confidence.
What’s the Difference Between Envy and Jealousy?
Before we tackle the subject of curbing your envy, you’ll need to understand the difference between envy and jealousy. Envy happens when we want something that someone else has. Jealousy occurs when we’re afraid that someone will take something that we have away from us.
People often confuse the two terms. We might say that we’re jealous that our friend’s hair always looks great. That’s an example of envy, though.
Jealousy usually occurs in the context of a romantic relationship. We might be jealous when our significant other looks at someone else because we worry that we’ll lose their affection. However, you can also be jealous when someone gets a job that you wanted.
Some experts say that envy involves two people, whereas jealousy involves three. Jealousy is like a triangle. Others claim that jealousy has to do with relationships, whereas envy is related to objects or status.
There is some overlap in the definitions of these emotions. But both of these emotions can make you feel inadequate. The feelings often go hand in hand. But jealousy might involve a fear of betrayal or anger. Envy is more likely to fill you with inferiority.
Why Should You Stop Being Envious?
Why isn’t envy a desired emotion? If you’ve ever felt it, you probably know that it’s unpleasant. It brings up negative feelings and might lead you to judge others unfairly. You don’t always feel like yourself when you’re envious. You might wonder where your compassion and objectivity have gone.
Envy is a painful emotion. Studies show that envy activates the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex or dACC. The dACC is an area of the brain that may be associated with pain, executive processing, and conflict monitoring. That’s distressing on its own.
But unchecked envy can transform into schadenfreude, which is pleasure in the misfortune of others. If you feel happy when someone that you envied is brought down, you’re experiencing schadenfreude. Feeling pleasure when someone else isn’t doing well can exacerbate shame.
Moreover, envy elicits the fight-or-flight response. This is your adrenaline kicking in because you sense that you’re under attack. Your survival may not be threatened, but it may feel as though your identity, lifestyle, and peace of mind are at risk.
But researchers say that envy may play an important role in humans. Other primates often have strong hierarchies in their groups, which can lead to conflict. Because humans experience envy, we may keep more checks on people in our society, preventing one person from taking all the power.
However, envy may come from our false sense of justice. When we believe that life has to be fair, we’re more likely to be envious. Envy can prevent us from maintaining a logical grasp on reality.
Envy may also be motivational. It can help us step up when we’re feeling less than perfect. However, if it’s left unchecked, envy can exacerbate feelings of self-doubt. Don’t you want to walk through the world with a desire to be your best self, not because you want what others have but because you truly want to be fulfilled?
Find Yourself by Eliminating Envy
Theodore Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” If you’re always comparing yourself to others, how do you know who you really are?
Think about the way that you feel when you scroll through social media. Do you ever feel as though everyone else’s life is better, easier, or happier than yours? That’s envy.
Research shows that people who spend a great deal of time on social media are more likely to be depressed and envious. Mindless social media usage impairs your well-being. That’s partly because it encourages competition. When you’re not secure with yourself, you might recognize everything that’s wrong with your life when you see everything that’s right with other people’s lives.
Eliminating envy from your life can help you find yourself. As you find yourself, you’ll find it easier to stop feeling envious. Just as envy can spiral you downward, getting out of the cycle can perpetuate itself toward a positive perspective.
What if you could be completely satisfied with yourself and your life? Have you ever dreamed of feeling whole and complete?
If you felt that way, you wouldn’t have a reason to envy anyone else. You would realize that you had everything you needed. You wouldn’t covet other people’s status, things, or attributes because you would know that they weren’t right for you.
There’s a deep sense of trust that comes with feeling complete. You recognize that the universe provides you with everything that you need. You also acknowledge that the things you need aren’t necessarily the same as the things other people need.
Therefore, you become gratified by what you have. That sense of gratitude perpetuates itself. As you focus on abundance and appreciation, you feel inner peace. When you have inner peace, you don’t have any need for envy.
That sounds great, you might think, but how do I find that inner peace?
