How many times have you been living your life and feeling content, only to open Facebook/Instagram and see that one of your friends was doing well? Maybe this friend got a very good job or is partying abroad or your friend just got into a relationship. Now tell me was there any time when such an incident happened and you suddenly felt something you were not sure what but it was not a good feeling. You get sad and depressed when you compare yourself with your friend and you feel you are worth nothing in comparison to your friend or you think that your friend is just lucky and he/she does not deserve that success or life.
My Story
Now, don’t lie; be honest with yourself. I will go first. This has happened to me a lot. I think right from my childhood until the past few years, I was the victim of this feeling. We call this feeling “The feeling of jealousy”. In fact, no one is spared from this feeling. Everyone feels jealous of something or someone and this is how we humans have progressed and this is the reason we compete with each other to come on top. This is all well and good when the result is a healthy competition. but sometimes this jealousy gets out of control. And jealousy can get you to take some pretty bad steps, steps you would never take otherwise.
Deep down, we all know that being jealous changes nothing. We will still be the same person that we were before we knew about our friends’ success. But if you are searching for “what should I do if I feel jealousy?” then congratulations my friend, you are on the right path. The path that brought you to this post. You will find a lot of reasons why jealousy happens and tips, tricks to manage on the Internet. But in this post, I’ll discuss how I overcame this feeling and how I no longer feel jealous, and no, it’s not because I’m arrogant or believe I’m better than everyone.
Cause for jealousy
The cause of jealousy is comparison. Comparison of yourself with others. Now we are not born to compare ourselves with others. As a kid, we didn’t even have the awareness to feel jealous. We were always happy and we used to cry when we needed something and then go back to being happy again. There was no place for complex emotions like jealousy.
Someone compared you to someone on an unlucky day, and you felt bad when you were inferior to the person with whom you were compared, and you felt somewhat satisfied when the comparison was favorable to you. This someone could be your parents comparing you to your neighbor’s children or your teacher comparing you to your classmates, and after a while, you no longer needed your parents or teachers because you had been conditioned to compare yourself to everyone.
What should I do? How do I overcome the feeling of jealousy?
Self-awareness
I know that comparing myself to others is a source of jealousy, so I try to avoid engaging in this comparison. I’ve cut back on my social media usage. I have trained my mind to understand that me getting jealous changes absolutely nothing. For this, I practice a little meditation. I practice gratitude for all the things that I already have. I acknowledge the success of others and their hardwork. In my initial days, I used to talk to myself in front of a mirror and used to judge myself. ask questions like “why am I affected?”, “How does this change my life?”.
Have a goal
This is a tough one. Let me give you an example: you see someone with a good job and want one too, then you see someone else in a nice relationship and want that as well. You see someone else travelling and want to do the same. You see, the problem is that you don’t have a goal, so as long as you don’t find out that someone is happy, you’re fine. Because you don’t have a goal, your life is being controlled by someone else, which is both wrong and funny. For this, I’m focusing on my own objectives right now. It may not be big but it is my own goal and I am in control.
Sleep on it
This is perhaps the easiest. I just used to wait for some time and these feelings automatically used to go away. This was my initial approach. While this works, it is not very healthy and I strongly suggest you follow the above steps. because, wasting your precious few days just feeling jealous is not worth it.
Read my other articles on life advices here.