Focus on Yourself
It’s not selfish to focus on yourself. Many of us walk around this world trying to figure out how to please everyone else. We lose ourselves in the process. If this sounds like you, work some “me time” into your routine.
One of the first things that you can do is contemplate what you really desire in life. You can journal or meditate on this. What makes you tick?
Beware of false fulfillment. Society tells us that we will feel accomplished and satisfied when we make a lot of money, get a promotion at work or achieve certain goals. If you’ve been living someone else’s idea of success, ask yourself what your version of accomplishment would look like.
What’s meaningful to you?
Maybe it’s staying home playing your guitar on weekends, spending time in nature, or connecting with your kids. When you’re doing the things that your soul craves, you’ll be less likely to concern yourself with the things that everyone else is doing.
Meditate
Our minds are bombarded with thousands of thoughts at a time. We think that we’re in control of what we think, but we’re so busy analyzing our “monkey minds” that we don’t realize that 95 percent of our mental processing happens subconsciously.
If you don’t take time to free your mind, you can get trapped in the superficial judgments that lead to envy.
Meditating is a great way to become a nonjudgmental observer. You allow thoughts and ideas to flow through your mind without trying to analyze them or evaluate them as positive or negative.
Doing this can help you release negative mindsets, such as:
- I’m not good enough
- I’m not productive enough
- I should be more successful
- I should have more money
- I should be more confident
- I’m not a good parent
Instead of judging your experience, you just let it be. Your productivity, success, money, confidence, and value aren’t linked to a specific level of worth. They’re just factors in your life. They’re part of the soup that makes you who you are. When you completely accept yourself as a whole person, you’re less likely to feel a tug of envy when you consider the attributes and things that you don’t have.
Affirmations
Affirmations, or positive statements that you can repeat to yourself, may help you gain more positivity and acceptance. There is some controversy as to whether affirmations work. There’s enough evidence to show that affirmations can shift your mindset and perspective.
Most people frequently engage in negative self-talk that’s similar to the examples that we included above. It’s difficult to stop a thought completely. However, you can replace it with another, more positive concept.
When you think, “I’m not productive enough,” you can say instead, “I am intentional about the way that I spend my time.” When you think, “I should be more confident,” you can replace it with the statement, “I am happy with who I am.”
Sometimes, affirmations can feel like lies. If you don’t feel confident, telling yourself that you are can feel like you’re faking it. But some people say that you have to “fake it until you make it.”
When you practice positive affirmations, you view information that might otherwise be threatening as valuable and relevant. Self-affirmations reduce feelings of defensiveness. Repeating affirmations can help you rewire your neural pathways to go to a positive place instead of a negative one. As you do that, you’ll be more secure in yourself and less likely to compare what others have to what you don’t have.
How to Stop Being Envious
Feeling complete in yourself is a lifelong journey. Just when you think that you’ve reached the pinnacle of purpose and awakening, something can happen to throw you off guard and shake up your reality.
The tips below can help you resist envy as you’re working on your growth. The more that you shift your mindset, the less likely you’ll be to fall prey to envy.
Eliminate the Competition
You don’t have to take other people out to stop competing with them. As we mentioned above, focusing on who you are without self-judgment can help take you out of the comparison game.
Another way to stop competing with other people is to recognize your triggers. If you feel envious every time you’re on social media, take a break from scrolling mindlessly through Facebook. We all have those people in our lives who love to talk about their accomplishments in a way that makes us feel inferior. Keeping them at arm’s length can help you work on yourself without feeling discontented.
What You See Isn’t What You Get
Remember that what you see in people isn’t the entire story. People who look perfect on the outside may be struggling in other ways. Others are just as whole as you are. The things that generate envy represent a tiny portion of who they are.
For example, you might be envious of a friend who owns a business and rakes in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. You wouldn’t mind having that kind of financial freedom.
Except your friend doesn’t have much freedom at all. She is tied to her phone, and she’s always thinking about work. She has anxiety because she is constantly taking out loans that she has to repay.
Your image of what other people have doesn’t always match reality. If you’re envious of other people’s success, you could be putting up walls between you. That can exacerbate the negative feelings and prevent true connections from forming.
In fact, envy broadens the gap between people. It reduces the likelihood that you’ll develop understanding and cooperation in relationships. Then, the cycle continues because the envy grows because you feel split from others.
Whenever you feel envious of the things that you think another person has, try to go below the surface. Get to know them. Try to view them as a person instead of as an accumulation of the things that you don’t have. You’ll likely be more understanding, and the elements that made you envious before won’t seem so black and white.
Practice Gratitude
We have already discussed how envy feels negative. It can also make you feel inferior and inadequate. When you’re stuck in your feelings of insufficiency, it’s difficult to notice the abundance in your life. You notice your shortcomings and look outside of yourself to fill them.
Practicing gratitude can turn that around.
Matt Kahn says that life is based on a cycle of rebirth and erosion. Everything that is born eventually dies down. Loss is necessary to make room for new growth. We experience negative emotions, such as sadness, when we don’t take the time to appreciate the growth.
Have you ever been stuck in a place in which you can only see what is wilting around you? You want to hold onto everything, nurse it back to health, and bring it back to life. You can spend so much time and energy attending to the areas of your life that are dissolving that you don’t pay attention to the things that are going well.
When that happens, you put all of your energy on what you lack. This attracts more scarcity energy and makes deficiencies stand out. Of course, envy can rear its ugly head during these times.
If you practice gratitude, you elevate your vibration. You bring your awareness to the things that are going well in your life. Doing this can attract more of the good things.
Moreover, it opens your heart to appreciation as an alternative to envy. Instead of harping on the things that you don’t have, you’ll value the positive things that you see in yourself.
Gratitude can improve your mental health. Many studies show that people who practice gratitude experience less depression and more happiness. But research also shows that a gratitude practice can pull you out of a dark place.
Appreciation moves your concentration away from toxic emotions, such as envy. It works in a similar way as affirmations. When you flood your brain with positive thoughts, you’ll have less room for the negative ones.
However, gratitude may not shift your mindset overnight. It takes time and consistency. Consider writing down three things that you’re grateful for every day. Do this consistently, and see how your feelings of envy dissipate.
Gratitude creates lasting changes in the brain. Once you establish a practice, the effects will continue even if you skip a few days.
Take Responsibility
It’s easy to get caught up in victim mode when you’re feeling envious. Let’s say that you believe that everyone else has it better than you. You complain about your inability to access the same positive things as the people that you envy.
When you play the victim, you get positive feedback. Your friends may tell you how amazing you are. They may try to cheer you up by spending more time with you or showing you more affection. But if you’re always the victim, you’re going to continue to feel envious of others.
You might even avoid taking responsibility for your situation because you feel as though you’re a casualty of external forces. When you’re always impacted by the world around you, you’ll be more likely to compare yourself to others.
Going inward involves taking responsibility for your mindset, actions, and decisions. You’re in charge. You have the ability to make the most of your situation. You shouldn’t rely on others to regulate your emotions.
Turn Envy Into Motivation
If you don’t get bogged down by envy, you can use it to your advantage. Marie Forleo says that you can transform envy into a secret superpower.
Envy can make you collapse into self-doubt. But you don’t have to let your insecurity destroy you. The fight-or-flight response that you experience when you are envious is the same physiological response that you have when you’re excited. Therefore, you can convert self-doubt into motivation with a slight mindset shift.
Instead of concentrating on your pain, think about the desire that’s driving the envy. That desire can help you get what you want. Becoming aware of the aspect of someone that you envy is an opportunity for you to look at that aspect in yourself. It shows you what you need to work on.
If you’re envious of someone’s family life, you might need to spend some time evaluating your desire to connect with family members. If you envy someone’s career, you might need to assess your own passions.
Think of the people that you’re envious of as examples of success. When you know that someone else has achieved something that you want, you know that it’s possible for anyone.
We often fall into the trap of thinking that we are just unlucky or success happens to other people. If you frequently have thoughts like those, re-read the section in this article on affirmations and gratitude. You need to change your self-talk so that you recognize that you can achieve anything.
If you really want to analyze your envy, ask yourself what attributes the other person has. Do they have certain strengths that have helped them achieve or obtain the thing that you’re envious about? If you’re honest with yourself, you will find that you can nurture those strengths in yourself too.
Change Your Limiting Beliefs
A great deal of our self-talk takes the form of limiting beliefs. Have you ever heard the quote, “She thought she could, so she did?” That goes the other way too. If you think that you can’t, you probably won’t.
When you’re full of limiting beliefs, you experience friction with yourself. You have desires and strengths. But you keep yourself down if you don’t allow yourself even to dream that you can use your strengths to achieve your desires.
The first step toward changing your limiting beliefs is to become aware of them. One way to do that is to check in with your life.
What have you accomplished?
Are those accomplishments in alignment with what you really want?
For example, perhaps you have a high-paying job as an attorney. You’re financially stable, but you have always dreamed of recording music. You don’t have time to practice your instrument or play in a band because you’re so busy working.
The discord that you feel shows you where your limiting beliefs are. Dig deeper to determine what they may be. You might find that:
- You don’t believe that someone like you can be a musician
- You don’t think that you’re talented enough
- You believe that choosing a job with a lower-income reflects on your intelligence
You can also ask yourself what areas in your life aren’t changing, no matter how hard you try. Those areas will help you pinpoint your limiting beliefs. If you struggle in relationships, you might justify your strife by saying things like, “Women don’t want men who work so much.” That limiting belief is preventing you from having a great relationship.
It could also be throwing you into victim mode and making you envious of the people who do have good relationships. If you see that those individuals have traits that you don’t have, you might turn those into limiting beliefs.
Once you identify some of your limiting beliefs, write them down. Accept that they are not the truth. They’re just forms of conditioning that you likely picked up in childhood and have carried with you all of these years.
Then, transform the limiting belief into a positive one. This is similar to developing an affirmation. If you believe that you’ll never have the kind of money that other people have, you can alter that statement to say, “I’ve learned so much from my financial strife that I’m ready to move forward.”
Keep repeating the positive beliefs like a mantra. Doing this will help you shift the focus to yourself instead of others. You’ll grow instead of letting envy eat away at you.
Practice Self-Compassion
Ultimately, you will experience less envy if you have self-compassion. We experience envy when our perceptions of ourselves don’t align with our expectations. We are often harder on ourselves than anyone else.
Have you ever been envious of someone and realized that they actually don’t have anything that you don’t have? That’s a sign that you’re being tough on yourself.
Self-compassion involves accepting yourself. Anything that you perceive as a shortcoming is simply part of what makes you tick. It’s neither good nor bad. It has made you who you are.
When you’re compassionate with yourself, you’re more resilient. You have a stable sense of self and can bounce back when times are tough.
Without self-compassion, you’re likely to validate your self-worth through others. Looking externally for something that you’re supposed to provide yourself can spark the comparison game. That leads to envy, and the cycle begins.
Some steps for fostering self-compassion include:
Treat yourself like a child – Have you ever heard the way that you talk to yourself? Step back for a moment, and ask yourself if you would speak that way to a child. You should nurture yourself the same way that you nurture your loved ones.
Be mindful – A mindfulness practice keeps you aware. Staying in the moment allows you to enjoy the present time without succumbing to your negative self-talk.
Allow imperfection – Nobody is perfect. We are all humans, and no one is more or less flawed than anyone else. Once you accept this, you’ll be more likely to connect with others instead of divide yourself via envy.